Beheading isn’t a haircut, either
Why does the Guardian call female genital mutilation ‘circumcision’? It uses the word six times in this very short piece – even while admitting that it ‘involves the removal of the clitoris, and is also called female genital mutilation.’ Removal of the penis isn’t called circumcision, so why should removal of the clitoris be called that?! Because the Guardian is tho thenthitive, because the Guardian is staffed entirely by cultural anthropologists, because the Guardian thinks men matter and women don’t, or what? What is up with this relentless passion to euphemize things that should not be euphemized? Auschwitz should not be called a Polish spa, My Lai should not be called a prank, the Rwanda genocide should not be called a backyard barbecue gone wrong, and chopping off a girl’s clitoris, slicing away her labia, and then sewing them closed should not be called ‘circumcision.’
I used to think the Graun was an OK paper. In some ways it is. It certainly provides some good services in its online version. But its editorial policy on things that are, to quote you, OB, ‘tho thenthitive’ is that of the woolly touchy-feely brigade who wouldn’t utter one syllable if it seemed to criticise a Muslim – poor, hard-done-to Muslims, whom we cannot criticise because in many cases they have brown skins and we were a horrible imperial power and we now feel ever so guilty and ever so sorry for it, so really very fucking sorry.
You sometimes see this attitude from the way the ‘Comment is “Free”‘ editors censor some of the comments (hence the scare quotes in the title above). Bloody appeasers!
“What is up with this relentless passion to euphemize things that should not be euphemized? Auschwitz should not be called a Polish spa,”
Doublespeak for public relations and politics sake would be part of the relentless passion.
Sometimes, using euphemisms is equated to politeness.
For example, Goldenbridge was referred to as an ‘orphanage’ when in fact it was really an ‘Industrial School’. The former connotation sounded much nicer.
Children therein were as well, by the government, referred to as pupils. Yet they were incarcerated in the – once womens’ prison refuge by way of court orders.
Having not received proper education renders the ‘pupils,’ phraseology – futile.
Idioms are, in essence, often colloquial metaphors.
Such idioms/phrasal verbs/euphemisms,or whatever can be very disparaging.
The donkey is an ass!
True – the Guardian does have some very good stuff, in education and books for instance. But – this distortion of language routine just drives me nuts. Especially when it’s at the expense of women who have had their genitalia butchered!
“tho thenthitive” made me laugh. I just watched the Penn & Teller Bullshit show on circumcision, amazing that people treat male circumcision so lightly, I really couldn’t believe what I was seeing!
I heard the BBC World Service treat this story the exact same way — by referring once to “genital mutilation,” and every other time calling this hideous practice “circumcision.”
They had the figure of mutilated females in Egypt at 97%. I was shocked at such a high proportion. They went on to say that the custom goes all the way back to the ancient Egyptians (obviously predating Islam), being a female rite of passage. Incredible that such a barbaric practice has survived so long.
And it was the BBC and the Guardian that were reliably telling us in a variety of ways that Rushdie offended Muslims and provoked the fatwa. Do they consult each other on their coverage of these subjects or what?
Male circumcision is fabulous. I used to imagine it being quite terrible, but I had it done a couple of years back, and frankly, it’s great. I highly recommend it.
Female genital mutilation is an absolute abomination, however. Truly evil in every respect. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a victim of this appalling practice.
Its another lost cause(the guardian) but god bless you for trying!
Actually, its precisely because the the Guardian is not a lost cause that I think its worth Ophelia and others making a noise about this.
After all the (UK) government, that bastion of euphemism and linguistic trickery, calls it what it is. So why shouldn’t a left-liberal paper?
“Auschwitz should not be called a Polish spa,”
Or anything else that will delude people.
Wiki tells me.
“For example, the term “concentration camp,” to describe camps used to house civilian prisoners, was used by the British during the Second Boer War, primarily because it sounded bland and inoffensive. However, after the Third Reich used the expression to describe its death camps, the term gained enormous negative connotation. Since then, new terms have been invented as euphemisms for them, such as internment camps, resettlement camps, etc”.
I will say this much, though: thtop being tho thenthitive. Just thtop it!
[with a smirk]
Let us call a spade a spade Eh!
