Our favorite radio essayist, M. Fouad Laroui, reports a
strange story of linguistic politicization: the banning, by Holland and Belgium, of the rather
scholarly-looking and politically quite innocent word allochthone:
Now, allochthone
is the antonym of autochthone, as you
can tell by the prefixes, borrowed from Greek: allo- ‘other’, auto-
‘self, same’. The root chthon- means ‘earth’ and appears in the
learnèd
English word chthonic. Neither word is common in
English, but autochthone is quite
common in French. Harrap’s defines
it as ‘native’, and allochthone as
‘immigrant’.
Given its forbiddingly philological-Hellenistic hue, the
word allochthone would seem as
unlikely a target for political hysteria as, say, shibboleth or postlapsarian. Yet such is the case today: the word is legally banned; anyone who uses it may be subject to
punishment.
How did this come about? As Laroui explains it, the word itself is innocent enough but came to be soiled by
the mouths that uttered it.
Just as, in America, the wingnuts came to use the term “liberal” (whose
core meaning is something like ‘generous’) as a sneer-word, a hate-filled
epithet, so the likes of Geert Wilders (of “scum villages”
ill-fame) has used the Dutch version of allochthone invidiously, in his
diatribes against immigrants.
And now -- just as they did in the “scum villages” affair -- the
palladins of political correctitude have over-reacted and over-reached, with a
tyranny that comes naturally to the self-righteous.
That the word is, von
Hause aus, entirely blameless, can be seen in such passages as the
following, picked almost at random:
Das Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau
(SCP), eines der wichtigsten Beratungsorgane der niederländischen Regierung,
hat am heutigen Tage eine Studie veröffentlicht, aus welcher hervorgeht, dass
autochthone Niederländer von Zeitarbeitsfirmen bevorzugt werden. Während 28%
der nicht-westlichen Allochthonen,
die sich bei einer Zeitarbeitsfirma persönlich vorstellen, einen Job angeboten
bekommen, liegt die Quote bei autochthonen
Niederländern …
http://nlpolitik.wordpress.com/tag/allochthone/
Hmm… As an experiment, let us take a somewhat scholarly
word, and see if we can similarly besmirch it:
“Donald Trump is nothing but a sniveling, low-down mercantilist
!!!”
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