And I say to myself, what a wonderful word
Words are fun; language is fun. There is, obviously, power in naming things. God gave Adam the right to give names to all the animals, as part of the ritual of handing over some of God’s power over His creation to the first of men and his descendants.
Of course, at the roots of almost all magical systems is the sometimes complicated business of trying to find the true names of all things vegetable, mineral and animal.
Language can be an effective political tool. There, words are mostly used to set one group of people against another. Long before the American Congress voted to change French fries into Freedom fries, their predecessors, during the second world war, had changed Sauerkraut into Liberty cabbage.
Language is also used for a number of other stupid things. The use of euphemisms, for instance, is a useful indicator of how much any society is willing to address its problems & failings or just tries to pretend there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.
The VOC, which was not an organisation exactly renowned for its sensitivity, still realized there was something decidedly iffy about the whole slavery issue. That did not stop them making money out of this very lucrative trade but it did mean that in their books no actual slaves were mentioned; there it simply was described as the Ebony trade.
It’s more or less the same with the descendants of slaves. Wherever there still is a blatant disparity in levels of income, health, job security and other discrimination markers, you don’t see many societies actually trying to do something about these matters. What you get is just more rounds of the naming game. Blacks become Negroes become people of colour, then black again and African American etcetera etcetera.
In this sense the use of euphemisms is a perfect litmus test for the willingness of societies to reform: he more the names keep changing, the more governments and people are avoiding to do exactly that.
Ah well, human beings can be very silly and the same goes for their tools, of course - like language. So, for now, let’s give Frank McCourt’s young Frankie (in ‘Tis a memoir) the final word:
Why is it the minute I open my mouth the whole world is telling me they’re Irish and we should all have a drink? It’s not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you’d wonder how they’d get along if someone hadn’t invented the hyphen
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