Yeah…in the US during the war of course it was Not Done to call the concentration camps for Japanese citizens ‘concentration camps’ even though they precisely fit the meaning.
RE: “Not Done”
DOJ American Internment Camp Facilities
I read;
The best known facilities were the Assembly Centres run by the Western Civilian Control Administration (WCCA), and the Relocation Centres run by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), which are generally (but unofficially) referred to as “internment camps.” The Department of Justice (DOJ) operated camps officially called Internment Camps, which were used to detain those suspected of actual crimes or “enemy sympathies.”
Wiki also says;
“Most historians now use the term internment camp for several reasons. Many definitions of internment refer to detention of “enemy aliens” or “prisoners of war”; while the Japanese-Americans were not prisoners of war, they were considered to be enemy aliens for several purposes, notably the draft, during the early stages of the war. Internment implies a sense of detention, which is not true of relocation, the official term used during World War II. While the term concentration camp was used by some government officials at the time, it is inappropriate due to its highly negative association with the Nazi concentration camps.
Denial! Denial! Denial! The Done thing!
Exactly. The bit about ‘they were considered to be enemy aliens’ is crucial, because of course that was absurd: they were all ‘considered to be’ enemy aliens even though most of them were citizens, many were second, third, fourth generation, many were a mainstay of California agriculture, etc etc etc. ‘Considering’ a whole arbitrary group of people ‘enemy aliens’ without further examination on no real grounds whatever could be seen as one of the central besetting human vices.
People gave very distorted justifications for the policy, too. I read about this just recently (fairly recently), in two books I happened to read part of at the same time…I think a book about the Supreme Court and one about the Roosevelts (F and E) during the war. Did I comment on it here? I think so…
Now I’ll have to look it up.
Found it. Fortunately I had mentioned it to my co-author, so it was easy to find it via archived email. It wasn’t all that recently: January. It’s from A People’s History of the Supreme Court by Peter Irons:
“The government’s brief in Hirabayashi v US asserted that ‘an unknown number of the Japanese may lack to some extent a feeling of loyalty toward the United States’ because of resentment against legal discrimination.”
So: we discriminate against them via the law; some of them resent this; therefore we must lock all of them up and we are legally entitled to do so.
The court agreed, too.
Remarkable.
See: “Japanese American internment
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”
“[P]resident Franklin Roosevelt Executive Order 9066.”
“Department of Justice and U.S. Army Facilities”
See also; There care interesting facts and related books therein.
Yeah. That was one of FDR’s least defensible and least admirable acts. He brushed aside criticism and objections.
Once a Jap – always a Jap. Yes, the Law is an ass.
And…”the Guardian thinks men matter more”?
Bugger it – I am in stitches – aching with laughter.
OB: “Yeah…in the US during the war of course it was Not Done to call the concentration camps for Japanese citizens ‘concentration camps’ even though they precisely fit the meaning.”
Hmmm. Maybe, maybe not. The first US Japanese citizens concentration camp I could find via Google was Manzanar – 146 deaths out of 11 000 according to Wiki, i.e. less than 1.5%. I haven’t checked the other camps.
By comparison, also via Wiki:
Boer War camps – 25%, but sharply declined as conditions were improved.
Buchenwald – 24%, probably much worse at the end I suspect.
For further comparison these death rates from my general knowledge – I no longer recall the sources and haven’t checked:
WWII Allied POWs in Japanese hands: 27%
WWII Western POWs in German hands: 4%
WWII Russian POWs in German hands: 60%+
Without in any way at all defending the internment of Japanese civilians in the USA or the continuing zeal governments have for euphemism, I can see how the label ‘concentration camp’ could be misleading even while fitting a precise meaning.
I would defend F.D.R. bearing in mind at the time he made this dicision the outcome of the war was still in the balance!I dont suppose he had the luxury to feel sentimental for the Japanese Americans.
The reason I think the Guardian is a lost cause is there was a time that regardless of who was ofended the paper would stand up for the rights of women in the true liberal tradition! that can no longer be said they will now shade the truth rather than ofend a minority group.They are so wedded to the principal that all cultures are entitled to equal respect that I just dont see how they could ever change.
