Friday, August 19, 2005

Terminological Turpitude   [John Derbyshire]

As a person from a different time and place, I am endlessly fascinated by
modern America's apparently irresistible drift towards ever more fantastic
extremes of "sensitivity." Case in point, from America's Newspaper of
Record: the ongoing fuss about a restaurant on the Jersey Shore that tagged
a pair of customers as "Jew Couple," and printed the tag on their check.
Here's the latest episode.



Anyone who has done this kind of work (I was a part-time bartender for some
years) knows that you *do* have to tag customers in some memorable way, and
that in the rush of work, brief tags beat longer ones. Why is "Jew Couple"
cause for outrage?



I think there are two reasons.



(1) The word "Jew" is now very nearly taboo, except in very restricted
contexts. You have to say "Jewish person," or some such formula — though I
suppose in ten years or so that will slip into taboo status, too, and we'll
all have to use some different formula ("Hebraic-American"?). Why this
should happen to words is an interesting question, which I guess linguists
have theories about. "Jew" is awfully short and handy, though, and it's a
shame to lose it, especially for headline writers and, well, waiters and
bartenders, who have a pressing practical need for short, handy words.
(Jonathan Miller in "Beyond the Fringe": "I'm not really a Jew. Just
Jew-ish, you know...")



(2) The idea that a person can look Jewish is no longer quite respectable,
because of our current determination to believe that differences between
human groups don't matter a bit. Whatever you may think of this tendency,
it kills about 10,000 jokes stone dead — all those jokes that end with:
"That's funny, you don't look Jewish." These jokes have mainly been told
by Jews — oops, Jewish people — are in fact a component of Jewish
folklore. I suppose they can no longer be told, This, too seems to me a
shame.



My favorite story in this general area: Evelyn Waugh belonged to a
gentleman's club in London, back in the days when men wore hats. On
entering the club, he handed his hat to a flunky at a counter, who put it
with all the other hats in a system of pigeonholes in a back room visible
behind the counter. When the flunky saw Waugh on his way out of the club,
he stepped into his back room, came out with the hat, and handed it to Waugh
as he left. How did he remember which hat belonged to whom? Waugh wondered.



One day as Waugh was leaving his club the flunky was not at his station.
Waugh lifted the counter flap and went into the room behind. Locating his
hat, he noticed a small paper tag on the pigeonhole it was in. The tag
said: FLORID.

08/19 10:15 AMShare