Just goes to show, if condemning use of certain words over and over and over – while threatening financial ruin, public humiliation, and physical threat to those who say them –you can successfully change the nation’s vocabulary in less than a hundred days.
A case in point is D.E.I., short for diversity, equity, and inclusion. The individual words and even the acronym are verboten in America now. President Donald Trump saw to that in the first week of his second presidency. Through a series of executive orders, diversity, equity, and inclusion were flushed into obscurity.
The war on words and ideas did not stop there. Just the other day, the president accused the Smithsonian Institution of focusing too much on “how bad slavery was” and not enough on the “brightness” of America.
In a social media tirade, Mr. Trump said, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been – Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”
“This Country cannot be WOKE,” he bombasted, “because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”
As the president toys with purging the Smithsonian of “woke” language, federal agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid altogether in spoken and written communication. Some no-no nomenclature includes: advocacy, feminism, Black, victim, stereotype, trauma and underserved. Phrases that have the feds clutching their pearls of wisdom are: affirming care, unconscious bias, cultural heritage, clean energy, mental health, Native American, and sense of belonging.
The work of the Smithsonian is not confined to Washington D.C. They also reach other urban and rural locations around the country. Murray State University has had the privilege of hosting more than one of Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street exhibitions. The one I remember most vividly is Journey Stories, which came to the Wrather Museum in 2012.
About four thousand visitors viewed the displays. Scores of school kids, inspired by the exhibit, wrote and recorded poems which were broadcast on WKMS-FM (a National Public Radio affiliate) to celebrate National Poetry Month that year.
One image in Journey Stories, an engraving of a line-up of male slaves being transported on foot, sparked comment from a middle schooler. The artwork, a primary document from the antebellum era, showed barely clothed African men yoked together with leg irons and iron neck braces.
Pointing to the picture, the child declared, “They didn’t wear those things around their necks, they just wore ones on their ankles.” As if leg irons were good, but neck irons not so much.
That day, the boy learned a new word: “Coffle.”
According to “The American Slave Coast” by Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette, coffle means, “the common way slaves were transported from slave breeding states on the Atlantic coast to the slave markets and plantations of the deeper South. Southern children grew up seeing coffles approach in a cloud of dust.”
Its origin leads to an Arabic word meaning caravan, harkening back to overland slave trade that trekked across the desert from sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East.
During the time of slavery in America, enslaved people were marched in coffles at a pace of twenty or twenty-five miles a day, sometimes for weeks and in all weather, to a point of sale.
“About a quarter of those trafficked southward were children between eight and fifteen, purchased away from their families,” The American Slave Coast description goes on.
An account by Charles Ball, who was forcibly taken from Maryland to South Carolina in 1805 stated, “The women were tied together with a rope…which was tied like a halter round the neck of each.” Men were collared in chains and “fitted by means of a padlock round each of our necks.”
“Women with babies in hand were in a particularly cruel situation,” Charles Ball recalled. “Babies weren’t worth much money and they slowed down the coffles,” he said. “William Wells Brown hired out a slave trader named Walker, who recalled seeing a baby given away on the road.”
In 1841, when Abraham Lincoln witnessed a chain of slaves he said, “The sight was a continued torment to me and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio or any other slave border.”
Today, coffle has faded from usage, although it retains precise historic accuracy and relevance. Recently, the deportees who, at the order of Mr. Trump, were sent to a notorious Salvadoran prison without due process were tethered in a coffle, even forced to bend from the waist as they shuffled to an uncertain fate.
Words and ideas shift in meaning and sometimes out of use. That’s a fact not fake news. Were comedian George Carlin alive today, he would have to expand his list of 7 dirty words to accommodate the new American lexicon that strives only to speak of the country’s positive achievements, as if admitting anything less was inherently bad.
George Carlin has a few words he might have used to describe such repression of the truth. I call it poppycock!
Between 1989 and 2023, Constance Alexander’s column Main Street was recognized for excellence five times by Kentucky Press Association and her writing for the media was recognized with a Governor’s Award in the Arts. Left on Main is an occasional column by the award-winning columnist, poet and playwright in Murray.
Constance is also a founding member of The Sentinel’s Board of Directors.
