Reactionary Syntax

I've been a little out of the loop for a few days. I just got a new computer and have been spending some time transferring my old files over and such. Hence my general lack of commentary here and elsewhere.

Anyway, Beijing's current status as the most talked about city in the world reminded me about a piece I wrote a couple years ago. I decided to dust it off, edit it a little bit, and post it here:

My parents used to talk funny. I'm not describing their individual dialects of English. Neither of them had speech impediments. I'm talking about the strange names they had for things - names from the past. You see, my parents were both old enough to have been my grandparents, especially my father, who was 46 when I was born. They spoke the language of the Great Depression and World War II, and what a strange tongue it was for a child of the '70s and '80s! In my house, there was no such thing as margarine, we used "oleo." The Woolworth's we had in town, which was already an anachronism by the time I was born, was the "Five and Dime" or the "Five and Ten." Imagine my dismay when all my friends spent the Ford-Carter years in cool blue jeans, while I wore "dungarees." There are plenty of other things I could mention if I thought about it, but you get the idea. In the broad scheme of things, it's a pretty silly thing to hold over my folks, but it always did strike me as funny. It was a perfect example of willful un-hipness. A stubborn refusal to get with the times. They knew all the modern nomenclature, they just refused to play along. Typical old farts.

Well, now that I am getting up there in years, I am starting to find a similar reluctance to change my language to fit with the times. It's not so much that I want to spit in the eye of younger generations (although sometimes I wouldn't mind doing so), it just seems that society likes to change the names of things for no good reason. Oh sure, there are usually reasons stated or apparent to anyone with a brain, it's just that those reasons tend to strike me as stupid, or not worth the trouble of me re-learning any vocabulary. Here are a few examples of slight language changes and naming protocols that I absolutely refuse to adopt:

1. I like history. In fact I love history. I love reading about it. When I started studying history, there was a very simple dividing line for everything: B.C. and A.D. Everyone knows this. Except now, the political correctness fascists have determined that we can't use them any more. Why, they stand for "Before Christ" and the Latin term for "In the year of our Lord!" Sheesh, if we keep using language like that, next thing you know we'll be living in a theocracy. So now, if you look at history texts written in the last decade or so, B.C. has morphed into "B.C.E." or "Before the Common Era." That means that the past 2008 years are "the Common Era." Ah, pure poetry I tell you! What bugs me about this change more than anything is that the sniveling academics responsible for it didn't even have the courage of their convictions. If you want to de-Christianize history, then why does the so-called "Common Era" coincide exactly with the traditional year assigned to the birth of Christ? What else happened that year that we're using as our historical milestone? I propose that if we are going to stop using B.C. and A.D. then we need to change the dividing line between eras. I propose we use the year formally known as 1946 A.D. as the starting point and we use B.B.B. and A.B.B. as our terms: Before the Baby Boom and After the Baby Boom. I figure that's when most of the people responsible for this kind of nonsense assume that history really started anyway - as soon as they were born.

2. If you're my age or older, you remember that when you were in school and were learning about China, the names of things were memorable, easy to pronounce and spell. The capital was Peking. Their most important political figure in the past 100 years was Mao Tse Tung. David Caradine used Kung Fu, which of course he mastered using chi. It's all different now. Somewhere along the line, somebody decided that the letters used to replicate the sounds of Chinese weren't confusing enough for the average American. Now the capital is Beijing. The homicidal maniac with the peaceful smile was named Mao Zedong. It turns out Caradine was beating up people with Gongfu and commanding the mysterious force of qi. Never mind the fact that Chinese doesn't even use our alphabet, so there's no "correct" spelling. Forget about the fact that even if there was a correct spelling the average American can't even speak European languages closely related to English without totally butchering them, much less mastering the intricacies of Mandarin Chinese. Someone (probably the reprehensible Communist government of the PRC) decided that we needed to change everything. To heck with that. Next time I'm in the mood to eat a waterfowl I'm going to order Peking Duck, and if the folks in "Beijing" don't like it, I'll take my chances that they will be unable to come over here and run over me with a tank.

3. Sticking with geography, when exactly did Hawaii officially become Hawai'i? Oh I know, you're supposed to make a distinct stop and say something like "huh-wah------ee." We all do that, right? Uh huh. Maybe if I ever go there, I'll see the light, but until then, everything I know about those islands I learned from Jack Lord, and I'll stick with the unenlightened pronunciation, and the spelling to match thank you very much.

4. I refuse to call any sports stadium by the name of its corporate sponsor - even the new ones. It was bad enough when we were told that "Candlestick Park" had become "3-Com Park" or that monstrosity in Cincinnati got even uglier when it changed its name to "Cinergy Field." Now the new stadiums start out with the corporate names and I still can't keep up with them. They change about every other year. I know that the Baltimore Ravens used to play in something called "PSI Net Stadium" or some such. The stadium is still there, but it's had three or four names. Screw that. I used to know the name of all the MLB parks and NFL stadiums. Now all I need to know is that a game is in Pittsburgh or Seattle or Atlanta. If they want me to say the name of the corporate sponsor, they can pay me for my advertising services.

I could go on and on, but I've probably worn every one out with my stick-in-the-mud, old man crustiness by now. I'm done kavetching about it. For the time being, I'll be happy to just bide my time until I can start making my kids roll their eyes at all my verbal anachronisms the way my parents did. I'll still be "taping" shows with the DVR; talking on my "cordless phone" well after the last corded phone has taken its place in the Smithsonian; and posting things on the "Internet" years after they've given this a new name or it's morphed into something barely recognizable by today's technology. And then, just to really confuse them, some morning I'll ask if they want oleo on their toast.