THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 19, 1996 TAG: 9610190006
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Kerry Dougherty
LENGTH: 66 lines
One of the better basketball players at the predominately white high school in my town in the 1960s was a black fellow named Jim Trammell. He had a sweeping hook shot and was one of the most graceful players we'd ever seen. What's more, he was a nice guy - smart and self-effacing.
When I first met Jim, his last name rhymed with ``camel.''
But during his senior year he learned his family had come to the U.S. from Martinique several generations before. On that French island, the family name was pronounced with the accent on the second syllable - Tra-MEL.
So Jim and his younger sisters changed the pronunciation of their last name to the Frenchified version. A mild brouhaha ensued. The basketball announcer cagily refused to adopt the new style or did so with such exaggeration that people in the stands began to laugh. And a number of students began to tease the Trammell kids for what they said was putting on airs.
After a few weeks of snide comments and deliberate mispronounciations, my social studies teacher devoted an entire period to lecturing the class about the importance of respecting names.
``Your name is yours alone,'' he told us. ``Simple respect for each other dictates that we should always pronounce names as others want them to be pronounced - not as we think they should. It's the least we can do for each other.''
It's been a long time since this teacher uttered those words, but I've never forgotten them.
I remembered those words when Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali and later, when Lew Alcindor changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And again, when Peking suddenly became Beijing.
Which brings me to the current presidential election and some Republicans' annoying habit of deliberately shortening the name of the Democratic Party.
Something about ``Democratic'' seems to stick in the craw of a few truly partisan Republicans. If you don't know what I'm talking about, tune into the Rush Limbaugh radio show any afternoon and listen to him rant and rave about the ``Democrat'' party, ``Democrat'' president and ``Democrat'' agendas.
Democrat. Rhymes with spat. And rat. You get the point.
Members of Bill Clinton's party are called Democrats - that's the way they want it. But when used as an adjective, the proper form of the word is always Democratic - as in, the Democratic candidate for president, the Democratic platform, the Democratic Congress.
Rush and company know that. And that's why they remind me of the mean-spirited basketball announcer in 1968 who took childish pleasure in insulting a nice guy and a great basketball player by messing with his name.
Just to be sure I was right on this one, I called the one place where I was pretty sure they'd know what they wanted to be called: the Democratic National Committee in Washington. The DNC communications office confirmed that they are part of the ``Democratic'' Party.
But this form of guerrilla grammarian warfare - misusing ``Democrat'' as an adjective - is not new and did not originate with Limbaugh. Joe McCarthy used the term in the 1950s when he was busy insulting and ostracizing everyone in the country who didn't agree with him. It was childish and churlish when McCarthy did it and it remains so today.
I think one of the reasons some Republicans engage in this kind of name-calling is because they know that ``Democratic'' has good connotations while Democrat may not.
But be that as it may, every political party, every city, every American has the right to be called by the correct name. Deliberately mangled monikers were something I thought I'd left behind in the intolerant halls of my high school. MEMO: Ms. Dougherty is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB