Etymological fallacy

[Rudolph C Troike]

     I've read the accounts of the etymology of "squaw", and have no doubt
that they are accurate. However, linguists have long argued against the
notion that words have a "real" meaning that is knowable by determining
the earliest discoverable or reconstructable meaning (a favorite topic-
generating rhetorical ploy of public speakers). Words mean what people at
any given time understand them to mean, and these shared understandings
change over time. "Hussy" no longer means "housewife", "knave" no longer
means a young boy, and "nice" no longer means "ignorant" in the minds of
current English speakers, and it would be absurd to insist that it is
perfectly all right to call a woman a "hussy" because she is a housewife,
or that it is insulting to say that a girl is "nice" (except in Liberia,
where the older meaning lingers, or in African American slang, where the
idea of sexually available has become attached to the word). Even if we
could go around prescriptively restoring words to their centuries-old or
millenia-old meanings, we would have to remember that further
irrecoverable millenia lie behind those, and we can never know what the
sources of any word might have meant 30,000 or 60,000 years ago.

        In modern American English, "squaw", while its sense may have
ameliorated from its strongly depreciative 19th-century meaning, still
carries a stigmatizing or negative quality in many contexts. This fact,
and not any argument as to its etymological innocence, should guide
decisions about whether it should be retained in geographic designations
today.

Rudy Troike
Dept. of English
University of Arizona