Political correctness has been slowly poisoning the English language for some time now. But it has until recently confined itself to one whole word or another. Negro was out, while black was in, only to be out in turn when African American came in. Political activists tried to substitute “native American” for “Indian.”
They haven’t gotten very far, I’m happy to say, outside of far-Left, race-obsessed circles, because 1) all people born on U.S. soil are, by definition, native to this country, as well as constitutionally American citizens, and, therefore, also native Americans; and 2) the overwhelming majority of American Indians prefer to be called . . . American Indians. That’s undoubtedly why the splendid new museum in Washington is called the Museum of the American Indian.
But now, it seems, words adopted from foreign languages cannot be used by the politically fastidious if they have been Anglicized to conform to English rules of spelling and pronunciation. The “correct” word is now the transliterated term from the original language, even if the transliteration makes no sense to English speakers whatever. This wondrous language of ours, for instance, has had a perfectly good word for the holy book of Islam, “Koran,” since 1725.
But Newsweek now insists on spelling it “Qu’ran” instead. What purpose the apostrophe serves I have no idea. The normally sensible (at least orthographically) New York Times this morning has a sad story on the death of Donald Marshall Jr., a Canadian who was long incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit. The first sentence describes him as a “mi’kmaq Indian.”
A what? English has used the word Micmac to denote the major Algonquian Indian tribe of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia since 1830. So why does it suddenly have to be spelled in a funny, un-English way, with one of those mysterious apostrophes in the middle? Not speaking the Micmac language, I can only guess that it’s a transliteration.
Notice that this nonsense is something so characteristic of political correctness: a one-way street. We are supposed to use a transliteration of the foreign word, but speakers of Arabic or Micmac are under no obligation to use our terms for the Torah or Bible or the descendants of Europeans living in North America.
To see how silly this is, imagine a thought experiment. The English have had their own word for the country on the south side of the English Channel since the two countries started beating each other up a thousand years ago. Should we now start calling it Frã:s, as those who speak French do? Perhaps we should call the southern side of the English Channel “La Manche” from now on as well. I’m pretty confident the French will not give up the word Angleterre or stop pronouncing the name of that large city at the southern end of Lake Michigan as (approximately) Shee-cah-GOH.
