Language changes over time
To modern eyes, the “Clippings from our past” article in last week’s Sun was both shocking and informative. Readers were warned in advance that in reprinting an 1891 account of a local crime, it would be presented to readers “warts and all.” And yes, “warts” was a very understated euphemism for what followed.
For younger readers, especially, it might be hard to believe that the account was, for the time, not surprising or outrageous: It reported that a Shelbyville man was arrested for assaulting a woman, jailed and later set upon by a vigilante mob and hung by the side of the road without so much as a trial–although it said “he confessed to his guilt.” So much for his “Constitutional rights.” The fact that he was, in accord with the terminology of the times, a “negro” was presumably a major factor in his treatment. After all, this was just a few decades after the Civil War, and over a century would pass before “a person of color” would become president of the United States. Even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, referred to “the negro” several times because it was still in common usage.
But I noticed something else in the story. While today we don’t use that term because it’s considered offensive, those living at the end of the 19th century had their own sensitivities when it came to words: It said the man, “after choking [the woman] into insensibility, committed a still greater outrage upon her.” Today, editors would just say he “raped” her, but back then it would have been considered ungentlemanly, improper and uncouth to use such a term. Even into the 1960s, female characters on TV shows were never said to be “pregnant.” They were “expecting,” or were “in a family way.” Using that other term got a little too close to explaining how she got that way.
Sensitivities and norms shift over time. So whenever we’re tempted to judge those in the past by the standards of the present, remember that those who lived back then would probably be outraged by our standards, too.
Jack Webb
Versailles