Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Just When ?


I thought that I had seen it all … the nadir of wokeness. However, just when I had thought that I had seen it all, another “woke” individual attempted to surpass the previous nadir of “wokeness,” by recommending something even more preposterous, outlandish, and … how can I say this in a family-type blog … stupid! 

I thought that there was no way to surpass the latest from an organization called ‘Bird Names for Birds,’ which recently announced that they were going to campaign to remove all eponymous names for birds. I thought, “I just learned the name of the majestic hawks that fly around in our canyon. They are Cooper hawks.” (FYI, the Cooper hawk was named in 1828 by Charles Lucien Bonaparte in honor of his friend and fellow ornithologist, William Cooper, who  studied zoology in Europe from 1821 to 1824, and afterwards travelled to Nova Scotia, Kentuckyand the Bahamas collecting specimens.)

Why change this eponymous name? 

There is an unsubstantiated rumor that these enlightened woke ornithologists somehow learned that William Cooper used a pejorative name for a native while he was in the Bahamas. For those of you unfamiliar with this word, “pejorative” means “having a disparaging, derogatory, or belittling effect.” 

He used a pejorative name? … Naughty, naughty, William Cooper. No eponymous bird name for you!”

Like I said, just when I thought I had heard it all, I read an article in my local Sunday paper that was taken from the New York Times. Apparently the name “gypsy moth” and “gypsy ant” are too pejorative, at least according to Ethel Brooks, who by the way is the chair of the department of woman’s gender and sexuality studies at Rutgers University.

From the NYT article, presumably when thinking about these “gypsy” renegade moths and ants, Brooks remembered thinking as a child, “That is how they see us. We eat things, and destroy things around us.” Was she really speaking on behalf of the insects? (Now right away my index finger was making a circumferential circular motion in the vicinity of my ear.)

“It’s hideous and it’s hurtful,” Brooks said, “but what can you do about it?” 

I’m sorry but who is being hurt here?  Who is being belittled? Is it the insects that are being hurt? Or is it the “gypsies” that are being disparaged? Or perhaps it is ‘Gypsy Rose Lee!’

Now that I think I am seeing the nadir of wokeness in the person of professor Ethel Brooks, I cringe, waiting until the next woke jerky entomologist considers the Black Widow spider, as this could be considered a “double pejorative” – both to blacks and to widows.

7/14/21

120 Replies to “Just When ?”

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