The great squaw debate

     The word "squaw" is at the center of an imbecilic skirmish in the political-correctness wars.
      The American Indian Movement has launched a media campaign to eradicate the word as an American place name, to force local officials to rename locales such as California's Squaw Valley.
      Why? Because these Indian leaders claim the term "squaw" means "vagina," that it's racist, sexist and politically incorrect. These activists have already cowed authorities in Minnesota into renaming places in that state with the word "squaw" attached to them. They want other states to purge their maps.
      One problem: "Squaw" doesn't mean "vagina." It means "young woman" or "wife."
      The Oxford English Dictionary -- the bible of English usage -- documents the first appearance of "squaw," meaning "woman" or "wife," in Pilgrim writings in 1634. It was a Narragansett Indian word incorporated into English by early American settlers and used throughout the centuries -- always to mean "young woman" or "wife." It is an English word whose derivation is 17th century Narragansett, in the same way that "lion" is an English word taken from Old French.
      Now, we might have consulted the Narragansett dictionary for the more ancient meaning of the word, but the Narragansett were, like all North American tribes, a Stone Age people with no written language. Besides, the Narragansett language is long extinct.
      Linguists such as Richard Rhodes of the University of California at Berkeley -- an expert in the Algonquian language group, which included Narragansett -- confirms the term means "Indian woman" or "wife," not female genitalia. But the folks pushing for "squaw" eradication -- they tend to be from the Dakota tribes -- claim some special knowledge of the word's meaning. How so? Just because they are Indians does not make them etymologists, in the same sense that being born Italian doesn't make one fluent in Latin.
      The great "squaw" debate is just the grievance industry working overtime and, as usual, producing nothing of value.