March 16, 2006
Political Correctness, Continued Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:45 AM EST I think that Joshua Zeitz is setting up a bit of a straw man with regard to political correctness.
Frankly I don’t know anyone who objects to using the terms black or African-American instead of Negro or colored, terms that, common in my childhood half a century ago, have vanished from the American lexicon and good riddance to them. The reason, I think, is that the vast majority of African-Americans prefer the new terms to the old ones, and the vast majority of everyone else thinks that’s fine. The same with Orientals, which is a Eurocentric term in any case (although no one seems to mind the terms Middle East and Far East, which are equally Eurocentric). Asian fits in neatly with European, African, Australian, etc. This is not political correctness, but a prime example of the democracy of the English language in action. I think “political correctness” refers to cases where a new term is demanded not by the mass of the people but by self-appointed spokesmen (spokespeople?) for the masses, who have a political agenda. Over 90 percent of American Indians, when polled about their preference for what to call themselves, say they are “Indians,” or “American Indians” if precision is required. The term “Native American,” however, is both inaccurate and highly political. Since I was born beneath the Stars and Stripes, I’m a native American, although my Indian blood is a tad diluted, my most recent Indian ancestor having lived fourteen or fifteen generations ago. If Indians were to decide that they preferred to be called, say, Aboriginal Americans or Amerindians, that would be fine with me. “Native Americans” is not fine with me. It is a political agenda and putdown of non-Indian Americans masquerading as an ethnic designation. Notice that The New York Times, hardly insensitive in these matters, uses “native American” only in quotes. And the altogether splendid new museum in Washington, D.C., is called the Museum of the American Indian. Many politically correct terms have nothing to do with ethnicity but with a desperate attempt to deny reality. Cripples are now “differently abled,” the short “vertically challenged.” These euphemisms, of course, are easily parodied, as in Stan Freberg’s classic song “Elderly Man River,” and most people make fun of them rather than use them. One term, however, has gone out of use for another reason, “deaf and dumb.” “Dumb” used to mean, simply, unable to speak. Today it means “stupid.” Mr. Zeitz admits that “supporters of pluralism and popular democracy sometimes go overboard,” but he implies that the supporters are only a subset of the population as a whole. I disagree. Liberals have a lamentable tendency to see themselves as those few, those happy few, that band of brothers struggling to bring enlightenment to the benighted masses. In fact, those opposed to “popular democracy” (what other kind is there, come to think of it?) and “pluralism” are only a subset of the population, and a very small one. They are not to be confused in any way, shape, or form with “conservatives,” most of whom are every bit as fair-minded and respectful of others as liberals.
March 15, 2006
Political Correctness Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon’s point about the spelling of non-English (often transliterated) words is well-taken, but I’m somewhat uncomfortable with his invocation of the term “politically correct.” Working as I do in a university setting, I often hear more conservative voices—in and outside of the academy—bandy the phrase about with very little precision. In effect, anything that remotely disturbs the old order of things can be discredited as “politically correct,” code for a seemingly coercive, overly sensitive, rights-based persuasion that privileges “special interests” over the general populace. (Let me emphasize that my remarks are not a rebuke of John Steele Gordon; I found his specific post about spelling both entertaining and intellectually challenging.) The trouble is, of course, that what conservative critics often dismiss as “politically correct” is little more that polite. A few examples: Unless we knowingly attempt to invoke an anachronism, we no longer describe African-Americans as “Negroes” or as “colored.” Why? Because these terms are fraught with ideological meaning; they were imposed on African-Americans by white Americans. Similarly, we don’t (or shouldn’t) lump tens of millions of human beings together under the vague category “oriental.” Why? Because the term “oriental” is and always has been pejorative, and it incorrectly defines as unitary a vast array of national, ethnic, and religious groups. By the same token, whereas my colleagues 40 years ago would refer to their female students as “girls,” I call them “women,” as do the more perceptive of their male student counterparts. Why? Because 18-year-old women are women, not girls. They can serve in the military, bear children, and be tried in adult courts. In short, what many critics dismiss as “political correctness” is no more than a belated attempt to recognize that we live in a more democratic, pluralistic and inclusive culture than 100 or even 25 years ago. Women and African-Americans enjoy full citizenship rights, which was not the case until the 1960s; immigration, sharply curtailed between 1924 and 1965, once again provides the United States with an important influx of ambitious and diverse newcomers; and we are coming, by and by, to recognize that gay and lesbian Americans want nothing so radical as a simple piece of the American dream—stable homes and families, good jobs, safe communities. Do supporters of pluralism and popular democracy sometimes go overboard? Sure, I guess they do. But the naysayers—those who freely invoke the cry of “politically correct! politically correct!”—are gesturing at a bygone world that most thinking people would prefer not to revisit. In short, if they don’t like a country where women, immigrants, ethnic minorities, and gays and lesbians are treated with full equality and dignity, then, to throw an old conservative cry back at the source, they should go back where they came from. The nineteenth century.
