PETA has gone off the deep end.
The terrorist group determined to end humankind’s position at the top of the food chain has learned to be soft and fuzzy. Probably from Al Gore, the Nobel laureate who has mastered the art of advertising to move most of a population away from real science.
PETA wants to rename fish.
Renaming fish is their 2009 contribution to political correctness.
Kindergarten educators (I can’t call them teachers because teachers know better) want to prevent kindergarten bullies from offending the less fortunate. The Political Correctness Police (ever wonder why that equates to PCP?) compel us to avoid upsetting the non-white, the homosexual, any female, the crippled, the ugly, the fat, or the stupid. One of my favorite Clint Eastwood movies is “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” The man in the lice-ridden poncho would lose a lot of punch if he starred in “The Good, The Goodness-Challenged, and The Unfortunately Handsomeness-Challenged.”
Political correctness comes in all flavors and all of them irk me.
I wonder whether Brazilians are annoyed by the name we have given (mostly) Bolivian almendra nut. The annual harvest of Brazil nuts is about 20,000 tons; Bolivia sends about half of those to market.
The American Fisheries Society moved Floridians to call the jewfish the “goliath grouper.” The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first usage of “jewfish” in this 1697 quote: “The Jew-Fish is a very good fish and, I judge, so called by the English because it hath scales and fins, therefore a clean fish, according to Levitical law.”
Seconds before his ouster in 1999, public advocate David Howard, was quoted thusly, “I will have to be niggardly with this fund…” The political firestorm came as others called this 700 year-old synonym for miserly, a “racist” epithet.
Muslims have castigated Prince Harry for calling a fellow cadet a “raghead.” (As an aside, I find it interesting that it is politically CORRECT for Muslims pledge to kill all American infidels and to shout *death to Israel*.)
The term “politically correct” traces back to Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book and was adopted in the 1960s by the radical left. RightSpeak (or in this case, LeftSpeak), ought to give us pause no matter what the origin. After all, the entropy of the universe never dwindles and once your peers decide they can trash your mental treasury, the penalties they impose grow larger with every alleged infraction.
The death of language comes when words lose their meaning in favor of their consequences.
| Got to dial it back:
I do not use racial or ethnic slurs. I do know that people who call me a redneck WASP show only their own brilliance. I do know kids need to build immunity to germs both bacterial and conversational. I do not tolerate RightSpeak or RightThink. |
And now PETA wants us to call all fish, “sea kittens.”
“Nobody would hurt a sea kitten!” the group says on its website.
They hope to start their campaign to end “fishing” by retiring the name for good.
OK, OK, I understand that no one takes PETA seriously and the sea kitten campaign is at best laughable. I’m not laughing. PETA’s agenda is quite simply to destroy our meat and fish industries which, when you look at the expected results, means PETA’s agenda is to destroy humankind.
After all, it is already so illegal to catch or eat a kosher goliath grouper in Florida waters that the penalty for simply having one aboard may be forfeiture of one’s fishing boat.
Time to trot out my recipes for cat.
Avoiding upsetting females is actually in your best interests, Darwin-esquely speaking.
> Darwin-esquely speaking
Not necessarily.
A statistically significant number of women prefer bad boys to men with proper haircuts and no tattoos. That means the bad boy with an interesting opinion may be more likely to procreate than the one with a suit and a purse.
An equally statistically significant number of women who believe that castration of language is necessary for mating probably make poor contributors to the gene pool.
Dick wrote: “The death of language comes when words lose their meaning in favor of their consequences.”
Language is always in flux, and even if it doesnt die, sometimes its hard to keep up with the changes. What used to be a perfectly good word for someone having a happy and lively spirit now means the most repugnant thing that one man can do to another I mean besides buying him a domestic beer or shortsheeting his bed in the dorm.
And during the heat of the Civil Rights movement we Caucasians didnt know whether to call our newly liberated black brethren *Black* *Colored* *Negro* or *African American*. For some of us it is still up in the air.
