Ebony's Pearls

I am always saddened when we lose words. We lost "gay" - it was once a pretty girl's name, and it once meant "giddy with joy and happiness". We lost "niggardly" because ignorant people associated it with racism and not with miserliness, it's true meaning. We are losing "vagina" because of inappropriate prudery. We are losing so many more words to political correctness that any loss is an agony to veriloquists of the world.

That's my reaction to this article - we are losing yet another word, one that has historical significance. It also happens to be a euphonious word. For one who doesn't speak English as a native language, it's a pretty word - visually, audibly, and on the tongue.

The couch manufacturer (allegedly Chinese) wanted a pretty name for a pretty color. It was ignorance, not malice, that caused this. Attributing deliberate racism to stupidity isn't going to make things better, only worse. I feel sorriest for the child, who apparently has never encountered a racial slur and whose apparent first exposure to racism came from her family.

I am tempted to post a list of all the words we have lost and are losing to this political correctness craze and to ubersensitivity. I know words have poewr, but their power is limited to what we give them. We can change the meaning of words, too. Perhaps I ought to list the words that were once powerful negative words that have become words of little power.

It snowed yesterday. Pretty much all day, from about 10:00 a.m. until dark, at least.

Today, there is not a single bit of evidence we had any snow. In fact, several roses have opened, and some more irises have bloomed. Nothing has any freeze damage on it.

I need to prune the mulberry tree and clear out a few saplings that popped up in inconvenient places. And prop up the neighbor's fence. I think I am going to run my own fence alongside it so when hers collapses, I at least have some fencing up to keep the dogs in.

I like this kind of snow. It's typical Oklahoman snow.