Lexicology and Hope
Sam Aurelius Milam III
In
1992, I wrote MANifest
Destiny — or — the Femme's Fatale. It was a satire
of the feminist assault on usage, a campaign that had been under way for
some time back then.
The
gender significance of words was a favorite target of the feminists.
For a long time, masculine indefinite pronouns (for example) had served
for either the masculine or the feminine gender, when gender wasn't otherwise
specified. As far as I'm aware, the use of plural indefinite pronouns
to refer to singular antecedents, just to avoid a masculine pronoun, didn't
become widely accepted until the feminists began to complain about that
sort of thing.
| Your
child should buckle their seat belt. |
Such agenda-driven grammar makes me wonder if maybe we're all suffering from PTND, Post-Traumatic Nagging Disorder.
Feminists
aren't the only spoilers of the language who're loose in the land.
Consider the homosexuals. It's a sure thing that homosexuality has
been around for a very long time. Given that, homosexuals have had
plenty of time to accumulate monikers. They didn't need a new one.
They certainly didn't need to hijack a word that didn't even have a good
synonym, but that's exactly what they did. They hijacked the word
gay.
They just stole it right out of the language, without even asking first.
Now, when I'm feeling joyful, carefree, and happy, I can't say that I'm
feeling gay, and there isn't a good synonym. Thus, they deprived
us all, without our consent, of a way to express that particular mood.
Furthermore, even if we deck the halls with boughs of holly, at Christmas,
we might not want to don our gay apparel. What does that even mean,
nowadays?
Moving
right along, if the anthropologists are correct about human origins in
Africa, then black folks (I think that I can't use the word people
here, but I'm not sure) have been around a lot longer than the rest of
us. With such a long ancestry, they ought to have arrived, by now,
at a generally accepted name for themselves. Even so, in recent decades,
they've repeatedly changed the names by which they want to be known.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if we eventually end up referring to them
as melanin gifted, or maybe not. The m-word might become offensive,
too, like the previous candidates. Given the long list of rejected
nomenclature, I don't know what to expect next. Maybe, just to be
on the safe side, we should all start sorting our laundry into whites and
others instead of into whites and — the c-word.
Heinlein
commented, through his character Lazarus Long, that very little thinking
is ever done in English, that it isn't a language suited to logical thought
but, instead, is an emotive lingo better adapted to concealing fallacies.
Orwell
warned us, through his characters O'Brien and Syme, that whoever controls
the language can control the people. So, at least in this newsletter,
men and women are not equal and homosexuals are not gay. Also, white
is the color of snow and black is the color of the night sky, so we need
some new terminology for that, too. Our thinking and our language
reflect one another, and influence one another. Maybe if we can correct
our usage, then we can correct our thinking. Maybe not, but I can
hope.
Letters to the Editor
Dear Sam,
As
usual, your 'zine [March
issue] was a good read. A correction, in my letter to you,
I mentioned a movie I must have wrote "Hotel" [Message
from S. H., a prisoner, page 3]. You mentioned it in your
letters to the editor. I meant the movie "Hostel". Sorry for
the "flub". [It was my error. You wrote hostel. I
misread it as hotel. I apologize. —editor]
I
think I'll respond to Howie in the Max's letter to the editor [Message
from Howie in the Max, pages 2 - 3]. His reference to his
theory of the Sun being the eye and heart of an alien god is a great example
of how God, millions of years ago could have populated this planet, and
then left, leaving the population here and how, over the eons of time passage,
how scientific explanations of things could have degenerated to urban legends,
lore, and religious dogma. But his (Howie's) reference did make me
think of a persistent thought of mine, and something you wrote. I'm
referring to the story [Theocosm,
July 2015, page 3] where, in God's laboratory, a germ being studied
in a petri dish (us) escaped and made it across a laboratory and man-
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