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Jabberwocky

         Charles Dodgson, know by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet and mathematician.  His most notable works are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. He also wrote one of the greatest nonsensical poems written in English.

         Lewis Carroll’s treasured poem entitled Jabberwocky, gave us new words like “galumphing” and “chortle” and introduced us to a menacing  beast.  Carroll writes: “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bit, the claws that catch!”  Today, there is a most fearsome Jabberwock prowling through science.

         A group of researchers in the U.S. and Canada have put together something they call the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) Language Project.  Its purpose is to crowdsource terminology that might be deemed “harmful” or “offensive” in biology.  For example, “male” and “female” should  be replaced with “sperm-producing” and  “egg-producing”.  “Mother” and “father” should instead be “parent”, “egg donor” or “sperm donor”.  To do otherwise, according to the Project, assumes that sex is “binary” and “heterosexuality” is the “norm”.

         The University of British Columbia put out a press release and quoted Dr. Kaitlyn Gaynor, an author on the project. She stated:

“The project started as a Twitter conversation among a few people discussing potentially harmful terminology…We reached out to different networks in ecology and evolution that were focused on increasing inclusion and equity in the field to rally support for one very specific action—revising terminology that might be harmful to certain people, particularly those from groups historically and currently excluded from science.”

         Other project members noted, “Much of western science is rooted in colonialism, white supremacy and patriarchy, and these power structures continue to permeate our scientific culture.” Now, you see where this is going - and the ideology from which it springs – like the deadly Jabberwock.

         Researchers listed some of what they called “harmful” terms, explain why they’re bad and came up with suggested alternatives.  For example, the word “virgin”, is “a social construct that reinforces Heteropatriarchal norms”.  The word should be replaced with “unmated”.  The word “rape” is bad because it “equates rape with a reproductive strategy rather than a violent and traumatic act, which can lead to dangerous misconceptions that this is a natural behavior, and the use of the term forces survivors to be confronted with it which is traumatic”.  It should be replaced with “forced copulation”. “Primitive” and “advanced” are problematic because they believe the words are used “derogatorily towards humans and also scientifically inaccurate, they say, as it implies an evolutionary hierarchy.” They suggest “ancestral” or “derived” instead.

         In Carroll’s poem, the hero of the story is a little boy who sets out to slay a dangerous enemy.  He does just that by cutting off the monster’s head – a wonderful word picture of good winning over evil. Wokeness is the new Jabberwock of our day, and it must be defeated and it soon will be. When it is, we shall all chortle and once again go galumphing back to common sense and civility.

         Those are my thoughts.  I’m Janet Parshall.