On the importance of words!

 Here’s a new word! New to me anyway: 

foofaraw. 

It means excessive or flashy ornamentation. 

A fuss over a trifling matter. 

Overly excessive or flashy ornamentation or decoration. I

I came across it in an article about the National Spelling Bee in the USA. There was a foofaraw, in the second definition given above, about accepting “womyn” as an alternative, but correct, spelling of “women”. Some people objected to the alternative spelling on the grounds that it was an instance of “crazy indoctrination of our children” into … shock! horror! … feminism! One parent declared, “This is supposed to be about spelling and language, not ideology.”

Here’s bit of explanation about the spelling: 

“Womxn and womyn are alternative political spellings of the English word woman used by some feminists. There are other spellings, including womban (a reference to the womb or uterus) or womon (singular), and wombyn or wimmin(plural). Some writers who use such alternative spellings, avoiding the suffix "-man"or "-men", see them as an expression of female independence and a repudiation of traditions that define women by reference to a male norm. 

These re-spellings existed alongside the use of herstory, a feminist re-examination and re-telling of history.”

Hmmm, I wonder what do with words like “specimen”!

There are probably more important linguistic things than words ending in “man” or “men” to get het up about. The writer George Orwell understood the intimate relationship between language, thought, and politics. He observed how “in our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible ... Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.”

And he wrote that long before countries were mired in the current messes they find themselves victims of.

Here’s a poem by a Palestinian poet, Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in October 2023:

And if one day, O Light 

All the galaxies 

Of the entire universe 

Had no more room for us 

You would say: ‘Enter my heart, 

There you will finally be safe.’” 

It features in an open letter from a large group of writers calling for an end to the genocide and an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. At one point it says:

“Too often, words have been used to justify the unjustifiable, deny the undeniable, defend the indefensible. Too often, too, the right words - the ones that mattered - have been eradicated, along with those who might have written them."

On the subject of words and language, here’s a link to an article about our diplomats all over the world being monolingual. That’s another aspect of language and communication that is important. In my last few years as a Modern Languages teacher, I worked at making it possible for students at our college to get a taste of Arabic and Mandarin. A few of my students went on to study those languages at university. As far as I am concerned it is a matter of courtesy, as well as diplomacy, to try to communicate in the language of country where you work, or even simply spend your holidays. With cuts to foreign language learning possibilities in our schools and universities, however, I am not surprised that so few of our diplomats speak languages other than English. 

Words are important.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!