Linguistic Resuscitation
Dear Dennis,
The issue of minority languages is one that I find very interesting, and you
raised some important questions. You have written quite a bit about bilingual
education and English-only movements. But I wonder what you think about some of
the real minority languages.
In your letter, you mentioned Navajo and Breton (the Celtic language of
Brittany); coincidentally, this morning I got a letter from a colleague who has
published an extensive dictionary of Hopi and is working with educators to help
Hopi children learn their ancestral language. It seems to me that such cases
are viewed rather differently in the mainstream than, say, Spanish. People have
a romantic attachment to these obscure languages, often for nationalistic
reasons. (The Celtic languages are an especially relevant case--not only is
there renewed interest in Breton, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh, but there
are revival movements for the extinct Manx and Cornish. The Cornish revival
movement is, in general, supported mostly by middle-class English people in
Cornwall, not the descendants of the Celts who originally spoke the language.)
Historical details often support these interests, as in the Navajo code-talkers
who played an important role in World War II.
The political movements that support English as an official language are not
threatened by Breton, Basque, or Boontling (a moribund argot spoken in a town
in Northern California). They are threatened by Spanish, mostly. Do you think
it ironic that there is interest in some of these languages at the same time
there is such hostility to other languages and nonstandard dialects?
Back to "Lewinsky." While the name does have a little currency as a slang
term or euphemism for oral sex--more than I thought when I spoke to the New
York Post --I agree that it won't have much staying power. The difference
between it and "Heimlich" or "sandwich," to take two more common eponyms, is
that there are many, many other terms for oral sex, but none for the Heimlich
maneuver or a sandwich. A good comparison is the use of "OJ" as a verb. In 1994
and 1995, I collected a number of examples of "OJ" in the sense "to beat one's
wife or girlfriend," and debated entering the term in the second volume of the
Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang , which I was
editing at the time. In the end, I thought that it was unlikely to last, and
kept it out. Based on the subsequent history, I think it was a correct
decision. It's likely that without the senior Lewinsky's calling attention to
this usage, it would have died a relatively natural death; instead it will be
remembered as a joke whenever her name comes up.
Best,
Jesse
