Chiefly Illiterate in San Francisco Schools

Here’s what is especially amusing on this try at progressive sensitivity: While the English language has plenty of phrases that may be traced to the native peoples of the Americas, together with “chipmunk,” “barbecue” and “hurricane,” they don’t embrace “chief.” That phrase comes from Old French, and initially Latin, and the Oxford English Dictionary has citations again to 1297.

“Farewell great Chiefe,” says a personality in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” That’s dated to the early 1600s. Somehow we doubt he was fascinated with the Sioux. A biblical translation from

William Tyndale

in 1526 speaks of “the power of Belzebub, the chefe of the devyls.” The earliest examples are arduous to parse except you’re fluent in Beowulfese, however right here’s one we grasp from 1483, a decade earlier than Columbus sailed to the west: “She was made abbesse and chyef of al the monasterye.”

Don’t San Francisco colleges have English lecturers who can clarify this? And even when “chief” did have Native origins, so what? The English language is a melting pot, to make use of one other disfavored time period. Or perhaps actual progressives ought to forswear French-derived phrases solely. Decolonizing the language would positive stick it to William the Conqueror, the Norman who subjugated England in 1066.

The San Francisco college district was at pains to emphasise that the title adjustments “are in no way diminishing the indispensable contributions of our district central service leaders.” But a alternative time period, the Chronicle stories, “has not been determined.” Sounds like they want one other recall election.