March 15, 2006
Spelling, continued Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:00 AM EST Claire Lui raises some interesting points. Czar, these days, seems to be used mostly metaphorically (drug czar, for instance). Tsar is the spelling most commonly used when referring to Nicholas II and his predecessors. As for the Persian Gulf, that is a geographic, not political, designation. Persia has been Iran since 1935, when the government in Tehran asked foreign governments to call the country by that name. I have not the faintest idea why. But if the legitimate government of a country wants to change the country’s name, so be it. That strikes me as an aspect of sovereignty. After all, the State Department dutifully refers to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea even though North Korea is not democratic, is not a republic, and the people are invited in no uncertain terms to butt out of running the place. But Iran has no sovereignty over the Persian Gulf and I have never seen it referred to as the Iranian Gulf. I have had conversations with several Irish-Americans who have tried to tell me that Ireland is not part of the British Isles. I have news for them. Ireland left the United Kingdom but can’t leave the British Isles, which is a geographic term referring to the archipelago off the northwest coast of Europe in which Ireland is inescapably located. And geographic terms, like all other terms in English, are changed by common consent of its 600 million speakers. English, mercifully, has no Académie Anglaise full of presumptuous Pooh-Bahs pontificating on what is right and wrong. This makes it the most democratic major language in the world. Thus it seems to me that it is when a clear majority of the speakers of the language decide to drop one geographic term and take up another that the term changes. That’s how the Sandwich Islands became the Hawaiian Islands.
March 14, 2006
Spelling Tests Posted by Claire Lui at 07:00 AM EST Reading John Steele Gordon’s blog post reminded me of Woody Allen’s joke that the Russian Revolution simmered for years and finally erupted when the serfs realized that the czar and the tsar were the same person. I suppose I am on John's side, if only because too many variant spellings mess with my ability to get through crossword puzzles. But I am curious about his mention of the Persian Gulf. I assume that even Mr. Gordon no longer calls Iran Persia. And Beijing seems to have become the default spelling for the Chinese capital, while Peking duck remains the preferred spelling, even in China, for that lovely dish. When should the English language change a geographic name? When the borders are redrawn? When a new regime seems permanent? I don’t know the answer, but perhaps Mr. Gordon has some thoughts.
March 13, 2006
Politically Correct Spelling Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:00 AM EST Pardon me while I vent, but there is a new fashion abroad in the land that should be nipped in the bud: politically correct spelling. I was reading an interesting new book last night, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler, when I ran across this sentence about the first meeting of Hernán Cortés and the Aztec emperor: “Motecuhzoma, born to sit on the royal mat of Mexico and already victorious in many wars, was carried on a litter, resplendent in a vast circular headdress with plumes of lustrous green quetzal, ornaments on his nose, ears and lower lip, behind him an escort of warriors wearing jaguar hides and eagle feathers.” A handy footnote explained that Motecuhzoma is “Better known in the corrupted form Montezuma.” Now, to be sure, linguists use the word “corrupt” to mean only “altered from the original” not necessarily debased in some way. And every language is full of “corrupt” terms. Raccoon comes from the Algonquin word for that creature, which is unknown in Europe, ärähkun. Admiral comes, ultimately, from the Arabic amir-al. The Spanish word coctel is a corruption of the English cocktail, while Kaiser and tsar are both corruptions of the Latin caesar. So there is a simple reason that Montezuma is better known to English speakers than Motecuhzoma: Montezuma is the English word for the last Aztec emperor while Motecuhzoma is the word in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, as it is transliterated into the Roman alphabet. A linguist, I suppose, might be forgiven for this, but there is no excuse in popular magazines and newspapers for this pretentious nonsense. For one thing, it violates both the first rule of good writing (be clear) and the second rule (don’t distract the reader from the point you are trying to make). Place names are now often given in the language of the area in which the place is found. The March 2006 issue of National Geographic has a long article on Ukraine in which the capital of that country is given as Kyiv. Interestingly, the seventh edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World gives it as Kyyiv while the sixth edition—which came out before the collapse of the Soviet Union—gives it as Kiyev. This is just a guess, for I know neither language, but I bet Kyyiv is a transliteration of the Ukrainian while Kiyev is from the Russian version of the word. But what on earth is wrong with the long-established English word Kiev? Have you ever seen chicken Kyiv on a menu? The spelling stops the reader cold while he asks himself, “I know what they mean, but why are