Pen-Elayne on the Web

Herstoire

Like plenty of other bloggers, I'm half-amused and half-disgusted that the cafeteria menus in the three House of Representatives office buildings have renamed "french fries" and "french toast", substituting the word "freedom" for "french" in each instance because someone's angry at France for daring to speak out against our war juggernaut. Those darn snail-eating chain-smoking peaceniks, harrumph! The thing that gets to me the most (aside, of course, from my continued incredulity at how easily many citizens can slide further and further into brain-dead jingoism so quickly just at the point when we ought to be evolving as a civilization) is that Thinking People understand that the word "French" in those foods has nothing to do with France. It's just an expression. They don't even call them "french fries" in France, they call them pommes frites or something. Changing words based on erroneous and ignorant assumptions in the first place just to score political points is to me the height of "PC" idiocy.

So Robin and I are talking about this last night, and he said that the same thing applies to feminists calling attention to the relative invisibility of women throughout history via doing a switcheroo with the word "history" itself by terming women's history "herstory." Now see, I've known for years that the "his" in "history" didn't refer to the male pronoun; the actual etymology of the word is that it's derived from the "Latin historia, from Greek, inquiry, history, from histOr, istOr knowing, learned; akin to Greek eidenai to know" (which of course immediately makes me think about Gus, the Michael Constantine know-it-all character from My Big Fat Greek Wedding/Life, who's always talking about Greek origins of words, but I digress). But I always considered "herstory" to be a play on the word the same way the lyrics to "Lullabye League/Lollipop Guild" from The Wizard of Oz are sung "From now on you'll be history, You'll be hissed, You'll be hissed, You'll be history." (Another brief digression - none of the Oz lyric websites I visited actually wrote them down this way! and not only that, a couple of the sites also downloaded unwanted programs on my computer for my trouble... Anyway, it's clear as day that the lyrics are "You'll be hissed" because the wordplay is repeated "You'll be a bust, be a bust, be a bust-- in the Hall of Fame!" and that's the point of the puns, that Dorothy being "hissed" and "a bust" are actually Good Things.) I mean, even Michael Jackson did a similar riff by naming one of his albums "HIStory." But Robin points out that many people don't perceive it as a pun or a spoof, they look at it exactly the same way as this "Freedom Toast" nonsense. Which perplexes me because the "Freedom" nonsense isn't a play on words at all.

Therefore, I figured I'd hold an informal opinion poll on this. Do you think "herstory" belongs in the same category as "Freedom Toast" or do you think it's just a cute (or annoying, depending on your views) pun? And why doesn't Wolf Blitzer ever have polls like this on his website?