Many of you will recognize that as a partial quote from Act II, Scene II of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The full quote goes as follows:
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
In this play, two families are presented: the Montagues and the Capulets. Romeo is a Montague; Juliet is a Capulet. These two families, despite their similarities, despise each other, and continually battle. The point that Juliet is making is that it is not the name that is the reality; the person behind the name is the reality. If the person is good, call them what you will, they are still good. Changing what the person is called does not change the essence of the person. This is just one place where Western culture has lost its grip on reality.
Probably most of you are not old enough to remember the old TV series called, Dragnet. It was on 1951-1959 with a 1967-1970 revival. One of the trademarks of the program was the opening narration: “Ladies and gentlemen: the story you are about to hear is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.” That has been reversed today as names are constantly changing to protect, not the innocence, but the essence of the real person the name refers to. I will deal with just a few.
The first area where names are changing is one that has been around the longest: sexual preference. Homosexuals became gays. Nothing changed except the name. Gay Pride is everywhere. If homosexuals are proud of being homosexuals why not call it Homosexual Pride? It is a realistic name. What has really changed?
Then there is the area of gender. The Oxford English Dictionary, Twelfth Edition (OED) defines gender as “the state of being male or female.” Now that is pretty simple. But not anymore. The word “gender” has lost its meaning but the reality of it is not hidden no matter how names change. ABC News website had a post titled, “Here’s a List of 58 Gender Options for Facebook Users” (https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/02/heres-a-list-of-58-gender-options-for-facebook-users) and it listed names like cisgender, genderqueer, non-binary, pangender. The only funny thing is, it claimed to list 58 gender options but the list only had 56 names. So I guess even 58 does not mean 58 anymore.
The word “gender” has been dropped altogether in favor of “gender identity.” The popular belief is that gender is something assigned at birth rather than something recognized at birth, and that assignment can be changed as the gendered person changes his/her/its/their mind. In other words, gender has become what is between the ears rather than what is between the legs.
Psychologists and psychiatrists, whose job is to make people feel good about themselves, have gone right along with this changed gender thinking. The American Psychiatric Association periodically produces a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the guide mental health workers use in treating people with mental problems. The Fourth Edition issued in 1994 contained the category of Gender Identity Disorder. The name speaks for itself. The Fifth Edition (the latest) has done away with the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder and replaced it with Gender Dysphoria that “refers to the distress that may accompany the incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s assigned gender.” Do you see what is happening here? The disease has disappeared. The symptom has become the disease. What has really changed?
Here are some more names people are called whose meaning has changed but the reality is the same:
PROGRESSIVE – I guess I am old-fashioned pulling out the dictionary to see what words mean. According to the OED, progressive means proceeding gradually or in stages. That can mean a progressive decline or a progressive increase. Culturally, it means favoring social reform, favoring change, or innovation. Today, its meaning depends on where you want society to go. Conservatives would consider a social reform going back to traditional ways as a progressive move. Liberals would consider the continued societal move toward a more socialist society as a progressive direction. Those that think that way, they call progressives. Those that think the opposite, they call deplorables. The reality does not change–progressive can be in either direction.
I honestly do not know what to call dark-skinned Americans anymore. When I was a child, they preferred Negro. In the 1960s it became Black (Black is Beautiful). In the 1980s, the Rev. Jesse Jackson led a movement to call Blacks, African-Americans. Now, movements like Black Live’s Matter has gone back to Black as the preferred racial term. As I said earlier, going back to Black is as progressive as the change from Black to African-American. What has really changed?
THEY – This name also has to do with gender identity. It is the new pronoun for single people that claim to have plural genders. Users are quick to point out that “they” has been used since the 1300s to refer to one person. Like all half-truths, they are false, wrong. It is true that “they” has been used since the 1300s to refer to one person, but only when it was not known if the referent person was male or female. (See the second paragraph of this post.) There was no question in this historical-grammatical usage that the referent was anything other than male or female. Today, the OED gives an alternate usage: “Used to refer to a person whose gender or sexual identity does not correspond to the traditional binary opposition of male and female.” What has really changed?
Well, I am out of stamina, but I am not out of words. This really is going somewhere, and I will continue it in the next post, which will probably be in a couple of weeks.