Please comment on what might be called a semantic-historical question:
Twice in the Feb. 17 Washington Post book review "So Close to Freedom:
A young slave woman on the run can see the future of America in living color," about James McBride's novel _Song Yet Sung_, reviewer David Anthony Durham refers not to a slave's owner but to a slave's "owner" -- that is, he uses quotation marks to distance himself from the language of the slavery era and thus, to some degree, from that era's grotesque, perverted logic. He does the same with the word _legitimate_ as a modifier for the phrase _slave catchers_.
This obviously connects with the practice of calling Sally Hemings, for example, not something like "Thomas Jefferson's slave" but something like "a woman enslaved at Monticello" to try to confer, however slightly and retrospectively, some dignity not just on Sally Hemings but on all those from whom dignity was stolen.
However, because facts are facts and because denotation is denotation, it's obviously easy to overdo this kind of semantic-historical carefulness. Some would sneer at it as political correctness or even call it precious, as in affectedly dainty.
Myself, I suspect that it will become increasingly important. To me it already seems important to avoid or write around casually repeated slave-era language like _rightful owner_ -- as if any human anywhere at any time owned another human rightfully (except in the eyes of laws that were grotesque and perverted).
But my knowledge here is thin. Can anyone please comment? Has anyone written about this?
And more importantly -- for the question bears on historic-preservation decisions -- what do you think the mainstream answer will be a century from now, when the language and logic of the slave era will presumably have receded that much farther into the past?
Thanks.
Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia
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