Safire shocks and awes

William Safire's On Language column today has a couple of timely bits on the new war language popping up and I'm not sure if I'm comforted by being reminded that jingoistic renaming of things isn't new and was actually quite popular during WWI.

FREEDOM FRIES

An Order of Fries, Please, but Do Hold the French was the headline in The New York Times over an article about an outbreak of France-bashing at the U.S. Capitol.

Representative Bob Ney, chairman of the committee responsible for House operations, ordered the word French stricken from all of the chamber's menus: henceforth, the potatoes laden with cholesterol were to be labeled freedom fries. The Ohio congressman, who is of French descent and who speaks the language fluently, was immediately assailed by Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts for making Congress look even sillier than it sometimes looks. . . . There is a potential war going on.

(A potential war going on? That's a contradiction in terms: the essence of potentiality, rooted in the Latin for power,is existence only in possibility. It cannot be both a possibility for the future and an event taking place at present. What the congressman meant to say, I think, was that a debate was going on about a potential war.)

The retaliatory nomenclature was instantly spoofed: what was to be next -- freedom toast, freedom dressing? Would orchestras feature a freedom horn? Would lovers, who long ago abandoned the euphemism French letter for the direct word condom, now also turn away from the French kiss? (That locution, also called a soul kiss, involves the insertion of the tongue into the osculatory partner's mouth; both these terms are now considered old-fashioned by teenagers, who -- after a brief flirtation with the odious sucking face -- turned for a time to the puckish tonsil hockey, which has a sporting rather than an international connotation.)

The jingoistic practice of changing the language to ride with current political tides was most prevalent in World War I, when sauerkraut temporarily became liberty cabbage or pickled vegetables, hamburger was referred to as Salisbury steak, Germania Life Insurance became Guardian Life and dachshunds were called liberty pups. (Frankfurters had earlier become known as hot dogs. About the only common phrase with the name of our enemy in it that was left largely intact during that war was German measles.) The English language is resilient, resistant to manipulation; after our irritation with French foreign policy passes, members of the House of Representatives will go back to gorging themselves on French fries.

I think a column I read a few weeks back has a better idea than removing French from the American lexicon;

If chauvinistic warmongers want to start renaming stuff, it should be Iraqi stuff. There's probably not much point in going after Iraqi food such as masgoof (barbecued fish) and pacha (sort of an Iraqi haggis) because Americans don't eat them. A better idea would be to tear out every page in the Bible that features an Iraqi place name, such as Babylon, Babel, the Garden of Eden, Nineveh, and Ur. The Christian right will object, but we all have to make sacrifices during wartime.