Warning: Through no fault of the author’s, the following fascinating and informative piece contains language that marginalized people may or may not find offensive.
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You’ve no doubt all heard the probably specious story that Eskimos have something like 300 or 600 or 300,600 different words for frozen water whereas we denizens of warmer climes only have a handful – sleet, snow, hail, slush, etc. The idea is that because they spend so much time dealing with frozen water they can distinguish subtle differences in its consistency and so it follows that —
Beep Beep Beep!
Un-oh, a new word processing app I just purchased, Offensive Connotative Terminology (OCT), has just generated a pop-up that informs me that “Eskimo” means “raw meat eater,” a pejorative name given to them by enemy tribes to the south and that E-words would rather we refer to them as Inuits, even though, as it turns out, Inuits do in fact eat raw meat. (No wonder then that there is a paucity of synonyms in the Inuit language for fire).
Fellini’s “Little Person” nun from his film “Amarcord”
I’ve lost my train of thought. Where was I? Oh yeah, that creepy obsession Fellini and David Lynch have with midgets. What’s the scoop on that?
Beep Beep Beep!
The damn thing’s gone off again. Looks like the word “midget” set it off. Let’s see, here’s a link in the pop-up that might offer an explanation.
[click]
Midget, denotation, “very small fly.” Popularized by PT Barnum and therefore associated with freak shows. Politically correct alternatives, “little person,” “dwarf,” “person with dwarfism,” or “person of short stature.”
Forget it, no way I’m going to write about Fellini and Lynch now. Try crafting a sonorous sentence with “person of short stature,” and to my sensibility “midget” conjures a less ominous image than “dwarf,” but anyway, I gotta go. I think I used “midgets” instead of “dwarves” in a piece I wrote about Folly Beach’ s freak show of a tavern, the Sand Dollar Social Club, a while back, so I better go back and edit it. [LINK TO SAND DOLLAR PIECE]
Beep! Beep! Beep!
OTC Suggestion: replace “freak show” with “side show.”
Okay, that’s it. I’m out of here.
You Do Hoodoo 
Whoa! Is this an app? Why didn’t we know to use Inuit? When we studied them we used the “E” word over and over. Houghton and Mifflin lead us astray in the sea of PC.
Actually, I made up the app. It doesn’t actually exist – yet. Eskimo, though, is considered pejorative, which I learned from a website devoted to racial slurs. Thanks for reading and commenting!
We learned about the Inuits using the “E” word over and over, completely oblivious were were offending our friends above us. Houghton and Mifflin lead us astray in this new sea of PC. I did know the joke about selling ice was pretty bad on my own, but that wasn’t rocket science. The only minority it’s ok to make fun of are the one percent 🙂
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