Most of us go through life with names chosen for us by someone else. But within that arrangement, we all make personal choices as to what we prefer to be called and by whom. By our middle name or the first. Joe or Joseph, Liz or Elizabeth, Ms or Mrs… it should really be the choice of an individual. A personal pet name (very common in some communities) is usually for family members. But some assume that as their formal moniker or allow close friends to use it. Relative strangers using a pet name is unacceptable and may be seen as taking unnecessary liberties. We feel secure and comfortable when others respect our choice of name.
Groups which have historically lacked power in societal hierarchy feel the need to redefine themselves more frequently than the powerful elite. Minorities in the US do it. Negroes to black to African American. Hispanic or Latino? Oriental ? Absolutely not. Asian? Fine. Men in most societies have always had the luxury to go by their birth names throughout their lives. Women used to change their names upon marriage. In the last few decades it has become acceptable for married women to retain their bachelor names. Names do matter in the sense that they afford us an identity signifying respect and comfort. Hateful racial or personal epithets (or deliberate distortions) can cause real pain and anger because they are aimed at diminishing the recipient’s self worth. Words in such instances, do break bones figuratively as surely as sticks and stones can.
Recently, I have come across a couple of discussions at other blogs regarding changing names or spellings of places which have for many years been known as something else. Opinions differed on whether it is a good thing or bad or if the changes are indeed necessary. Can one obliterate painful or shameful history by reinventing oneself? And should others be able to ignore the change as unnecessary inconvenience? Would it be okay for the Christian world for example, to revert to calling Istanbul by its older name Constantinople, just to put the Muslims down? What right does Rush Limbaugh have in pointedly and unfailingly calling Bob Dylan by his birth name of Bob Zimmerman when this famous singer is known the world over by his chosen name of Dylan?
The practice of renaming is common in nations where radical political changes occur – post colonial Africa, Asia and now the ever splintering erstwhile Soviet Bloc. It is worthwhile to remember that most of the names that are jettisoned were arbitrarily chosen, often by conquering powers without any input from the local inhabitants. And many of them had a name before the conquest or colonization. Is this practice P.C or a legitimate desire to exercise one’s autonomy over one’s identity? I had left a comment at one of the blogs. I will reproduce it here with some modification.
"How about the simple rule of calling a place or person as he/she/they want to be called? I mean as a linguistic exercise, how is one name better or more sacred than another? It is just another word. Peking to Beijing. Burma to Myanmar. Bombay to Mumbai. Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. How hard is that?
Growing up in India, Egypt was Egypt in the English language books and Misr (the Arabic version) in vernacular. England was England in English and Vilayat/Bilet in Hindi/ Bengali. India itself is India in English and Bharat/Hindustan in native languages. We picked the appropriate name depending on whether we were speaking/writing English or Hindi/Bengali.
My German friends say Deutschland in Deutsch and Germany (Chermany) in English. Many cities and streets in India now sport new names and spellings. I still say Calcutta and Bombay to myself, as they were known when I left India. But I write Kolkata and Mumbai when addressing the mail. It is a minor adjustment – not an annoyance at all. (I am unperturbed as long as they don’t mess with my beloved Delhi / Dilli.)
One of the funniest and most mischievous renaming with a political motive was changing the British name of a street in Calcutta (Kolkata) to Ho-Chi-Min Sarani. The communist state government of West Bengal pointedly chose the street on which the US consulate is located, for this honor.
I definitely don’t look like an "Oriental". But on the other hand, what does an Asian look like? In India I look like a Bengali not an Indian. (This is a regional and ethnic identity, not a national one. It would be akin to saying one looks like an Iowan or a Californian although that doesn’t quite capture what is meant here. A better parallel would be the description of an American as black, white or Hispanic.) Now that I am an American in the US, I look like an Indian here. And rather ironically, other Asians sometimes mistake me for a Phillipina, Indonesian or Thai but Caucasians and African Americans unerringly peg me for a south Asian / Indian.
