In my department, we outsource a lot of work to India, so for the past three or four years I’ve been in daily contact with colleagues in Mumbai. It was only a chance remark, months after the Mumbai outsourcing project began, that made me realise that Mumbai was the same as Bombay.
Obviously I had missed the latest round of new spellings for traditional foreign placenames, adding Mumbai to Beijing, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and many others.
I find the whole business of names and name-changes fascinating. Names have so many layers. A name has the primary function of referring to something, with (one hopes) little ambiguity in its usual contexts. But if that were the only function, we could just refer to everyone and everything with randomly-chosen made-up words or even serial numbers. But names have meanings as well – literal meanings, associations, historical usages, and all those reasons why people want to change them, or not change them. A name can strongly influence people’s perception of the social, historical and political situation.
The popular historian Norman Davies uses this fact in a delightful and unsettling way in his history of Britain and Ireland, The Islands. In the text, proper names are given in the form used at the time and place in question (sometimes in modernised spellings). So, for instance, the name “England” is not used at all until we get to the period when people started calling it that, and we are not allowed to forget that the Norman Conquest was headed by Guillaume le Conquérant, not an Englishman named William.
Foreign names raise their own interesting questions. Is it more “authentic” or sensitive to change a traditional name in English for a foreign place (Bombay, Peking), to another spelling? Deutschlanders never seems to go around asking that French and English speakers stop calling their country Allemand and Germany. And when is it appropriate to translate the meaning of a foreign name rather than using it untranslated?
I find this particularly interesting with respect to….well, the people that wish to be called Muslims and the religion which they wish to be called Islam. “Muslim” and “Islam” have no meaning in English aside from being sound-symbols referring to those particular people and religion, but they do have meaning in Arabic. I am no expert on Arabic and the shades of meaning are sometimes debated, but it seems fairly clear that “Muslim” means one who submits or surrenders, with the implication that this submission is to God; the same concept of submission to God appears to be the fundamental meaning of “Islam”, a word from the same root as Muslim.
I don’t really approve of the use of these words. I don’t believe that followers of that religion are actually submitted to God, so I dislike being asked to validate that claim in my speech and writing, even in a language I don’t speak. I much prefer the terms that were still commonly used when I was in school, “Mohammedan” and “Mohammedanism”. Supposedly some Mohammedans find these terms insulting, claiming that it means that English-speakers are implying that they worship Mohammed, but firstly it is clear that English usage does not imply this (as evidenced by our use of “Lutheran”, “Calvinist”, “Amish”, “Mennonite”, and so forth) and secondly, the term “Mohammedanism” accurately reflects my belief that they have indeed privileged Mohammed’s teachings over and against those of God. I’m not always consistent with my usage – “Muslim” and “Islam” have completely taken over in popular usage so if I’m not thinking about it, I often use them. And I do sometimes bend to PC in this respect (e.g. at work)!
And this brings me to what started me on this train of thought: what about names for the various Christian communions, specifically my own? My personal preference is “the Church”, followed close on by “the Catholic Church”, but I’m not overly fussy. Some other Christians prefer not to call us by those terms and use other terms which some Catholics find insulting, but I don’t. Here’s why: those who refuse to call us “the Church” or “the Catholic Church” are usually doing so because they correctly believe that those terms reflect a claim to be the universal church in a way that other Christian communions aren’t. I disagree, obviously, but I think it’s wrong to insist that other people validate my truth-claims in their speech and writing if they don’t actually assent to them.
When it comes to other terms, I’m still not too fussy. I consider first the original purpose of a name: does it actually serve to identify the entity in question, taken in context? If someone is talking about “Romanism”, “Papistry” and so forth, the answer is usually “yes”. There may be people on the web ranting about the Whore of Babylon who don’t mean the Catholic Church, but I’ve never run across them, so even that term meets this criterion.
Furthermore, I generally don’t mind the terms for the Church that are often taken to be perjorative. This is mainly because whatever the term is, it tells me something about the views of the person using the term. The term then has meaning as a subjective description as well as a referent.
If everybody agreed to politely call us “the Roman Catholic Church”, that would tell me little. That’s generic and generally non-offensive (well, since the “Roman” addition is associated with those attempting to claim that certain “other branches” were exactly as Catholic, it doesn’t rank among my favourite terms, but it’ll do). Generic is fine in some contexts, but it’s mushy and bland. If on the other hand, someone starts on the Whore of Babylon, or the Papists, or Holy Mother Church for that matter, you know where you are with them.
I like that.
