What To Say

This does belong in my “Things You Shouldn’t Say” series though this will be a bit of a different entry. Just as much things people say annoy me, also the things people don’t say annoy me. The meaning of the word ‘connotation’ is very important.

The term “cleaning lady”. I don’t know about the countries outside the Netherlands, but inside, at some point we were not allowed anymore to call the “cleaning ladies” “cleaning ladies”; they were now to be called “interior carers”. That makes me laugh, still. My mom was a cleaning lady and was told she was not to be called a “cleaning lady” anymore, but a “interior carer”. In return my mom asked: “Does that mean I get paid more or that I have to do other things?” to which the answer was a sounding ‘No’. And my mom said: “Then call me a cleaning lady”. Gotta love her for that.

The word “nigger” is a special one and shows how wrong things can go for words. Initially it meant “black” as derived from the Latin “niger”. Unfortunately, through the consensus of environment and time, the word collected a negative connotation. These days a lot of people will take offence if you call them a nigger, especially when you’re not “black”. So the word “negro” was adopted, meaning the same and even being derived from the same Latin word “niger”. But this word went the same way as its older brother/sister? These days I’m a little confused of what to call them, but then again, I usually don’t use anyone’s ethnic background to refer to them. Most people have names, you know.

I saw a header in paper requesting the word “allochthonous” become forbidden. The equivalent Dutch word “allochtoon” is a word we use a lot in the Netherlands to refer to people who don’t have the Dutch nationality. It’s an old Greek word meaning “from another country”, which is what these people are. Forbidding usage of this word is ridiculous, because all you’re saying is “this person who is not from this country”. The person can be from a Western country like Germany, England, Italy, Spain or America. The person can also be from an Eastern land like Turkey, Greece, Russia or one of the Asian countries. The reason this person wanted to forbid the use of the word “allochtoon”, because it had a bad connotation for the Moroccan or Turkish people. Bollocks! Sure we can keep to saying “Moroccan” or Turkish, but for a lot of people the bad connotation stays. It’s not about the word, it’s about the people. It’s about how people regard each other and treat each other. If both groups, allochthonous and autochthonous, would learn to tell people apart from groups and judge behaviour per case, a lot of the bad connotations would evaporate. There wouldn’t be a need for a change of usage of words all the time.

I do understand those connotations became more important than the actual meaning of words as stated in dictionaries all over the world, but aren’t we going a bit crazy here? We’ve got plenty negative words to refer to people, objects, events and other things. Why do we have to keep raping words? In the end, if we carry on like this, we will end up with more forbidden words then speech needs and with not understandable positive words. Cocking them up won’t make life sweeter. Can you imagine the amount of beeps on our tv sets if we let this happen? Life is what is, deal with it.