Asian = Oriental, etc.

[Gregory {Greg} Downing]

At 08:33 AM 2/9/2001 -0700, you wrote:
>I think what makes "oriental" derogatory is that people used to use it a
>lot. I hear it from the older generations. Newer terms sound better because
>they are new, and we don't associate them with something our (more
>prejudiced, of course) grandparents or parents say.
>
>Nancy Elliott
>Southern Oregon University
>

Yes, this is something like what I was thinking about this thread of
discussion. I.e., "oriental" is not so much a problem because of any
"occidentocentric" etymology (even though that has come to be adduced as a
plausible problem). Instead, it is more centrally a matter of cumulative
usage. Our sense of a word's denotations and connotations is heavily
affected by the sum total of uses we have seen made of it over time.

Now, when one hears "oriental," one has some general sense of the sum total
of uses one has heard the word put to. Many such uses date back decades, to
users whose attitudes, shaped in the first half of the 20th cent., one
doesn't agree with. So one is leery to use the word at all, lest one be
taken to share similar attitudes or, perhaps even more uncomfortably, feel
oneself somehow akin to past speakers with whom one strongly disagrees.

Obviously one major reason language changes over time is that as attitudes
and ideas change, people become leery about words used in a prior era
sheerly because they do have a long usage history in an era whose attitudes
are no longer current. It's not the words' fault, or even a function,
necessarily, of the words' etymologies. It's simply that certain words come
to seem associated with people and attitudes one doesn't identify with,
without there having to be any denotative, etymological, or even explicitly
connotative derogation inherent in the word itself.


Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at nyu.edu