Much of the energy in liberal politics lately has gone into a campaign to change the names we give things. In the summer of 2020, I covered three particularly spurious examples: a push to rename the Masters golf tournament because of the supposed inherent connection between the word “master” and American slavery, a push to rename a Washington, D.C., coffee shop named Colony Club because of the evil moral record of colonialism, and the governor of Rhode Island removing “and the Providence Plantations” from the state’s name, again because the word “plantation” seemed inherently tied to slavery. There’s also a series of scandals in the world of birding over species named for Confederates and over the namesake of the Audubon Society. The Cleveland baseball team recently jettisoned the name Indians in favor of Guardians.
What is interesting is how much momentum this rectification of names retains. The belief that changing names will change the world is a complete superstition, though it’s true that in the names we give to things, we can observe dominant attitudes in the world at the time of the naming. But it is a remarkably popular superstition.
“Should British Columbia change its name?” asked a piece in Canada’s CBC News in August. The author notes that the province was named for the Columbia River, not Christopher Columbus directly, but even two degrees away from the explorer’s sinful taint is too much. The CBC article replaces argument with strident moralism. For example: “Michelle Nahanee, who is Skwxwu7mesh and the founder of Nahanee Creative, says this renaming process is important and an opportunity to look at what we believe now as a society.” I find the idea that whole societies need to believe things as a collective “we” and express an updating consensus through language highly creepy because you simply can’t make people believe the right things by controlling what words they are supposed to use. But this is where the idea that language usage causes the public’s beliefs always leads.
This brings us to “shark attacks.” Per the Sydney Morning Herald, “Authorities in Queensland and NSW are signaling a shift away from describing encounters between sharks and humans as ‘attacks,’ a move scientists say is both welcome and well overdue.” They will now be “bites,” “encounters,” or “incidents” for scientific purposes. This is the perfect example of what goes wrong when activism tries to change attitudes through language and not the other way around. The reason people are afraid of shark attacks is because sharks are scary, not because of bad branding or misinformation. The author of Jaws spent the remainder of his life after selling his novel’s movie rights working to defend sharks and to “destigmatize” what are, in fact, not especially dangerous animals compared to any other carnivorous predator. Somehow, that project was less successful than the project of his novel, which was to stoke horror about a shark. There, he was pushing on an open door.
I hope the shark conservation project succeeds, but we all know it won’t. Updated proper verbiage will not actually change how people act in the world. Many kinds of activists need to internalize this, so they can have more productive encounters with the English language instead of just mindlessly attacking it.
