A Modest Reclassification
In renaming the chair, the committee left no one able to sit down
The petition about the pavement having been deferred indefinitely, the Committee turned, with visible relief, to a matter it felt equipped to solve: the word chair.
Councillor Adeyemi opened by noting that chair was a term of unexamined privilege, having presumed for centuries to describe an object without once consulting it.
She proposed, therefore, that we adopt the more accurate and less , seating-support , effective forthwith.
The Treasurer objected that implied machinery, and moved that we prefer the humbler seating-facilitation resource.
A third faction, led by Prewitt, held that resource commodified the dignity of rest, and demanded restorative horizontal-tendency enabler.
It was at this point that the meeting, in the words of the minutes I was even then composing, began to acquire a certain warmth.
I record, for the sake of history, that no one present could now sit down, every available chair having been rhetorically dissolved into a contested abstraction.
Councillor Adeyemi reminded us that language shapes thought, and that to reform a word was to reform the world it had been quietly oppressing.
Prewitt countered that if language shaped thought, then renaming a thing we could not fix was merely a way of feeling we had.
This observation, being both true and unwelcome, was ruled out of order and expunged from the record, though I have preserved it here.
A subcommittee was struck to determine whether the object formerly known as chair had feelings that its name might injure.
The subcommittee reported, after due deliberation, that the question lay outside its , and recommended the formation of a further subcommittee to define .
By now the word we had gathered to correct had been replaced four times, each replacement more careful and less usable than the last.
The Chair observed that we had made the language more just, and, in the same motion, entirely unspeakable.
Councillor Adeyemi, sensing victory, moved that all previous minutes be amended to the offending word wherever it appeared.
I pointed out, in my capacity as of the record, that this would render forty years of proceedings a sequence of tactful blanks.
She replied that a blank was preferable to a slur, and that history, properly cleansed, need not have happened at all.
It occurred to me that the is a treadmill: each polite new word grows impolite by association, and must itself be replaced, forever.
We had, in a single afternoon, chased the meaning out of a chair and watched it flee into the next word, and the next.
The Treasurer asked, , what we were now to call the things we were standing beside, unable to sit.
No one answered, because to answer would have required a noun, and all the nouns were, at that moment, in committee.
Prewitt proposed that we simply say the thing, and point, thereby retiring language altogether in the interest of accuracy.
This motion, being the only practical suggestion offered all day, was defeated overwhelmingly.
The Chair adjourned proceedings by inviting us to resume our seats, and then, catching himself, apologised for the term.
We filed out standing very upright, as though sitting had become a confession none of us wished to make.
In the margin I wrote that a chair by any other name would hold you up exactly as well, and that this, precisely, was the trouble.
For the Committee had discovered its true : not to change the world, which resists, but to rename it, which does not.