people of color & Chicano

[Lynne Murphy]

One thing that gets lost in the discussion of group names is that they are
just names, and liable to be as arbitrary as anything else in language.
After all, you park in a driveway and drive on a parkway.

--On Wednesday, February 7, 2001 10:13 pm -0500 Tony Glaser
<tonyglaser at MINDSPRING.COM> wrote:

> And Caucasian is the worst of all. How many white people have a clue
> where the Caucasus is (are? I don't even know if that's a plural or
> singular), let alone whether that is where their ancestors originate!

Well, Caucasian has little to do with the Caucasus, since it's from
Caucasoid and that's from the same group as Negroid and Mongoloid.  (You
don't expect black people to know where "Negro" is.)  For me, the problem
with 'Caucasian' is that people use it to mean 'of European descent' when
really it includes people from the middle east, the Indian subcontinent,
and northern Africa as well.  Many dictionaries until recently did not
recognize that Caucasian has come to have this more narrow sense (and that
white usually has the more narrow sense) and that white and Caucasian are
often not synonymous.  (And so I bitched about that a bit in a 1991 article
in _Dictionaries_.)  I'm happy to say that the AHD4 has avoided this
problem.

Lynne

M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
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