| "Some Cynical Guy" No. 3:
June 23, 2000
History Is HISTORY
It's a sad fact of life that that a sizable chunk
of American students can't place the Civil War within the correct
century, let alone the proper decade. It's a sorry commentary on our
educational establishment, but you learn to live with it after a
while -- like living with baldness or chronic gum disease. You
EXPECT American kids not to care whether the sixteenth president was
Lincoln or Ferdinand Magellan. They're just, you know, these DEAD
guys. We're a forward-looking nation, we always have been, and it
hardly matters if the current generation thinks Andrew Jackson was
one of the Jackson Five. We'll always find a way to conquer the
world with the likes of Barbie and "Baywatch." That's our
style.
But Britain is another story, you'd like to think.
On that sceptered isle the summer breezes still echo with the sound
of clashing swords from Hastings and Bosworth Field. Thatched
cottages and medieval churches still dot the rumpled countryside,
while gray ghosts continue to clank their chains in the stately
homes of ancient families. The land is so steeped in history that
you can almost smell it, like the pleasingly musty aroma of an
antique book. That's why it comes as a shock that a British college
recently published a list of "unacceptable language" that
included such "offensive" words as chairman, manmade,
lady, gentleman, Mrs., and -- I assure you this is not a joke --
HISTORY. That's right, you heard it here: any member of the student
body or faculty caught using this ugly and insensitive word can be
tossed headlong into the street. Granted, we're not talking about
Oxford or Cambridge; the college in question is Stockport, a
vocationally-oriented "red-brick" institution situated in
a northern industrial city. But the outrage is still outrageous
enough to make even a cynic's jaw drop a few centimeters: not only
are 15,000 students and teachers being subjected to the whims of
rabid language police, but the absurdity of those whims makes you
wonder if the "political correctness" movement has finally
crossed the line from neurosis to ripe insanity. It's the difference
between hearing noises in your head and insisting that those noises
are being broadcast from the Crab Nebula.
The school officials who banned
"history" as a sexist term were too hysterical to think
rationally. If the administrators had done a few minutes of homework
by dusting off their dictionaries, they might have discovered that
"history" is a safely genderless word; it doesn't mean,
and has never meant, "his story" and is never, ever
pronounced, even by the British, as "his story" -- though
the preponderance of its leading characters have been lifters of
toilet seats. I've just checked my own dictionary: the word comes to
us from the Latin "historia," which in turn derives from
the Greek word for "inquiry." But try convincing a coop
full of clucking academic bureaucrats that "history" isn't
a sexist term; you're dealing with folks who would probably condemn
Santa Claus as a wanton exploiter of reindeer and elves -- make that
"antlered companions and vertically-challenged gift-producing
artisans." You'd think they'd see the inherent silliness of
changing "manhole" to "personhole," but nobody
on the school board seems to be snickering. I wonder what they
propose in place of "history." "Ourstory"?
"Theirstory"? How about "really old news with lots of
hard-to-memorize dates"? Will the scholars in the college's
history department have to change the plaque above their door? Maybe
they can devise a squiggly little icon, the way pop-singer Prince
did when he went nameless. But what happens when they want to
mention their field of endeavor during a lecture or cocktail party?
Will they have to use hand-signals?
Where does it all end? Why not dump the concept of
gender altogether, so as to comfort those joyless souls who grow
queasy at the contemplation of sexual differentiation. We've already
shelved "poetess" and "stewardess" -- why do we
still cling to "temptress," for example? You're either a
tempter or a temptee -- preferably neither in the postsexual world
of gender politics. Let's change "cowboy" to
"cattleperson" while we're at it. "Woman" is
already being spelled "womyn" in some quarters where men
have been hounded into exile. I find it galling that we're now
obliged to call a chairman a "chair" even if that chair
is, in fact, a man. Will the Chinese still pay homage to the memory
of "Chair Mao" even if he sounds like a piece of
furniture? Speaking of chairs, let's look briefly at the French, who
have ascribed gender to such apparently sexless objects as chairs
and tables for a thousand years. I can assure you that I've never
detected genitals of any sort on chairs and tables, yet the French
enjoy infusing everything in their universe with a soupcon of sexual
allure. Maybe that's why they can ingest all that brie and goose
liver without clogging their arteries; they inhabit a world that
hums with the perennial interplay of male and female, and it keeps
them open and alive. "Vive la difference!," they exclaim,
and you'll notice that even the word "difference" has an
assigned gender (it's female).
