2021 is an incredibly frustrating time to be someone who loves and cares about words and likes to know things about where they come from. That’s because we are surrounded by etymological conspiracy theorists.
If you talk to a 9/11 truther, they’ll act like it’s the most natural thing in the world to derive some deep meaning from the fact that the towers formed an 11 or some movie from 1996 showed a plane flying over them. That’s the level of addled self-assurance you get from reading a Washington Post article pleading you to “Stop Calling Food Exotic” as it lays out a moral problem with a fictional, conspiracy-theory version of the etymology of the word “exotic.” The article’s author, G. Daniela Galarza, quivers:
“Like ethnic and alien, the word exotic was invented to describe something foreign. It comes from the Greek prefix, ‘exo,’ or ‘outside.’ It used to mean something ‘alien’ or ‘foreign,’ and though this is an archaic definition, it’s part of the word’s legacy. According to Merriam-Webster, in reference to food, its modern-day usage may describe something ‘introduced from another country,’ ‘not native’ or something ‘strikingly, excitingly, or mysteriously different.’ The problem is that it’s a definition that changes based on the user’s perspective.”
There is no problem with words that change based on perspective. “Near” and “far” are such words. Are prepositions inherently problematic now? Also, both men and women are described as exotic. And it’s not archaic. Exotic still means exactly what she says it means in Greek: “from outside.” It’s just the literal meaning of the word.
Galarza keeps up the high dudgeon with almost zero self-awareness, quoting an expert who says “exotic” is “dated terminology.” That’s because “calling a food exotic puts the onus of the puzzle on the people who make the food to define it, to rationalize, explain, or whitewash it until it’s palatable to the dominant culture.” Is this a grave evil if you think about it for five seconds, though? Or is explaining a food just what a menu does?
The piece drags other words into this, too. For example, we learn how “in the 1500s, ‘there was a self-proclaimed center of the world: the West.’ Thus, ‘the word orientation originally described one’s position in relation to the East.’” Several things make this a stupid thing to say about “orientation,” both cultural and linguistic. First, it’s Eurocentric to imagine that the West was the only 1500s society to picture itself as the center of the world. China has historically referred to itself as the “Middle Kingdom” specifically to emphasize its self-conception as the supreme civilization and protagonist of history, much like European mapmakers called the Mediterranean the middle (“medi”) of the earth (“terra”) that they knew. It’s less evil ideology and more interesting trivia. Second, that is simply not the reason why we call a briefing at the beginning of a school or job program “orientation” rather than occidentation or something else. The term “orientation” actually comes from the fairly arbitrary traditional practice of “liturgical orientation” — early Christian eastward church altar directions inherited from Jewish custom.
But why learn anything? Why report about etymology accurately when you could completely make things up and accuse others of verbal sins on that basis?