Month: July 2003

I’m not a blushing prude, and neither, I sense, is our dear Marn. But, slippery slopes notwithstanding, that doesn’t mean that anything goes.

I think there’s a time and place for erotica and porn. What any of us does in the privacy of our own homes is between us and our browser caches. But oh man, when I don’t know you and I’m sitting in your place of business at 10 a.m. on a Thursday morning, the last thing I want to learn about you is that lesbian threesomes turn your crank.

Read all about the art of improper interior decoration in a place of business. It is, as Marn usually is, tremendous fun.

Dean Esmay notes folks critiquing his spelling of the Muslim holy book as Koran, when the current preferred spelling is Qur’an (or just plain Quran, if you want to be slightly simpler but less preferred).

That then provoked Dean to point to an interesting article by John Derbyshire on what the author calls “The Onomastic Cringe,” the push in the West to use (approximations of, sometimes vague ones) the “local” names for geography — countries, cities, etc. — and enthnonymy (what people call themselves). (The article gets a bit screwball in places, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless.)

So, for example, one doesn’t call them Gypsies any more, but Roma. It’s not Peking, it’s Beijing. Mt. McKinley becomes Denali. Burma is now Myanmar. And the Koran is the Qu’ran.

I wonder how much of this is a combination of post-colonial guilt and Third World muscle-flexing. Certainly there seems to be no widespread move among English-speakers to refer to Deutschland instead of Germany — nor are the Germans bugging us (or the French with their Allemagne) about it, either.

Maybe the Europeans are innured to it. After all, most cities in Europe have undergone a myriad of spelling changes (Danzig, Gdansk), depending on who owned them that decade, let alone wholesale name changes (St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, and back to the beginning again).

That might explain why nobody in England cares that the Chinese show Oxford as Niujin on their maps.

One might wonder whether this trend will lead to the end of people criticizing citizens of the US from calling themselves Americans (to the chagrin, rumor has it, of folks in Canada and Mexico and elsewhere on the North and South American continents). After all, if that’s what we call ourselves, that trumps other claims, right?

Well, probably not.

I’m of mixed minds on this (as with so much else). On the one hand, yeah, I feel the need to respect the language and self-identification of others.

On the other hand, chaos pretty quickly can ensue from this, especially when ownership of a name or locale or people comes into dispute, particularly over historical periods. Is it Yerushalayim or Al-Quds — or do we respect several centuries of our own language and just call it Jerusalem, torquing everyone off?

Or, to quote an earlier post of mine on the subject, whose claims do we respect for Mt. Everest’s “real” name? The Tibetan name Qomolangma. as proposed by Tibetan scholars working in Beijing? Or maybe Chomolungma, as other Tibetans call it? Or Sagarmatha. as it is named by the Nepalese?

Maybe we should just give it a lat-long coordinate and leave it at that. Or return to its pre-surveying days of “Peak 15.”

How do you spell Moammar Gaddafi’s name, anyway? Has anyone asked him? Does that matter?

Anyway, I’m not sure it’s a debate that lends itself to a straightforward answer, being tied to history, politics, religion, and emotion — not to mention orthographies and alphabets that don’t match our own. I’ve referred to the Muslim holy book hereabouts as the Qur’an for quite some time.

But, then, I think it’s cool being pedantic, so don’t pay me any attention.

(with a nod toward Adam for the title)

I won’t go into all the details here, just go read Brian’s post about New York’s new “gay high school.”

A well-meaning but very misguided (in my opinion) attempt to deal with the very real harrassment of gay teens, for reasons which Brian elucidates and which are added to in the comments. Though my summary is, Dealing with intolerant thugs by secluding their victims in a separate school seems to be a generally bad idea to me.

A group of parents in Oberlin, Ohio are fighting the assignment of a teacher based on race.

That’s what it really comes down to, as various black parents are arguing against the scheduling of a white teacher to teach a black history class.

Because of a scheduling conflict, the black teacher who has taught the course for the past several years may not be able to this year.

Phyllis Yarber Hogan, a member of the Oberlin Black Alliance for Progress, said a white teacher wouldn’t be well-suited to teaching students about subjects like slavery. “When you talk about slavery, students need to understand it is not our fault,” she said. “Our ancestors did nothing wrong to be enslaved.
“How do you work through that when the person teaching it is the same type of person who did the enslaving?”

Right. White people can’t teach black history (or about slavery) because slavery was done by white people, not black people.

Never mind that there was a flourishing slave trade in sub-Saharan Africa, managed and participated in by blacks, who found white slavers to be just another market, along with Arabs and other blacks.

And never mind that the argument seems to say that African-Americans have more in common with their black slave ancestors, and white Americans have more in common with white slavers of the past, than they have in common with each other. Is that the lesson we really want to teach?

May we conclude that only women should teach women’s history, only poets should teach poetry, and only robots should teach computer science? Would my Italian background make be better suited to teach the history of Rome?

Or, more pointedly, would my white skin make me more appropriate able to teach US history as a whole — what with all its white Presidents and white generals and white historical figures, let alone all those white Founding Fathers (hmmm, better be male, too) — than a black teacher?

Michael Williams, interim director of Cleveland State University’s black studies program, said schools should choose a black teacher if that person is most qualified, not just because the teacher happens to be black.
If two teachers are equally qualified, Williams gives the edge to the black teacher. “That person still has the advantage of the culture,” said Williams, who is black. “They understand the nuances of the culture.”

I guess the answer would be “Yes,” then. Obviously I “understand the nuances of the [white] culture” better than a black teacher could — and the “nuances of the [male] culture” better than a woman. I clearly understand the “nuances of the [US] culture” better than any foreign-born teacher could. Being of British descent, too, I would obviously be better qualified to understand the “nuances of [British] culture” in teaching English Lit than, say, an African American, a Japanese American, or a Hispanic American.

Is that really the path we want to be going down?

(via David Bernstein)