Chiefly a rant against politically correct euphemisms – Evening statistics
I have come across another change in the naming of our roads that irritates me profoundly. The road formerly called “Plantation Parkway” has been re-christened “Fair Woods Parkway.” It follows the same pattern of the recent re-naming of “Old Lee Highway” to “Blenheim Boulevard” and of “Rebel Run” to “Lion Run”; the idea, apparently, being to purge Fairfax City from any taint of Confederacy. And in this case it’s so completely unnecessary. “Plantation” is a perfectly innocuous word. It means a large farm devoted to the cultivation of a single main crop: often in practice, it is true, of cotton, tobacco, or sugarcane, which in the ante-bellum South were certainly managed by crews of slaves. But a plantation in itself does not necessarily equate to slavery. It merely signifies a farm with a certain function. Many exist in the country today. It does not mean a farm that uses slave labor. There is no more need to remove the word from the language than it is to remove “Kristall” (glass) from German simply on account of the Nazis looting and pillaging Jewish shops on “Kristallnacht” in 1938.
Many years ago, Mad Magazine parodied this concern for avoidance of potentially upsetting language by showing us a dining room in a wealthy household full of guests who were avidly discussing the excellence of the broiled chest of chicken served for dinner and their participation in meetings of the Lavatory Birch Society. If ridicule could kill, this type of pretentiousness would be long gone; but unfortunately it very much alive with us today.
But what does it matter, it may be asked, if the name change is, in Douglas Adams’s phrase, “mostly harmless”? The answer is that the prurience of such false delicacy is every bit as blatant as that of the 19th-century lady who sedulously covered snowmen with clothes to shield the supposedly refined sensibilities of young maidens. It is as thoroughly repellent as it is ridiculous. It is gestures such as these that characterize the Left at its worst, and which alienate thousands of Americans – my friend JN, for instance, who has worked at blue-collar jobs and has voted Democratic all of his life until 2016, when he was so repelled by Hillary Clinton and, four years later, by Joseph Biden, that he refrained from voting at all.
To those zealots who are dedicated to refining American modes of thought I would say: concentrate your efforts on the issues that really matter – for instance, upon those would-be disrupters of elections who clog our judicial system with frivolous and costly lawsuits whenever the results of a ballot turns out not to be to their satisfaction (yes, Kari Lake, I’m looking at you). That, surely, should absorb your energies to the full. Oh, yes, and leave linguistics alone: that field, decidedly, is not your forte.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 685,915,037; # of deaths worldwide: 6,844,203; # of cases U.S.: 106,491,174; # of deaths; U.S.: 1,158,454. During the past few days the COVID-related deaths have been in the range of 75-150 per day; if this trend continues, COVID will scale back in mortality rate to parity with influenza.