#245 Misnamer

You see a lot of people throwing around the term misnomer to mean an erroneous description. Funny, I always thought it was using a wrong name. It’s a misnomer to calling Broke Back Mountain a movie about homosexuals, it’s a movie about the universality of love, they say. Actually, it would be more accurate to say: it’s a misnomer to say Brokeback is a “homosexual” movie it should be called a “love” movie. Using the “abouts” confuses that whole naming thing. I think calling a misnomer a description is a misnomer. It’s mis-naming something. Like, say, the term Indian giver.
I’ve always wondered a little at the inherent racism in this term. The act of “Indian giving” is supposedly the act of taking something back after you’ve given it. An act some might confuse with the whole sharing thing. If we, say, share a peace pipe, we pass it back and forth, each of us partaking in the same devil weed. Perhaps the lighter skinned one of us gets addicted to it and passes it along to our European friends, eventually destroying 8% of our population through lung cancer, emphysema, elevated triglycerides, and heart disease. At some point, healthy Euros catch on that they’re sucking in secondhand devil weed fumes and dying too, and banish their smoking compadres to where? To the reservations, of course, where they can smoke to their failing hearts content while they gamble with chips and their life in the great tobacco lottery of health. It doesn’t seem to me that the Indians are taking that back. It is, of course, ironic that even though we gave then alcohol and it devastated their population, they were able to return the favor with a more insidious addiction, one whose process of dealing death was all the more painful. And now, in a more direct version of the process, certain Indian reservations—excuse me, misnomer—Native American sovereign nations are producing their own tobacco products for sale and consumption, thereby avoiding the stiff federal tax on tobacco products, causing state and federal revenues to decline and encouraging white folks discouraged by the high cost of cigarette to smoke more and more cheaply. So the Native guerilla warriors deal out a double whammy, more cancer-ridden conquering Euros and a poorer great white father government as well.
Even calling Indians “Indians” is a misnomer. And what arrogance to name an entire group of people after a bonehead error. Columbus didn’t discover the Indies, and these folks weren’t Indians. Even Columbus eventually knew he’d made a mistake. But using the term “Indian giver” smacks of bigotry. I mean, just look at all the land treaties the conquering Euros hammered out with the indigenous tribes. Now who was it that actually did the giving and the taking back?
America, ya gotta love it.