Trego's Mountain Ear

I ran across this chart of words people either will or will not use in a substack article by the Liberal Patriot – who took the graph from a study done by the New York Times.  It’s worth examining, and it may tell me something about my perspectives – not necessarily my biases.

Down on the list is powwow.  I’m one of the 34% who use this word . . . and every Native (American Indian) I know uses the word too.  There are some expansions on it in the Native population.  As a gerund – going powwowing usually means going to a powwow to dance or drum.  As a descriptor – the powwow circuit means attending multiple powwows. 

On the other hand, while 73% of the respondents are comfortable referencing the third world, I’m not.  The first world is still with us – what we call the western world – but the second world was dominated by the USSR, and that’s been gone since just after Christmas in 1991.  It’s hard to have a third world when you don’t have a second world anymore.

I think the words we use – at least those identified in this study – show a language split based on ideology.  To me, illegal alien is a legitimate descriptor.  When I was in the southwest, I might have used the same Spanish term my neighbors did –mojado.  The word translates to wet – I’m pretty sure the implication was wetback.  None of the folks who used the term mojado would have accepted the term Latinx.