I’m all for social progress. I don’t think all the adjustments we’ve made as a society have been positive, but compared to 100 years ago our progress on all fronts has been spectacular. But we’ve made progress at a price. One of the prices we’ve paid is the efficiency of our language. Now that’s a price worth paying, but if we can get back some of what we lost, why don’t we?
Recently I used the phrase “people of color” to refer primarily to blacks and Latinos. Why? Because I want to avoid appearing biased, racist, or ignorant. Most of the time when I write I use “he or she” or rewrite what I want to say so that I can use “they” when I want to talk about a person rather than the old default, gender neutral “he”. Why? Same reason as previous, except replace the word racist with the word sexist.
We’ve gone through lots of social language reform over the last few decades:
negroe-> black -> Afro-American -> African American -> black -> people of color
(including other racial/social/ethnic groups)
But you know, I’m not satisfied with “people of color”. It’s unwieldy and imprecise. I’m just waiting for Rainbow Brite and the Carebears, not to mention that horse from the Wizard of Oz, to show up and file a class action suit.
he -> one -> the person -> she/he -> s/he -> use she or he interchangeably
(though being consistent within a single example)
That’s not acceptable, either. Too many words, and just a stupid convention overall.
Now, reformers surely wrangled over these “acceptable” changes and did their best to come up with the best replacement words they could, but I think they just flat out failed. The problem was that they didn’t have any Forumosans. I mean, one of us came up with the term “the word between letters M and O”. Who could be better qualified?
People of Color
Personally, I think sticking to basic colors was the easiest. The problem is that
1- the colors don’t really match. I mean, I’m not really “white”. My arms look more like a pizza box than a sheet of A4 paper. And my soft underbelly that doesn’t see the sun quite so much is still closer to pizza crust color than true white.
2- colors symbolize different things, and people with less auspicious symbolism get jealous of those with better symbolism.
So, we could just change the colors to be more neutral and throw out any sort of relevance to a person’s true skin pigmentation.
Caucasians could be Lavenders
African Americans could be Cyans
Latinos could be Aqua-marines
Native Americans could be Muaves (I thought of Indigo, but then it’s too much like “indian”)
Asians could be Magentas
Or we could do foods. I mean, we already have things like “banana” and “oreo” for mixed races, plus “cracker” for whites. We could take eliminate the negative connotations to these by assigning a food that everyone likes- ice cream. Two have already been done for us:
African American: Chocolate
Caucasian: Vanilla
Native Americans: Strawberry
Latinos: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
Asians: Butter Pecan
Then when you have mixed kids you end up with Neopolitan.
he or she
For the whole s/he thing, I think simple is best. Just keep things as they are and indicate neutrality with just one or two extra keystrokes.
he or she- Well, both of these use an ‘h’ plus a long ‘e’. Since ‘the’ is already taken, we’re left with either ‘che’ or ‘phe’.
him or her- combine the two. You have ‘himer’ or ‘herim’.
his or her- again, combine them: ‘heris’ or ‘hiser’
Then there’s the whole thing with words with suffixes. policeman->police officer, mailman-> mail carrier, actor/actress, etc.
Personally, I think we went the wrong way on that. The suffix “-man” is not pronounced with a short “a” when it is being used to be neutral. It’s pronouced as a reduced vowel/schwa. Policemun, firemun. Just change the letter to a ‘u’.
Also, the use of “man” to mean “person” has been stopped. Well, “person” has been expanded to include alien races and artificial intelligences. We need something to identify purely “humans”. I suggest retconning all of our past literature (a la DC and Marvel comics with their previous “ages”) so that the use of “man” was really “-man” (pronounced “mun”) with the hyphen omitted, and continue it’s use with the inclusion of the hyphen. Afterall, the word “woman” includes the suffix “-man” as well.
The US Declaration of Independence would then be universal if you read it: “All -man (mun) are created equal…”
Ok, I’m tired. I’m going to stop now.
I RIKE it! I’m gonna contact the English Grammar Panel and see that this change goes into effect at once! Amun!