The San Francisco faculty district is a gradual learner, apparently. In February voters ousted three school-board members in landslide elections. One criticism was that the board was extra concerned with progressive gestures, resembling scrubbing
Abraham Lincoln’s
title off faculty buildings, than in reopening lecture rooms amid the pandemic.
Now the San Francisco Chronicle stories that the college district is planning to part out the phrase “chief” in its job titles, “given that Native American members of our community have expressed concerns.” Currently the district has executives with the customary roles of chief monetary officer, chief of employees, and so forth.
Here’s what is especially amusing on this try at progressive sensitivity: While the English language has numerous phrases that may be traced to the native peoples of the Americas, together with “chipmunk,” “barbecue” and “hurricane,” they don’t embody “chief.” That phrase comes from Old French, and initially Latin, and the Oxford English Dictionary has citations again to 1297.
“Farewell great Chiefe,” says a personality in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” That’s dated to the early 1600s. Somehow we doubt he was fascinated with the Sioux. A biblical translation from
William Tyndale
in 1526 speaks of “the power of Belzebub, the chefe of the devyls.” The earliest examples are laborious to parse until you’re fluent in Beowulfese, however right here’s one we grasp from 1483, a decade earlier than Columbus sailed to the west: “She was made abbesse and chyef of al the monasterye.”
Don’t San Francisco colleges have English academics who can clarify this? And even when “chief” did have Native origins, so what? The English language is a melting pot, to make use of one other disfavored time period. Or possibly actual progressives ought to forswear French-derived phrases fully. Decolonizing the language would positive stick it to William the Conqueror, the Norman who subjugated England in 1066.
The San Francisco faculty district was at pains to emphasise that the title modifications “are in no way diminishing the indispensable contributions of our district central service leaders.” But a substitute time period, the Chronicle stories, “has not been determined.” Sounds like they want one other recall election.
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Appeared within the May 27, 2022, print version.
Source: www.wsj.com”