they spelling it that way?” The argument, such as it is, I suppose, is that when in Rome one should spell as the Romans do (although I have yet to see the capital of Italy rendered as Roma). But this is to confuse two very different things: the thing itself and the word by which the thing is denoted in the English language. In other words, we are not in Rome, we are in English, and we should stay there. Other languages have their own words for foreign places and see nothing wrong with them. The French call the city at the southern end of Lake Michigan (roughly) she-cah-go, with no accented syllable. (They also still spell New York—the city not the state—New-York, retaining the hyphen that New Yorkers dropped two hundred years ago.) The most notorious recent example of p.c. orthography is the word for the holy book of Islam. English speakers have called it Koran for almost 300 years now (the OED gives the date of 1725). But suddenly even such normally sensible newspapers as The Wall Street Journal are spelling it Quran. Even worse, Newsweek, among others, now spells it Qur’an. What is that apostrophe for? In English there are only three uses for an apostrophe: to indicate possession (John’s book), a contraction (John can’t come), or a transition from one sort of symbols to another (the 1960’s). The last use is rapidly dying out. The apostrophe in Qur’an, as near as I can figure out—not knowing a single word of Arabic or the rules whereby it is transliterated into the Roman alphabet—is that it is a breath mark, whatever that might be. Why is Newsweek spelling Koran that way? So as not to offend Muslims? The silliness of that idea is easily seen in a thought experiment: What is the Arabic word for Bible or Torah? I don’t know either and, like you, I’m sure, I don’t care. Arabic is not my language, English is. This effort to be politically correct can, in fact, lead to political trouble by taking sides. English speakers have long called the capital of Belgium Brussels. The Belgians call it either Bruxelles (French) of Brussel (Flemish). Which should we choose? Should the largest city in Quebec be spelled Montreal and pronounced MONT-tree-all, or spelled Montréal and pronounced Mon-ray-al (that N is nasalized, not a sound that occurs in English). For that matter, should it be Quebec (cwe-BEC) or Québec (kay-bec)? English speakers have long called the strategic body of water in the Middle East the “Persian Gulf.” Arabs insist it should be called the “Arabian Gulf.” To whom should we pander? As far as I know, the French have never objected to English speakers referring to another strategic body of water as the “English Channel.” (The French call it la Manche—the sleeve—after its shape.) As Cole Porter suggested, let’s call the whole thing off. In truth, it is a compliment when the speakers of a foreign language regard a place or person of such importance that they coin a word to denote that person or place in their own language instead of trying—invariably unsuccessfully—to pronounce the foreign word correctly. To have and to use the English word is a sign of respect, not disrespect. It says, “You are important to us.”
March 11, 2006
Look at the Colors Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 07:00 AM EST The best thing that came out of the 2000 and 2004 elections was the establishment of “red” and “blue” as approximate synonyms for “conservative” and “liberal.” A color system for politics is something our nation has always lacked, and its acceptance is a sign of a mature political system. The English, for example, have used colors to indicate political allegiance at least since the War of the Roses; Dickens satirized this tendency with his chapter on the Blues and the Buffs in The Pickwick Papers. The advantage of color terms is that they are completely, unmistakably arbitrary. To be sure, most of us understand that “liberal” and “conservative” are mere labels, not meant to be taken literally any more than we would expect a person named Smith to be handy with tools. But not everyone grasps this rudimentary point, so at some point in any political debate, a conservative is sure to say, “I’m the true liberal because I’m in favor of freedom,” or a liberal will say, “I’m the conservative because I’m sticking with what’s tried and true.” (Adding to the confusion, in some countries, particularly the former Communist bloc, “liberals” are those who favor free markets while “conservatives” want to retain state control.) “Left” and “right” are just as arbitrary as “red” and “blue,” but in American parlance they have taken on a strong connotation of extremism. When someone says “left” or “right” in a political context, the listener tends to mentally supply “-wing” rather than “-of-center.” The same thing may happen with “red” and “blue” in time, though the lack of a convenient linear scale for in-between cases may work against this. In America most people are happy to think of themselves as centrists, but who wants to be purple? Terms like “center-right” or “to the left of Bill Clinton” are much more easily grasped than “gentian violet with a hint of rose pink” or “PMS 2582” (unless you happen to be an art director). Widespread adoption of “red” and “blue” will not, by itself, suddenly cause America’s political commentators to start making sense. But at least it will deprive them of one easy way to degenerate into linguistic quibbles instead of framing their arguments on the merits.
