Scapegroup: How Many Wisians Does It Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?
TWO years ago this March, on the feast day of Saint David, the patron saint of Wales, a lawyer named Rees Lloyd, whose professional distinctions include service as the general counsel of the Twin Siôn Cati Welsh-American Legal Defense, Education, and Development Fund, filed a lawsuit in California Superior Court against a half dozen prominent newspapers, magazines, and television stations. The plaintiffs were upset by the use in these media of terminology that constituted, in their view, a slur on the Welsh people. They sought an injunction and a declaratory judgment against the publication or broadcasting of such terminology.
Not long ago I received a note from Rees Lloyd (“a.k.a. Rhys Llwyed”), with whom, out of curiosity about the lawsuit, I had been in occasional correspondence. He acknowledged with regret that the final disposition of the case had not been in the plaintiffs’ favor. As Judge John H. Leahy wrote in his opinion. “The remedies sought in this complaint are injunction and declaratory relief. Under the facts of this case, both would amount to a prior restraint on speech and would bump squarely up against the First Amendment. The First Amendment would win,” Lloyd has vowed to appeal the decision.
I must confess that until hearing about this lawsuit I had not really thought of the Welsh, or of Welsh-Americans, as being on the world’s ever-expanding roster of aggrieved parties. Given how touchy people and groups can be these days, I probably should have known better. No one, seemingly, is exempt. In 1993, for example, the New York Zoological Society decided to change its name to the Wildlife Conservation Society, believing that the word “zoo” had acquired a pejorative connotation—specifi-
cally, its connotation in the phrase “this place is a zoo.” It is only a matter of time, I expect, before the Wildlife Conservation Society begins lobbying, on the same grounds, to rename the species we currently know as snakes, asses, monkeys, and pigs.
The complaint of the Welsh-Americans is not so frivolous. Their concern is with the verb “to welsh" or “to welch,” as in “to welsh on a bet,” and with the related noun form “welsher,” as in this recent headline from The Dallas Morning News: “NOW’S TIME TO PIN SOCIAL SECURITY WELSHERS.” There is no firm linguistic evidence linking this sense of “welsh” to the name for the people of Wales (“origin unkn.,” says The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary), but given the frequency with which the name of the Welsh people has been added to other words in order to produce disparaging terminology, the chances that a link exists are high. A “welsh comb,” for example, is the thumb and forefingers. A “welsh cricket” is a louse. A “welsh pearl” is a fake pearl. All these terms were given to us by the English, who have long reserved for the Welsh a special place in the taxonomy of their esteem. In Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, the character Richard Rich perjures himself before a jury, and by so doing condemns Sir Thomas More to death. In return for his perjured testimony, More knows, Rich has been appointed AttorneyGeneral for Wales. “Why,
Richard,” More says to Rich, “it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... But for Wales!”
There is probably nothing the WelshAmerican Legal Defense, Education, and Development Fund can do about the fact that this line in the play always draws a laugh. But the lawsuit the group brought against the Los Angeles Times,Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, the Universal Press Syndicate, the National Broadcasting Company, and the television station KNBC, in Los Angeles, did seek to enjoin these prominent media outlets from further use of the words “welsh" and “welsher.”
Cullen Murphy
“By their publication of the ethnic slur ‘welsher,’” the plaintiffs contended, “these powerful media degrade and defame the Welsh and Welsh-Americans in a manner in which the same media modernly do not, and dare not, defame and slander any other race, ethnic group, nationality, or people.” I suspect that even Rees Lloyd knew that the lawsuit was constitutionally preposterous—the First Amendment protects far more offensive language. The aim, rather, was to shame the media into acquiescence. And in this the lawsuit partly succeeded: All but two of the defendants announced that their policy would henceforward be to prohibit the use of the pejorative terms. Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal, however, decided to dig in their heels and fight the suit. Now they have prevailed.
In thinking about this dispute, and others like it that have erupted down the years, I find myself wondering whether there is some way to pick a path through the muddle. No decent person wants to cause offense to other people. At the same time, few of us want to erode freedom of speech. Few of us, moreover, want to diminish the English language’s variety of expression. And yet the fact remains that the suppression of “welsh" is only a start. The Welsh, after all, are not alone in having their name unfairly brought into unflattering associations.
It occurs to me that we can perhaps have it all by summoning into existence, for rhetorical purposes, a fictitious ethnic group—a “scapegroup,” one might say— whose name could replace that of every other group mentioned in pejorative expressions and terminology and jokes. I even have a name for these fictitious people. A few years ago the American Jewish Committee sponsored a survey of American attitudes toward various ethnic groups, and they included a nonexistent group called Wisians as a way of helping to gauge the background attitude toward ethnic groups in general. Although most respondents had the sense not to venture an opinion about the Wisians, about 40 percent went ahead and replied. They gave the Wisians a low favorability rating—4.12 on a scale of 9.0, which placed them below Greeks, white South Africans, and Koreans, but above Guatemalans, Iranians, and Gypsies. “Wisian,” I think, is worth a try.
Here are some contexts in which to use the word: Wisian courage. Wisian treat. To Wis on a bet. Wisian giving. The Wisian disease (which might have been prevented by the use of Wisian letters). To get your Wisian up. To take Wisian leave. Wisian measles. A Wisian’s chance in hell. A Wisian standoff. Wisian roulette.
Why stop there? One encounters scores of behaviors and situations in daily life that cry out for a shorthand label. For instance, while standing in the express check-out line in the supermarket—“No more than 12 items, please,” the sign says —you notice that the person in front of you has interpreted “item” to mean “species of item,” and the cart is packed tight with, say, sixteen bottles of Coke (Item No. 1), a dozen containers of yogurt (Item No. 2), maybe eight bags of hot dog rolls, twenty cans of cat food, and so on. What we have here, I would propose, is an example of “Wisian calculus.” Or say you’re waiting to back into a parking space that another car is vacating, and a third car manages to sneak in first. Sorry, but you’ve been a victim of “Wisian protocol.” Have you ever found yourself bounced around among bureaucrats or customer-service representatives, fruitlessly seeking a person who is actually able to help you? This is a “Wisian steeplechase,” a procedure frequently brought to an end by a rude or testy remark on the part of your interlocutor (a “Wisian apology”). A “Wisian handshake” is. I would imagine, the kind that Getty extended to Pennzoil. A “Wisian chow bell" is a phone call from a salesman that comes during dinner.
As these few examples suggest, the opportunities for evoking this scapegroup are considerable. Until they get around to setting up a legal-defense fund, the Wisians may serve us very well indeed. ®
