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Street person, panhandler, homeless, vagrant, unhoused, home challenged, tramp, bum, or hobo. Take your pick. Whatever you call them doesn't matter. These are screwed up people living on the sidewalks, under bridges, in our parks, libraries, and vacant lots. The nomenclature is irrelevant to the diseased and disgusting human beings who befoul our cities. Giving them a nicer name won't help the situation.
Which of these labels are the preferred name to describe the human beings who were living in America before the Europeans came? American Indian, Native American, or indigenous peoples? The answer is, it depends on who you ask. Some tribes prefer Native Americans, some prefer American Indians. Some don't care. And actually the only people who like the term indigenous peoples, are the small number of activists who would like to tear down all statues of European founding fathers, including Christopher Columbus, of course. And whatever they are called, it doesn't change who they are. The only group names that really make any difference are the individual names of their tribes.
And what are we to do about Latin Americans? Who are they? Latins? Chicanos? Latinos? Latinx? Many of them are some mixture of south of the border "indigenous people" and Spanish or Portuguese. Decades ago they were simply referred to as Latin. I personally like Latin and Latino is the Spanish word for Latin after all. Why does our grievance driven politically correct woke culture insist on making everything so complicated? Don't people have other things to do with their lives?
Mongoloid was once used to refer to people of a certain physical appearance, usually those from east Asia. Then things changed and the term became Oriental. But now the term Oriental has become in effect thought of as derogatory and insulting. Not quite sure why that is. You don't even hear of Oriental food or Oriental rugs anymore. The woke police won't let us even use Oriental salad dressing on our salads. It's all Asia now, which is stupid because many people in Asia would never be considered to have an Oriental physicality.
But no people have had label designations change so much through the years as have the blacks. They've gone from Negro to colored, to Afro-American, to black, to people of color to African-American. Negro has become almost a dirty word in our modern times, no doubt because of the bastardization slur which we have come to call "the N word."
Caucasian is out of date completely and now people of European heritage are simple referred to as white, if they're lucky. If they're not lucky they are referred to as hateful colonialists who want to exterminate all the other races.
And speaking of name changes, countries do it too. Persia was officially renamed Iran in 1935. This was done supposedly to better reflect the nation's identity and to distance itself from colonial legacies. Well, I have to say that Persia is a much more pleasant sounding place than Iran.
When I think of Persia I think of Persian rugs, Persian cats, beautiful exotic belly dancers, magic flying carpets and snake charmers. When I think of Iran I think of Islamic terrorism, antisemitism, and Anglo hatred. Persia sounds poetic, Iran sounds ugly and dangerous.
In the same way, I wish Peking was still Peking and not Beijing. I would order Peking Duck but never Beijing Duck. I prefer Rangoon to Yangon. And I think Siam is a more romantic sounding place than Thailand. Have you ever heard of Thailander twins? Or Thailandese cats?
I tend to favor the old names to the modern ones. I like Burma not Myanmar. I like Ceylon, not Sri Lanka. Not that I'd ever want to live in any of these places, mind you. I just like saying the old traditional names.
We haven't changed the Name of the United States of America since its founding, thank goodness. Why should we, it sounds good just as it is. Although the Gulf of Mexico might soon become the Gulf of America thanks to President Trump. But that's not a bad change since the majority of the gulf faces the United States.
And sometimes a city will change its name to make it sound better, or fancier. The City of Lankershim in Southern California became North Hollywood to give it a more glamorous cache. Streets are renamed all the time as an attempt to placate certain "marginalized" people. Brooklyn Avenue in Los Angeles became Caesar Chavez Avenue to make Mexican fruit pickers happy, I guess. And all across the country every major city has a Rev. Martin Luther King Boulevard.
And don't get me started with gender renaming. That's a whole other column.
I guess my point is that you can spend all your days renaming people and places and it doesn't change what they are. Not a bit. You can call a jackass a donkey, but in the end a jackass is still a jackass.
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