I heard a report on NPR this morning about an Israeli leader who suggested that people not refer to the new strain of influenza as the Swine Flu.
His comment came in deference to Orthodox Jews, those who would not want anyone to think — should they become infected — that they had somehow violated the strictest Jewish health and dietary laws.
I get it — even though the disease is not transmitted by eating pork.
But the same leader showed less sensitivity when he then suggested that the disease be called the “Mexican Flu.” After vigorous protests from a Mexican official, this idea was rescinded and the proposed name described as a joke.
But this name — the Mexican Flu — is no joke at all. Back in the United States, this illness strikes at a time when relationships between Mexico and the United States are strained, to say the least. It crosses the Rio Grande at a time when many Americans want to ship illegal immigrants back to Mexico, when some want to build a fence at the border, when Mexican drug wars are being fueled by the American appetite for illegal drugs and waged by drug cartels armed with American automatic weapons. The scapegoating of Mexicans has become something of an American sport, sad to say.
Remember the Spanish flu of 1918? Remember the “gay plague” of the early 1980s? It’s probably only a matter of time before we hear cries of “Remember the Alamo!”
To live inside your language, you need to develop a foolproof language prejudice detector. It’s an old, old story. Words that now seem common or neutral — and in many cases are now deemed inoffensive — once expressed deep cultural prejudices based on national or regional identity, ethnicity, religion, race or gender.
To lift the issue of language prejudice out of these categories, consider how common words reflect the biases of a right-handed majority. (My father was left-handed and both my brothers are left-handed, so I’ve always understood that the physical world was organized for my benefit and not for theirs.)
The Latin word for right is dexter; for left is sinister. Those roots have given us the English words dexterous and sinister. Notice how one has a positive, the other a negative denotation. (If that is not revealing enough, consider that the Latin word sinister also meant unlucky.) And wouldn’t we all rather be considered right-minded than receive a left-handed compliment?
When I was in high school, the kids enjoyed piling out of a car at a red light, running around the jalopy in a mad circle, then piling back in before the light turned green. This was called a “Chinese fire drill,” and although I can’t remember anyone ever using the game to heap abuse on the Chinese, there was in retrospect an implication that China was a place of unruly overpopulation.
To jew down the price; to welsh on a bet; to go Dutch; to gyp the waiter; to be an Indian giver — all reflect direct or indirect cultural stereotypes. I used the word gyp earlier in my life without realizing it is short for Gypsy, and, to be honest, that would not stop me from using it. The name “paddy wagon” was coined to describe the police van used to cart off the drunk and disorderly to jail — at a time in American history when Irish Catholic immigrants were subject to great discrimination. And on and on it goes.
I lived for three years in Montgomery, Ala., and once heard that people in Georgia used the expression “Do like they do in Alabama” to mean “do without.” Of course, some Alabamans would say, “Do like they do in Mississippi.” In other words, the folks in Georgia would look down on the folks in Alabama who would look down on the folks in Mississippi — who probably look down on the folks in Mexico.
This tradition of blaming “the other” goes back a long, long way, and is often associated with the history of disease. Epidemics of the bubonic plague (a bubo is an inflamed lymph node), also called the Black Death, were often blamed by one country or one culture on another, the blame usually being directed from west to east and from north to south. The same was true of syphilis. During the Elizabethan era, the English referred to the devastating venereal disease as the “French disease,” which the French called the “Italian disease.”
Shakespeare refers to syphilis with the phrases “malady of France” and “infinite malady.” The definition of this latter term by the British slang expert Eric Partridge may reveal the author’s own cultural biases:
I had to look up pullulating, which means teeming, swarming, or over-bred, and gets us back, I suppose, to the Chinese fire drill.
What then are we to do with the Swine Flu? In the spirit of Ockham’s razor — that the simplest solution is to be preferred — I offer this strategy: If we have to name a disease, let’s come up with a name that defames neither man nor beast, nor is so scientifically technical as to be forgettable. I nominate “The Influenza of 2009,” or simply the “2009 Flu.” The date is accurate, and its feelings can’t be hurt.
