In a vain attempt to avoid writing about what we were still calling the “novel coronavirus” two weeks ago, I went spelunking in the notes I jot down about any particularly weird words I see that might make for good fodder for this column. This sent me to a Feb. 14 article at Vice called “Why I’m Asking White Critics Not to Review My Show” by playwright Yolanda Bonnell. See if you can spot the word in the lead line that I tripped over:
“This week my show bug, a theater performance about women of an Indigenous family navigating addiction and intergenerational trauma, opened in Tkarón:to (Toronto).”
I want to be clear that there’s no issue with “Tkarón:to,” as it’s the historical name for that place. Personally, I have never seen a colon in a transliterated word before the way Arabic and Hebrew and many Native languages are rendered into Latin script with apostrophes, but that’s just my ignorance. It appears to be the agreed upon way to write it. Yet Bonnell seems to be insisting on using it here to make a moral point about it being the proper, true name for the place, as though we should all still be using it in all cases, historical or otherwise. She deigns to render the settler-colonial name that replaced Tkarón:to only in parentheses for clarity.
As she goes on, the request to prescreen critics of her play racially is “part of our efforts to decolonize art and foster culturally informed criticism.” Lest anyone think this is racist or odd, she concedes: “White people are welcome to attend the show. It’s important to have witnesses present to understand the ongoing effects of colonialism. And we are totally fine with a person of color giving us a bad review. It’s not the review we’re worried about, it’s the voice behind it.”
Since I first encountered “Tkarón:to” on Feb. 14, a whole lot of technicalese has entered our lives. On Valentine’s Day, you’d never heard of “social distancing” or pondered the difference between a voluntary lockdown and a shelter-in-place order. You hadn’t observed the “novel coronavirus” become “the coronavirus” become “coronavirus” for normal people, and “COVID-19” become “SARS-CoV-2” become just “COVID” for people trying to sound proper and authoritative. Both types are now just at “the virus,” predictably.
Words with lots of hard-to-pronounce sounds, nonstandard uses of capital letters, and strange punctuation will naturally get filtered out. Bonnell may attribute the reason to white settler colonialism, and some people think the virtuous use the most technical vocabulary. But vernacular evolves for a simpler and less moral reason than that, as we’ve just seen in superspeed. Tkarón:to probably became Toronto at least partially because there’s a colon in it, and ordinary people like to use shorter and more ordinary-sounding words.
