Chauvin: the etymology of a murdering cop

Just a little language stuff regarding Officer Chauvin, formerly of the Minneapolis Police Department. The word "chauvinist," commonly meaning one who condones sexist actions and attitudes, is derived from "chauvin," a French word that was in turn coined from the name of Nicolas Chauvin. Chauvin was a notoriously bellicose and belligerent hyper-nationalist who was a prominent figure in the French First Republic. A "chauvin" in French is an excessively patriotic person. Nicolas Chauvin was a busy finger-pointer in the Reign of Terror, a period in France of post-revolutionary gusto that led many free-thinking newspaper editors, political rivals, private citizens and more up the guillotine steps. Chauvin.

"Decimate" is a metaphor built into a word

The word “decimate” in its most literal sense means to reduce by a factor of ten. “The previous record of initial jobless claims was decimated by this week’s statistics.” After the recession that followed the housing collapse of 2008, initial jobless claims totaled around 695,000. That record was eclipsed tenfold this week with initial jobless claims totaling around 6,648,000.

Practically speaking, the word “decimate” is used metaphorically almost every time it is invoked. Even in the above example, while eerily close to being exact, the new initial jobless claims figure doesn’t quite decimate the old record. “Decimate” has at its root a mathematical expression, and mathematics is predicated on precision. While this week’s initial jobless claims number doesn’t precisely decimate the old record, it dwarfs it to a rate that makes the use of “decimate” perfectly appropriate here. 

Were its usage restricted only to matters of moving the decimal point to the left (notice the identical root word in “decimal”), it would hardly get used at all. It’s perfectly acceptable to use “decimate” in the context of “by a large amount,” and in most dictionaries, indeed serves as the primary definition.

He/she, they/them. What's in a pronoun? A lot.

The first time a request for the they/them pronoun was made to me was at a lunch counter in Oakland just last year. I was visiting a friend and he took me to a diner nearby his place of business where the person who waited on us was a young man, ostensibly, but with a feminine personal carriage and clothing that hearkened an iconic ‘50s diner waitress look. My friend mentioned in casual conversation that our waiter was a musician, and did so using the pronoun “he.” Our waiter corrected my friend by saying, “they/them” while breezing past. This person was presenting exactly down the middle and I immediately thought to myself, “You know what? They’re right.”

The Oxford English Dictionary this year welcomed into its infiniteness the usage of “they” and “them” as non-binary gender descriptors for persons who identify at a sufficient midpoint along the gender spectrum to prefer it to traditional “he” and “she” identifiers. British vocalist Sam Smith recently requested on Instagram that fans, interviewers and the rest of the world honor a preference of “they/them” to refer to Smith. “After a lifetime of being at war with my gender I’ve decided to embrace myself for who I am, inside and out,” they wrote. 

Do you see how easy that was? They wrote. It’s a little odd, admittedly, and does take some getting used to. I am a language and usage traditionalist, and my general viewpoint is that there has to be a good reason for accepting new words and usages. Well, unlike the now welcome misuse of “literally” and the fall of the proper pronunciation of “nuclear,” here is an actual good reason for a shift in the language.

This is a maligned and marginalized segment of society that can encounter sustained environmental hostility and sudden hostility in common daily encounters. They are a misunderstood and oppressed demographic, and using the proper pronoun (as far as they are concerned) telegraphs a measure of support. It can even be fairly considered an expression that the transgender person is in a safe environment. There is a great loveliness to replacing “he” or “she” with “they/them” for people who identify as non-binary. I have embraced the change wholly and recommend against the stodgy in this case.

Ted Cruz' Silicone Problem

At a campaign rally in Humble, Texas yesterday, Ted Cruz said of the Texans who support his challenger Beto O’ Rourke, "they want us to be just like California...right down to tofu and silicon and dyed hair....not on our watch.” Ted’s wife might have some grumbling words for him about her own Olay stash, and Texas’ many soybean farmers might not appreciate tofu’s disparagement, but the word I’d like to focus on is “silicon.” 

I have watched the video and that’s what he said, though it is obvious he was aiming for “silicone.” Silicone is a synthetic polymer that has myriad uses in electronics, medicine, construction and other applications, but its popular familiarity in an easily titillated America lies in its use as breast implants. It is often confused with “silicon,” which is what Cruz has done here. Silicon is much harder and more brittle than silicone, and is a critical component in the manufacture of computer chips, hence the term “silicon valley,” a nickname for the southern San Francisco bay area where much of America’s high technology development occurs. There being no colloquial Texas pronunciation resembling "silicon," it is safe to say Cruz committed this common error. 

It being a common error, you might regard my pointing it out here as finicky, but Cruz is a Harvard-trained debate star and a professional communicator, so I think it fair. One literal way to interpret his utterance is this: “There is NO WAY Texas will invest in high tech…not on our watch.” If you are inclined to forgive it as mere mispronunciation, its redux is thus: “Why spend money on fake boobs when you can elect a real one?”

Ron DeSantis has a monkey on his back.

Not to comment on Ron DeSantis’ metaphorical monkey business would be ignoring the 800-pound gorilla in the middle of the room. The Twittersphere and other platforms went bananas today when they heard DeSantis warn Florida voters not to “monkey this up” by electing his African American opponent, Andrew Gillum. I think his critics are up a tree with this one, as this usage has clearly thrown a monkey wrench into DeSantis’ campaign plans. It was a mistake, not a dog whistle. Dog whistles are usually precisely that—hard to hear, whereas “monkey this up” is about ten degrees south of the N-word. There is no phrase “to monkey up” in any kind of American slang. He was aiming for “muck up” and he misspoke. That said, malapropisms don’t often come from nowhere. It is easy to imagine the M-word making the rounds in meetings among close associates of a Florida candidate who is a monkey-see, monkey-do for the Trump administration. The opinion call from this desk is that DeSantis' use of the phrase, “monkey this up,” was not an intentional dog whistle to white voters. However, his having ceded a few sentences earlier in the speech that Andrew Gillum was “articulate” may bear a closer look on those grounds. Dog whistle. A little hard to hear.

"Tape," like "film," is an anachronism.

My admiration for the resiliency of the word "tape" knows no measure. Very little audio record-keeping is "taped" these days. It is recorded certainly, it is captured, but not taped.

If you peruse today’s comment boards and even news headlines, you’ll read about the “taped” conversations between Cohen and Trump. Unless it was magnetically captured to a tape medium, which I doubt it was, it wasn’t taped. People familiar with Cohen’s work might not be shocked if it indeed were found on a microcassette, but this article refers to “tape” more generally.

The Watergate tapes were on actual tape. For recording one’s own phone calls in the 21^st century, however, it is almost always done with a tap off the phone into either a recording program or a handheld digital recorder. But nothing else sounds as cool as “tape,” so “tape” it is.

My hat is off to "tape," a word that managed to outlive itself.

"Proughts" is hereby coined as a conflation of "thoughts" and "prayers."

Due to the high volume of mass shootings and the attendant need for large quantities of thoughts and prayers, the word "proughts" (pronounced "prots") has been coined as a means of expressing "thoughts and prayers" more efficiently in a single word. It is estimated this will result in a 20% to 30% increase in thoughts and prayers for the victims and their families.
#proughts