Language and Racism

* “ ‘Language Keeps Racism Alive’ ” (Voices, Nov. 28) is enough to make one weep. How can a college professor be so completely bereft of common sense? A dictionary is a reflection of language usage, not a guide to morality. It’s people that use, misuse and change the meanings of words.

To Prof. Kwaku Person-Lynn’s “amazement,” black can be defined as “ ‘forbidding, menacing, threatening, evil, wicked’ and more. This could explain why many people may have negative attitudes toward black people.” Oh, please. Is the Aryan Nation going to appeal on the grounds that “the dictionary made us do it”?

To blame the dictionary is to blame the messenger. But the professor doesn’t stop there. “Our scrutiny must be constant,” he says. Are we going to censor dictionaries? Was my back turned when Sen. Jesse Helms changed his name to Kwaku Person-Lynn?

CHARLES G. BRAGG JR.

Pacific Palisades

* One could, if he chose to do so, leaf through dictionaries and compile a far longer list than Person-Lynn’s of words for which archaic and demeaning synonyms are given. Of the synonyms offered for “ethnic,” for instance, the professor has been careful to omit any that convey its generally accepted meaning.

This old, white man has never learned, was never taught, “from his cradle to his (near) grave” to use or to read the word “ethnic” to mean “heathen,” “uncivilized” or “irreligious,” its Greek root notwithstanding. Nor was he offended to learn that a Chinese synonym for “foreigner” is “barbarian.” This old man is himself part of an “ethnic” group, however ill-defined that group may be.

Dictionaries, like the Christian Bible, are often put to uses obtuse and unworthy. Each of us has sorrow and grievance enough without manufacturing more. Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty said that words meant what he said they meant. No dictionary can correct that way of thinking.

FRED SCIFERS

Downey