March 10, 2006
Folks We Have Lost Posted by Audrey Peterson at 03:45 PM EST This Monday I was sitting at my computer, attempting to write an editor’s letter for American Legacy magazine. The theme was a goodbye to some of the notable African-Americans we have lost in 2005 and 2006. The list was discouragingly long, and seems to have started with the death of Shirley Chisholm on New Year’s Day of last year. It went on from there: Ossie Davis last February. Bobby Short and Johnnie Cochran (love him or hate him) in the spring. By the end of the summer we had lost Luther Vandross, August Wilson, and the founder and publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, John H. Johnson. In the fall it was Judge Constance Baker Motley, the entertainers Shirley Horn and Nipsey Russell; and Rosa Parks, and Vivian Malone Jones, who in 1963 faced down Governor George Wallace when he refused to allow her to enter the University of Alabama to register. She became the first African-American to graduate from there. In November, the artist Ernest Crichlow died at 91. He lived in Brooklyn, just a few subway stops from our offices here on Fifth Avenue, but I found out too late that he had still been alive and missed the opportunity to talk to him about his long career and share it with our readers. December took Richard Pryor. Lou Rawls and Coretta Scott King passed on a few weeks into 2006. And at the end of February the 58-year-old science fiction writer Octavia Butler fell at her home in Seattle, hit her head, and died. As an African-American woman, she was alone in her genre when she published Kindred in 1979, a tale about a black woman who, in order to save her life, travels back to the antebellum South to save the life of a white slaveholder ancestor. Butler is the only science fiction writer to have received a MacArthur fellowship. Men and women like Ossie Davis, Judge Baker, Mrs. Parks, Mrs. King, and Vivian Jones were outright civil rights activists; artists and writers like Crichlow and Butler, on the other hand spoke to us about the social conditions of black people through their work. Public they were, but one has only to see Crichlow’s 1938 lithograph Lovers (part of a printmaking collection at the Library of Congress Web site) to understand the special kind of quiet courage it took to create as he did in those times. “I didn’t like seeing her go through back doors,” Ms. Butler once told Publishers Weekly. “If my mother hadn’t put up with all those humiliations, I wouldn’t have eaten very well or lived very comfortably. So I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.” The quote, which I clipped from her New York Times obituary, beautifully summed up her motivation. The great Gordon Parks, who died on Monday at the age of 93, possibly while I was churning out my long list of people who had gone before him,was another kind of social activist and artist. But right now I’ll set aside his films—The Learning Tree and Shaft—his poetry, musical compositions, and books (although his final autobiography A Hungry Heart: A Memoir by Atria books is a must-read if you’re interested in Parks), to focus on his photographs. Parks was a prolific recorder of history. But he was pragmatic enough to know, early on, that if he wanted to keep taking photos he’d have to earn a living at it—and so he got his first chance at learning to “shoot fashions,” as he was given to saying, by strolling into a white-owned Minneapolis dress shop in 1938 and asking the husband-and-wife owners, the Murphys, if he could have a job photographing the gowns there. Mr. Murphy gave him short shrift, but Mrs. Murphy gave him a job. That job eventually led him to the Farm Security Administration, where in 1942 he shot American Gothic, Washington, D.C., which he named after Grant Wood’s famous 1930 painting. You have probably seen it. A black cleaning woman stands with a broom in her right hand and a mop propped against the desk next to her. Behind her hangs the American flag. It’s not an homage to the plain-living American, as in Wood’s painting; it’s an indictment of segregation and racism in our capital city, something some of the white Southern members of the FSA, who didn’t want Parks there in the first place, would have used against him. “Stryker said you’ve got the right idea, but you’re going to get us all fired,” Mr. Parks told me in a telephone conversation last October. “He put it at the bottom of the pile, but he told me that I should stay with her. He said you had to write cold and hard about black life in America and not allow whites to address the words with the consolation of a few tears.” Parks took it to heart, but he wrote his words with images. He stuck with Ella Watson and took photos of her in her apartment with her family and attending church. She was a person beyond her ironic emblematic role of African-American as second-class citizen. And Roy Stryker’s words stuck with Parks. He continued throughout his life to capture his fellow blacks in all kinds of situations, from all walks of life. His work for Life magazine—a chronicle of poverty in Brazil, an exposé of gang violence in Harlem, a chronicle of racial segregation in the deep South, a photographic essay on Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam—are moving, stunning, brilliant, memorable, the expert work of a gifted man. But it is his earlier work, the FSA photos from the Library of Congress, that remains my favorite. Many of the images, including those of Ella Watson, are available to look at online. By visiting www.memory.loc.gov and typing “Gordon Parks” into the search box, you can see scores of his works, wonderful images that capture the soul of black America in the first half of the twentieth century.
|
