What Do You Mean?

 

 

 

As former students can attest, I am a bear about precise wording. For example, I never let history students use the term “American people” and insisted they identify which Americans they meant: men, women, white people, people of color, upper-class Americans, the middle class, working people….

 

In that vein, I have some vocabulary reform suggestions. I'd ban making verbs from perfectly good nouns such as priority or conference. In fact, I support criminal penalties for all business speak. But let's start with a few other words.

 

·      Let’s lose the F-bomb. Nothing says pathetic hipster or junior high school boy like a splatter of F-bombs. The word has become so boorish that it’s used to describe everything except having sex.

 

·      Stop confusing the words hero and victim. If a firefighter risks life and limb to carry someone from a burning building, that's heroic. If the same person perishes with a hose in hand battling a blaze set by an arsonist, that firefighter is a victim. Heroism is a conscious act; victimization is not.

 

·      I've grown suspicious of the label activist, especially when self-applied. Activists place their lives and liberty on the line to redress grievances. Those who lobby elected officials, sign petitions, post on social media, or carry protest signs are not activists; they’re citizens.

 

·      My personal sample is just two, but do you see a groundswell of urgency among people with physical challenges to be called differently abled? The two folks I know well definitely see themselves as disabled and scoff at terms that suggest otherwise.

 

·      I read a lot of literature from indigenous writers. I'm betting if you gave most of them and their constituencies a choice between being called: (A) Native Americans, or (B) Indians, (B) would win in a landslide.

 

·      Can we please make a distinction between racists and fools? Not everything that upsets someone is racist. I recently saw a post from someone–okay, a fool–who insists that the word “jimmies,” as in ice cream sprinkles, is racist because it disrespectfully references blackness. Ummm… they're made of chocolate, not licorice, and it would be an amazing stretch to connect jimmies to something like Jim Crow. As Tom Lehrer once remarked, “If you’ve got nothing to say, the least you can do is shut up about it.”

 

·      Along similar lines, I pay more attention when a person of color uses the term “racist” than when it comes from some privileged white person from tony suburbs.

 

·      The word stupidity knows no racial or class boundaries. It’s not racist or classist to call out African-Americans, Latinos, or poor rural whites for being resistant to being vaccinated against Covid. Sadly, the vax rate among all three is low. That was structural at first–not enough access–but that has given way to paranoia about not trusting the government or the vaccine. Yes, I know about the Tuskegee experiments, thalidomide, and other such horrors, but this isn't the same situation. If there was any validity to assertions that the vaccine is dangerous or a plot to eliminate people of color, the streets would already be littered with deformed white corpses. History should never be an excuse not to flip the calendar forward.

 

·      In the same groove, when did the word rights cease being enumerated Constitutional privileges and mutate into wingnut libertarianism? Rights are not a synonym for the liberty of individuals to do whatever they please. Anyone who thinks they have a “right” to eschew Covid-19 shots is a bio-terrorist. Under what precept of law, civil society, or morality is it acceptable for individuals to jeopardize public health just because they feel like it? If this nonsense continues, I can guarantee another lockdown, probably with an attendant economic collapse. It's time to reclaim what John Dewey called the Great Community. An anti-vaxer has only the right to stay at home. Get vaccinated or no school, no job, no travel. I recall my boyhood when nurses came into my grade school, students lined up, and each got a polio jab. There was no discussion.

 

·      A hoax is something that's not objectively, demonstrably, or scientifically true. It's not the same as something you simply don't wish to believe. To those who think Covid or climate change is a hoax, I can only say I hope the little green men in the Mothership treat you well.

 

·      Religious tolerance must either be universal or abandoned. It cannot, for example, be filtered through a Southern Baptist value system. The founders of the United States knew the history of the Inquisition, the wars of religion, witch trials, and “official” religions. That’s why the Constitution specifies Congress can make “no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Liberals are often as bad, if not worse, than conservatives. If you're one of those with a knee-jerk acceptance of all Muslim beliefs, but ridicule Christians and make Antisemitic remarks, you are merely a bigot with different targets.

 

·      To end on a light note, gardening is agronomy aimed at maximizing the growth of flowers, fruits, and vegetables. People like me are Darwinian scatterers who believe if a plant survives, it was fit enough to do so on its own.

 

Rob Weir