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[T]he Tea Party claims to take its name from the Boston Tea Party, when a few colonialist men, disguised as Indians, threw British tea into Boston Harbor to protest British taxation without representation in the British Parliament.
No, we are not going to discuss how ridiculous the Tea Party is (from a purely linguistic stance, of course). Here, we are looking at the Indians. Yes, he said "Indians" and not "Native Americans." And does this matter? Yes. At least, it should. It certainly matters if you are Indian (from India), in which case you are wondering, what the hell does that even have to do with my country? Nothing. It was a mixup. We misused a word a few centuries back and it stuck. But to go back to Robert Beard's article, he ends it with the following comment,referring mostly to the Tea Party:
Playing with new words in any year does no damage to the English language. It is often another way humor is created with and from language -- and it goes away soon enough.
Misusing the words we have, however, does cause problems, because it leads to confusion in communication, if not offense to those who try to use language clearly, precisely and appealingly. And that's not a fun word game at all.
Despite his "misuse" of the word Indian, which now only seems to cause confusion in America when you are actually trying to refer to someone from India, because the term is so widespread, he responded to criticism with the following:
I am not concerned since I have mentioned before the futility of hoping that by changing the name of something, we will cure all problems associated with it.
Now, the problem here is not an inane attempt to 'fix' all things wrong with the nomenclature of the present-day minority of people who were once the only human inhabitants of this continent. It is the fact that Indian usually responds to a native of that country across the globe. You know, the one called India? Oh, wait, I said native. Mr. Misuse has already tackled that word:
The word native is based on the Latin past participle natus “born” and refers to where someone is born. A native American is someone who was born in America, nothing more.
However, I used it as a noun with a preposition, since it was a country. I would not hesistate to say a native New Yorker, referring to the city, but I do not say that I am a native American or that my friend’s are native Germans, Indians usually to not say that they are native Indians. They are just Indians. Let’s look at the etymology of this: Oh, wait, it comes from India, the country they were born in.
Now, I try my best to be relaxed and descriptive about the English language, focusing on what the kids actually are saying these days, as opposed to prescriptive and telling people what they should say. But do we really need to refer to the descendents of the indigenous tribes of the Americas as Indians? He argues against the word native based on etymology, but where is his etymological defence for the use of the word Indian? I mean, this is a word that came up when colonists thought they were in India, but then they figured out that they weren't. Yet we carried a word born from this misconception on throughout the generations and continue to use it today, even though we know that they were indeed not in India, they were in the New World. So, I don’t care if it is Native Americans or Aboriginals or New Worldians, I really think we could do without two groups of people on opposite ends of the planet with different cultures, continents, languages and customs, both being called Indians because one group comes from the country and we briefly thought for a couple weeks +500 years ago that the other did, too. And I am willing to give them the title as 'native', because it doesn't mean much to me. They can have it. I will swear off ever describing myself as a Native American, though I will not deny I am a native to America.
And if a boat full of confused German travelers crashes on the shore of New Zealand and they think they are in America, I should hope that 500 years from now, they are not referring to New Zealanders as Americans in Germany.
Because that is more than misuse. That is taking a word hostage and forcing it to do another word's job against it's will. That is word expropriation. And we already saw how terrible a misuse of the word can be:
Misusing the words we have, however, does cause problems, because it leads to confusion in communication, if not offense to those who try to use language clearly, precisely and appealingly. And that's not a fun word game at all.