Why do they bother ? It hasn’t stopped RageBoy reappearing this weekend.
(He then proceeded so ineptly as to be threat-listed not so much as “critical” as “blackly comical”.)
“the Rwanda genocide should not be called a backyard barbecue gone wrong”
Rwanda official website says:
One million lives were lost in only one hundred days. It is the fastest and most vicious genocide yet recorded in human history.
Wiki also says;
The US government was reluctant to involve itself in the “local conflict” in Rwanda, and refused to even refer to it as “Genocide”, a decision which President Bill Clinton later came to regret in a Frontline television interview in which he states that he believes if he had sent 5,000 US peacekeepers, more than 500,000 lives could have been saved.
Kiwi Dave,
Sure, but I don’t think the death statistics are the point; concentration camps are not death camps, and they’re not necessarily (not by definition) places where conditions are deliberately life-threatening. The Japanese ‘resettlement’ camps simply were literally concentration camps. I think it’s a lot more misleading to refuse to call them that than it is to call them that.
Richard – it wasn’t a question of ‘feel[ing] sentimental for the Japanese Americans’ – that’s the kind of thing I want you to slow down and think before saying; i.e. it’s the kind of thing I want you to stop saying. Refusing to arrest and remove to isolated camps an entire nationality, stealing all their property except one suitcase worth of goods in the process, is not ‘sentimentality,’ and allowing it is a gross violation of about ten human rights.
I’m so tempted to tell you to take a vacation from commenting. I’m really sick of that kind of crap. If I wanted talk radio comments I’d run a different kind of website.
“My Lai should not be called a prank”
That is so correct.
My Lai Massacre was a massacre of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children, by U.S. soldiers on March 16, 1968, in the hamlet of My Lai, during the Vietnam War.
It prompted widespread outrage around the world and reduced American support at home for the war in Vietnam.
1. Butchery occurred in Egypt.
2. Butchery occurred in Auschwitz.
3. Butchery occurred in Rwanda.
4. Butchery occurred in My Lai.
And all were/are dressed up by the media under the guise of euphemisms.
Have just been reading about honour killings in B&W news section.
I was struck in a disturbing way by the following mind-set of the people. It beggars belief.
“They are Arabs, that’s their culture and tradition” “They kill their women”
“They kill their women” “They kill their women”. Just repeating it. It sounds like a nursery rhyme.
One wonders why they go to the bother of butchering [some] of the women when killing is for some women the end product?
This also caught my attention
“Whose turn? Mine or yours?” Sahar said. “We Abu Ghanem women are all waiting to die,” she said”.
It instantly reminded me of:
Eeny meeny miney mo. Catch the Tigger by the toe”…Or should it be in this case. Catch the arab woman – and stone.
Inimicus animo “enemy of the spirit”.
I didnt say F.D.R. actions were not a gross violation of human rights O.B.the only point I was trying to make is that it is very easy for us who know the out come of w.w.2 to judge F.D.R.s actions using todays morality and 20 20 hindsight,you also need to realise that this discision was made for many reasons(none of them seem all that valid today)one of them was that it was thought that the American people would have turned on them if losses started mounting.I would not have liked to be a Japanese american during the island hoping campain living on the west coast,I also think that we need to remember that Peal Harbour would have been quite fresh in F.D.R.s mind so can we not forgive him for a degree of irationality regarding the Japanese Americans? I dont think it is even posible for us to put ourselves in F.D.R.s shoes so I for one would give him the benefit of the doubt.Maybe I put things badly sometimes but do remember that I dont have the same gift with the written word that you do,I left school at 15 after having played hooky from English class for the previous year,something I regret to this day.
Also remember if I do choose words badly that I have to try to write with words that I can spell or at least make look enough like the word to be understood and that severely limits my choice.
Widespread Male Circumcision is an interesting essay by Robert Darby.
But, but but?
