In the last Word of the Week, I traced how we were seeing a twisted, Puritanized version of the Confucian concept of a “Rectification of Names.” A morally panicked America is seized by zeal for a project to set society right by changing words that it imagines to have all sorts of sinful connotations they don’t. Over the past few weeks, things have only gotten worse. Last time, I mentioned that a sportswriter had called for the rectification of golf’s Masters Tournament, imagining the name has to do with slaveholders rather than excellence. Now, CNN has joined that charge in an actively etymologically misinformative article about “everyday words and phrases that have racist connotations.”
The implications of the reasons behind the renamings are becoming only more absurd. The “MacDowell Colony” is a picturesque camp in New Hampshire that awards luminaries a stay in rural surroundings to work on creative projects. Or, it was. Now, it’s just “MacDowell,” having dropped “Colony” from its name for “oppressive overtones,” as part of efforts aimed at fighting “internal and external racism.” Emerita Princeton professor and History of White People author Dr. Nell Irvin Painter explained, according to the Associated Press, that “the word ‘colony’ can mean a country or given location under the control of an outside power or, as would apply to MacDowell, a community of like-minded people. But she said both definitions carry a sense of exclusion and hierarchy, and that the first definition was far more prevalent.” (Ants and penguins and the Oxford English Dictionary could not be reached for comment.)
Think for a minute on the implication that there was something morally problematic about the previous name: James Baldwin was a MacDowell fellow in 1954, ‘58, and ‘60, just before he wrote The Fire Next Time, a collection of two essays giving unsparingly eloquent voice to black pain. Was Baldwin simply not alive to the oppression and “internal and external racism” he was complicit in, or what? Is it time to cancel Baldwin? Or is this kind of claim just a projection of something about the prevalent moral attitudes of our moment and not about the realities of our language?
Rectifications keep coming. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s word columnist, the “Angry Grammarian,” has ruled “no can do,” “peanut gallery,” and “eenie meenie miney moe” racist. The column reads more sermonizing than angry, to me: “Before we let any of them out of word purgatory, we need to scrutinize why they mean what they mean, and if we’re truly comfortable with everything those definitions imply.”
Twitter’s programmers announced they would stop using a list of words with racist or oppressive implications, including “blacklist/whitelist,” which will become “denylist/allowlist.” But the implications are not in the words; they’re in the minds of these name-rectifiers. The weirdest of these terms ruled problematic was “dummy value.” This is a computer science term for “variable,” sort of like you used in high school algebra. The metaphor is to a mannequin — think “crash test dummy” — not a stupid person. But even if the etymological implication were what they think it is, is it oppressive to imply that idiots are worse than non-idiots now? Have we really become too precious for such scalding put-downs as “dummy”?
These questions have become beside the point, I suppose. Actual etymology and meaning and truth have little to do with why people are tearing down words in their zeal to rectify names. They just want to break stuff for the thrill of power. Dummies.
