A instructor sporting a protecting masks speaks to college students throughout a lesson at an elementary faculty in San Francisco, Oct. 5, 2020.
Picture:
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg Information
The San Francisco faculty district is a sluggish learner, apparently. In February voters ousted three school-board members in landslide elections. One criticism was that the board was extra all for progressive gestures, resembling scrubbing
Abraham Lincoln’s
identify off faculty buildings, than in reopening school rooms amid the pandemic.
Now the San Francisco Chronicle reviews that the college district is planning to part out the phrase “chief” in its job titles, “on condition that Native American members of our group have expressed considerations.” At present the district has executives with the customary roles of chief monetary officer, chief of workers, and so forth.
Right here’s what is especially amusing on this try at progressive sensitivity: Whereas the English language has a number of 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 That phrase comes from Outdated French, and initially Latin, and the Oxford English Dictionary has citations again to 1297.
“Farewell nice Chiefe,” says a personality in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” That’s dated to the early 1600s. In some way we doubt he was fascinated by the Sioux. A biblical translation from
William Tyndale
in 1526 speaks of “the ability of Belzebub, the chefe of the devyls.” The earliest examples are exhausting 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 perhaps actual progressives ought to forswear French-derived phrases solely. Decolonizing the language would certain 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 adjustments “are by no means diminishing the indispensable contributions of our district central service leaders.” However a substitute time period, the Chronicle reviews, “has not been decided.” Feels like they want one other recall election.
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Appeared within the Could 27, 2022, print version.
