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Colorado has so far escaped the crusade to eliminate "squaw" from the landscape, although somebody tried to get it going a few years ago by complaining about Squaw Pass near Idaho Springs.
My own county has a Squaw Creek; Zebulon Pike camped near its mouth on Christmas Day, 1806. When there was some talk about renaming it a few years ago, I suggested we go the full route, something like "Native American Womyn Cusec-Challenged Watercourse."
A few years ago, Minnesota ordered its counties to replace squaw names. One county proposed "Politically Correct Creek" and "Politically Correct Bay," which the state rejected. The last I read, they were still at an impasse.
According to the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary, "squaw" entered written English language in 1634. It came from the Narragansett, a Massachusetts tribe, and just meant "woman." Other Algonquian languages, like Cheyenne, Blackfoot, and Arapaho, have similar terms. There is no scholarly evidence that it ever meant "vagina" in those languages.
So this whole "Let's eliminate the offensive word from our maps" is based on a false premise. And even if "squaw" were so derived, so what?
Today we use the word "quaint" to mean charming in an old-fashioned way, as in "a quaint country inn," but back in Geoffrey Chaucer's day, roughly six centuries ago, it was spelled "queynte," and had two meanings -- one akin to its modern definition, and another referring to the vagina, as in "he caught her by the queynte" in the raunchy "Miller's Tale."
And what could be a more wholesome word than "nature," one that appears often in these environs?
But in 1622, it also had another meaning, the "female pudendum," as the OED politely puts it, with a citation referring to a "great lady" who, to preserve her chastity, had "her nature stytched up." Does every "nature preserve" or "natural area" now need a new name, lest someone find an excuse to be offended?
I'll grant that a lot of Squaw Creeks and the like should be renamed, just because there are so many of them. The same could be said of all those Dry Creeks and Bald Mountains -- let's apply some creativity and imagination when appropriate. My county has some delights like "Dead Goat Gulch" and some banalities that could use better names, such as the "Middle Fork of the South Arkansas River."
But where will sanitizing stop? Do the Grand Tetons need a new name? And what happens when the purifiers discover that right next to U.S. 40, on the road from Kremmling to Steamboat Springs, there rises a Granny's Nipple? Or that the local name for an eminence at the Salt Works Ranch in South Park is Butt Crack Butte?
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