To England's credit, several newspapers around the
kingdom published the Stockport College list of forbidden words with
a smirk of irreverent commentary. You can usually count on a smidgen
of common sense even among journalists. But the college officials
were unmoved. Anyone on campus who chooses to utter oppressively
sexist words like "history" continues to do so at the risk
of expulsion. Thankfully for most students, history is something
they never have reason to bring up in conversation. They're about as
aware of it as medieval serfs were aware of gravity, and their
ignorance is their salvation. But in one respect the school
administrators haven't gone far enough in policing the language. If
they're going to be consistent about banning sexist terminology,
maybe they'd better do something about the name of the city in which
their college is located: MANchester.
© 2000 by
Bridget Petrella Media Relations. "Some Cynical Guy" appears here by
permission of the publisher.
"Some Cynical Guy" column archive:
2002
81 -- A Brisk Walk Through the Ruins
80 -- The Fountain of Futility
79 -- Farewell to the Big House
78 -- The Cynical Guy Contemplates Cell Phones
77 -- Rich and Poor in Paradise
76 -- Dead Ducks: A Tale of the Food Chain
75 -- Old Comedians Just Fade Away
74 -- Suburbia Comes to Manayunk
73 -- When Nestlings Won't Leave the Nest
72 -- The Curse of High Standards
71 -- Inside the House of Horrors
70 -- The Post-Yuppie Handbook
69 -- Spring Reflections
68 -- Priestly Perversions
67 -- British Teeth: An Apology
66 -- The Sniffling Snout
65 -- Bullies with Social Skills
64 -- Supermarket Rage
63 -- Is the U.S. Really the Greatest?
62 -- The Holes in Our Armor
61 -- A Breath of Used Air
60 -- The Cynical Guy Has Sex
59 -- Let's Abolish the Seven-Day Week!
2001
58 -- Why Worry About the Future of Books?
57 -- The Friendly Face of Evil
56 -- Why We Live Where We Live
55 -- The Cynical Guy Discovers Talk Radio
54 -- Kite-Flying and Other Crimes
53 -- My Night as a Socialite
52 -- Gardening Is Not for Sissies
51 -- Invaders of the Honeysuckle
50 -- To Be a Cat
49 -- The Upside of Terrorism
48 -- The Vanishing Nerd
47 -- Anger Management for Cynics
46 -- Let's Level the Playing Field for Disadvantaged WASPs
45 -- First Impressions, Lasting Impressions
44 -- Close Encounter with a Go-Getter
43 -- Cheering for a Perennial Loser
42 -- The Cynical Guy Reads the Tabloids
41 -- When Does the Good Part Begin?
40 -- Confessions of an Internet Addict
39 -- The Decline of Punctuation and Civilization
38 -- Oh Baby, What a Nightmare!
37 -- The Cynical Guy Watches 'Xena: Warrior Princess'
36 -- A Night-Stroll into the Void
35 -- In Search of the Elusive Wild Tomato
34 -- Getting in Touch with Your Inner S.O.B.
33 -- The Lure of the Lurid
32 -- Black Tie and Beard Stubble
31 -- In Heaven There Is No Pez
30 -- Did You Make the Forbes Celebrity 100 List?
29 -- Redesigning Mt. Rushmore
28 -- On Listening to Dead Voices
27 -- Selling Your Soul on eBay
26 -- Sympathy for Colonel Klink
25 -- Democratic Celebrities in Exile
24 -- High School Revisited
23 -- A Farewell to Bachelorhood
2000
22 -- Requiem for a Middleweight
21 -- Is There a Gene for Tackiness?
20 -- How the Beautiful People Entertain Themselves
19 -- The Cynical Guy Gets Behind the Wheel
18 -- The Fickle Finger of Fame
17 -- Adventures in Bodybuilding
16 -- Some Don't Like It Hot
15 -- The Cynical Guy Watches Oprah
14 -- Sports Parents: Menace to Society?
13 -- Airfare Is No Fair at All
12 -- There's No Such Thing as 'New and Improved'
11 -- Celtomania!
10 -- The Naked Pate
9 -- Vanishing Act
8 -- Bush vs. Gore: It Could Be Worse
7 -- Who Wants to Be a Survivor?
6 -- Adventures in Heart Attack Prevention
5 -- Where Men Are Men
4 -- Thoughts While Listening to the Car Radio
3 -- History Is HISTORY
2 -- The Great Casino
1 -- Greetings from Your New Cynical Guy
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