Every nation and its people redefine themselves after a political catharsis as India and Pakistan did in divesting themselves of British names after independence. (And as Islamists and Hindu fundamentalists are doing now to wipe out the vestiges of a shared Hindu-Muslim past in both nations.) This is reflected most overtly in the renaming of cities and streets. That prerogative, like rewriting history, belongs to the victor.
It is best in most cases to comply with the name of a place as desired by the majority of its inhabitants – unless there is something patently offensive and objectionable about it. For an example of that I have to move closer to home in Texas. A couple of years ago, there was a bewildering brouhaha over the renaming of a street called "Jap Road" in east Texas. Asians were aghast at the inappropriateness of the name but many of the locals fiercely resisted a change. (See the story to find out their justification for keeping this offensive name.) They insisted that the name honored the memory of a long ago Japanese farmer who had settled there in the early twentieth century !"
Accidental Blogger 
3 responses to “Changing Nomenclature – PC or Personal Prerogative?”
I agree with you, in general, though in practice, have found the politics of this somewhat trickier. For one thing, we live in a country that rightly prides itself in welcoming the world’s political “losers.” Many people who fled to Los Angeles around 1979 call themselves Persian, although they come from a country that was officially renamed Iran in 1935. To some extent, this is responsive to romantic associations in the Western media with the name Persia and negative associations with Iran; to some extent, it represents hostility toward the Islamic Republic of Iran by a community that includes a large number of exiled Jews and Christians. Some more recent immigrants reject the “Persian” nomenclature and call themselves Iranian. What should one do when in a room with people from both camps? I have similarly known people who, in what is now a 17 year vigil, say that they are from Burma rather than Myanmar, I suppose because they like the authoritarian indigenous military regime there even less than they liked the authoritarian British regime. And, I know both Palestinian Americans and non-Palestinian sympathizers who refer to the entire area of the former British Mandate as Palestine. I tend to say either “Isreal/Palestine” or “Israel and the Occupied Territories,” a solution that I intend as conciliatory, but which probably pleases no one except those with my particular politics. The more contentious the politics, the more difficult this negotiation becomes.
A related question is whether to adopt nomenclature that people feel strongly about using in reference to themselves, but which comes across very differently when used by someone outside the group. The famous jazz critic Stanley Crouch will only use the term Negro in reference to his ethnic group (and I have met other, older African Americans who resist that now-standard term). However, as much as I respect Mr. Crouch, as a white woman, I would not be comfortable with the signal I might send by talking about the Negroes with him, even though he might not appreciate my resistance to his preferred terminology.
On the other end of the spectrum, those who have the unfortunate combination of being both ignorant and thin skinned can demand terminological choices that compromise our intelligence. In the (admittedly not very representative of the larger population) circles I run in, I have found myself in groups that banned the use of the words “picnic,” because of an urban myth that its etymology was the expression “pick a n_ [slur against African Americans]”, and “niggardly,” notwithstanding its lack of any etymological connection to the aforementioned slur.
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The only way to explain Rush Limbaugh’s refusal to accept ‘Bob Dylan’ that I can think of is a kind of thinly masked anti-Semitism. He wants to remind his viewers that this man isn’t one of us!
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Anna:
It is indeed sometimes dicey to figure out the acceptable way to refer to groups who themselves may be splintered over what the correct names are. I never knew about the sinister connotation of picnic in some people’s minds.
Amardeep:
You are so right! That’s exactly what Limbaugh’s motives are. I have seen this practice among some of the reactionary “upper caste” Hindus in India too. Many Indians belonging to Scheduled castes or tribes choose to discard their caste specific names in favor of something neutral such as “Rai” or “Singh” – names common in all of north India. But some of their Brahmin or Kshatriya colleagues at work would invariably address them by their original names (how they find out, I do not know), particularly when many others are present!
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