Comment by: Ampersand
“…[I]’m sure that the profit motive is important to circumcision — did you know that hospitals make huge profits selling cut-off foreskins?…[T]wo things annoyed me about Darby’s essay. First off, the seemingly obligatory passage, in any essay objecting to male circumcision, comparing the practice to female circumcision:
SEE: Why can’t the United States stop circumcising boys
Richard, I didn’t say you did say what you say you didn’t say, but you did say ‘I dont suppose he had the luxury to feel sentimental for the Japanese Americans’ and that’s what I took (and take) exception to. I’m aware of the circumstances surrounding FDR’s decision, thanks, and it’s also the case that he’s something of a hero of mine in spite of his rather glaring faults. The fact remains that all Japanese citizens on the West coast were forcibly sent to concentration camps for the duration of the war and that there was no genuine justification for such a policy.
Enough with the leaving school story. We know, you’ve told us; enough already. Just try what I suggested (or rather commanded): slow down and think before posting. Don’t talk about ‘sentimentality’ about Japanese Americans – that’s just bullying garbage.
Well at least we share a hero,F.D.R. is a giant hero of mine hardly supprising there would probably not be a free nation for me to grow up in if not for him,I am probably to inclined to forgive his faults for that reason,my only purpose for telling the school story again was because you always jump on me for poor choices of words and all I was saying is it is not deliberate. It would have been far better if I had said given the historical context I would defend F.D.R.s actions.
I wonder what the hyena would have to say about all of this. I do not think that somehow for ‘her’ it would be a laughing matter.
No, I am not going to say – (‘_’)??
Oops!
Richard, come on – be fair. I don’t always jump on you, and I also don’t believe for an instant that your leaving school at 15 has anything whatsoever to do with saying ‘I dont suppose he had the luxury to feel sentimental for the Japanese Americans.’ I’m sorry but you just can’t treat that as a mere trivial matter of vocabulary and then use your education as an escape clause. You can’t because that’s all this is – what we’re doing here – words. I’m not demanding that you pass any grammar or spelling tests, but you do have to think about what words you use. That’s why I tell you to slow down and think before posting. Dismissing a gross, wholesale, widely acknowledged, officially apologized for (by Ronald Reagan no less!) violation of human rights as not having ‘the luxury to feel sentimental for the Japanese Americans’ is a way of making a very strong moral claim. You cannot pretend that’s trivial or that I’m being too fussy. I do not want defenders of wholesale human rights violations posting here, at least not unless they can offer a very strong and well-constructed argument.
So my injunction remains. Slow down and think before you post. I’ll be deleting comments of that kind in the future.
O.B. I dont think the fact that R.R. apologised for this event means that it cant be defended in its historical context,this is one of those things that look worse as time passes and we learn more,F.D.R. made this decision on advice from American inteligence that now looks ludicrous,the Japanese could not have iinvaded the west coast it would have been imposible logisticly for them but A.I. was telling F.D.R. that it was iminent,they were also telling him that imformation about Pearl harbour had been provide by Japanese people living in Hawii,there may have been some truth to that, but they also convinced F.D.R. that the mainland Japanese Americans would present a simlar danger.Of course this now looks like racist paranoia but probably would not have seemed that to F.D.R. at the time,the last point I would make is that F.D.R.literaly held the future in his hands, it was an awesome responsibility and on this matter he ered on the side of caution(probably been better if he took a chance)so I for one do not judge him harshly.Do try to borrow Jerys lap top I will miss B.W. if you dont and say hi to Jery.
At least you will get a well earned rest from me.
I’ll tell Jerry hi, Richard – probably right after I tell him to do his share of the washing up. We’re all sharing a guesthouse next to the Center for Inquiry. Julian and I clean up the kitchen, Jerry messes it up again – that’s the division of labour.
Heh.
(There’s more to the WWII Japanese internment matter, but I don’t have time to go into it right now.)
Jery wash up? good luck!
I am a bit confused here. I thought this was about female genital mutilatation not being called it’s correct name in the press, not about war terms. The writer seemed to me to be using these ideas to put over her own. However she seems to got stuck with a lot of readers who either don’t know what she is on about or those who just wanted to put their own point about a totally different subjects.
Working as a nurse I have seen women who have had this terrible thing done to them, they have constant problems with infections from urinating and mestruating (having periods) as well as painful sex, they also need opening when delivering a baby. Something should be done to stop it, one way may be for the press to report correctly about what is done to these women and why and to use it’s correct name.