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When Official English became part of our state constitution seven years ago, our tight-fisted legislature failed to finish the job. Any civilized region with an official languages -- i.e., France and Iceland -- also has an academy of distinguished writers and scholars.
When there's a usage question, or a need for a new word, the academy finds a way to accommodate progress while preserving the purity of the Official Language.
The rest of the world might call the memory chips inside
computers RAM
(for Random-Access Memory,
which makes locutions like RAM Memory
as redundant
as Rio Grande River
), but the French Academy insists
that the chips be called memoire vive
by all who
fall under its jurisdiction.
Similarly, most of the world calls the ringing annoyance
a telephone,
telefono
or the like. But in
Iceland, the academy has decreed it a simi,
from an
old word for long thread.
To insure that everyone
can read old tales of Thor and Odin, they don't allow any
word in the modern language that wasn't also a word 1,000
years ago.
Besides providing wholesome pork-barrel employment for deserving scholars and writers, a Colorado Official English Academy could perform similar definitive services.
For instance, how does one spell the vernacular name of
Buena Vista? In my tenure at the local paper, I preferred
Buny,
but our correspondent there employed
Bewnie,
and the Pueblo Chieftain used
Beunie.
A ruling would be useful, and even more needed is an official word for a new group of people. Consider that High Country News and Colorado Business serve quite different audiences, and yet the most recent editions of both had articles about Californians migrating to the interior West, much as Oklahomans ventured toward the coast 60 years ago.
Then a simple word, Okie,
said it all. But we
don't have such a word now, much as we need one.
Californicators
conveys the concept, but it's
much too long. Californios
properly describes only
residents of the Golden State, not its exiles.
Venturans
has an appropriate exotic UFO
connotation, but it, like Simian
for Simi Valley
resident, covers only a fraction of the sprawl of Southern
California.
Airheads
has been proposed, but even if
California leads the world in their production, it
unfortunately holds no monopoly. I have used Nappie,
from New Age Puritan,
for people who fight
second-hand cigarette smoke while producing smog by the
ton, but it, too, lacks geographic precision.
The best term to date is Lala,
as in the An
idiot Lala just paid $55,000 for the shotgun house I was
renting, and now I've got to find a place to live, and you
can't afford anything since the Lalas started buying
everything up.
But should we continue to use Lala?
Or is it
somehow politically incorrect? Where's our academy when we
need it?
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