But on a serious note, Lake Superior State University recently published a list of banished words and many of them are what we have come to recognize as *politically correct* lingo.
Case in point: *Carbon footprint* and *Green*. Some emoticons have also come under fire, mainly the *winky/smiley* one that goes ;) Or <3 that is supposed to stand for a sideways heart as in I <3 NY.
By the way, *I heart New York* oughta be on the bye-bye list as well.
Hackneyed phrases like *Still up in the air*, *Case in Point* and *By the Way* are also way past their bedtimes.
> Language is always in flux, and
> even if it doesnt die, sometimes
> its hard to keep up with the
> changes.
Except in France where the language cops work overtime to assure that no American phrase sneaks into the country.
That said, language should be fluid. Despite the resistance from Geno’s buggy whip manufacturing plant, we English speaking shoppers would be in dire jeopardy without the words automobile and trash hauler.
It is a bad, bad day, though, when the language cops want to force us to call a perfectly good spade a … shovel.
I have no problem with renaming fish. In fact, I have a suggestion for a new name: Dinner.
Yes, Dinner would be a good new name for the scaly things. Specifically, I’m thinking of the lovely orange/soy-glazed salmon I had at a dinner recently. Or the salmon in a pesto cream sauce they serve in the Tradewinds Buffet at Treasure Island Casino. Yummy. Pity that Applebee’s keeps fiddling with their menu, because they used to do a delicious tilapia with a mango salsa (they changed the salsa recently and I don’t care for it anywhere near as much). It’s been much too long since I’ve been to Tavern On Grand for their fantastic broiled walleye, so I’ll have to put that suggestion out there for the next Girls’ Night. I cooked up some trout fillets last week that were pretty good, but I think they weren’t quite as fresh as the butcher at the market asserted they were, because even though they smelled and looked fresh, they tasted a little titch fishier than I really like, but then again, sometimes trout is just that way. I’m a bit put out with our new cafeteria management here at work, because they rarely serve fish for lunch, although when they do have it, they do a really good cod with a nice potato/herb crust (on the other hand, I wasn’t aware it was really possible to completely screw up a tuna melt until I tried one for lunch one day in the cafeteria… bleaaaah!).
Is PETA taking suggestions on the renaming of fish? Perhaps they should start with assigning a new taxonomical name, since anything starting with “icth” just doesn’t even sound very, well, fubsy. (“Fubsy” is a biology-nerd term meaning that an organism is generally appealing, with big limpid eyes and a sweet face. Fubsy is the “AWWWWWWW IT’S SO CUUUUUUTE! factor, even if it’s so ugly it’s cuuuuuute, like a Peruvian guinea pig I had once upon a time, who looked kinda like something horked up by a long-haired calico cat. Kittens and puppies and bunnies and baby harp seals are fubsy. Otters and sugar gliders and owls are fubsy. Cows and lambs and piglets are fubsy. Fish are not fubsy in general, and some, such as eelpout, are even LESS fubsy than most.)
I rather like the PETA image another correspondent offered of a cold and perhaps slimey critter sitting in one’s lap purring… er, gasping for air.
Whoda thunk that PETA was all for drowning kittens.
Oh.
Perhaps a fish isn’t an animal. Or a kitten.
The women who sleep with the bad boys maybe just get an abortion. Darwin’s fallen on new times, and you have to not only get a woman pregnant in order to spread your seed and continue your genes, but you have to get a woman pregnant who actually wants to have your baby.
Sex was never intended for procreation. Its sole purpose was to give “the weaker sex” an equal playing field by providing them the keys to a hot item, much in demand that did not require a padded resume’ or expensive marketing plan to either sell or use for barter.
That it comes with an unsavory side effect is simply an example of Hyde’s Third Law of Reciprocity: *Every good thing comes with a bad thing*. Just like sweets and tooth decay.
I’m glad I could clear that up for everyone.
–George