PETA wants workers to “bring home the bagels”

On December 4, the animal rights organization, PETA, asked anglophone speakers (in the US) to quit using anti-animal idioms cold turkey. In a Tweet they proselytized:

Words matter, and as our understanding of social justice evolves, our language evolves along with it. Here’s how to remove speciesism from your daily conversations.

and in a follow-up Tweet, they argued:

Just as it became unacceptable to use racist, homophobic, or ableist language, phrases that trivialize cruelty to animals will vanish as more people begin to appreciate animals for who they are and start ‘bringing home the bagels’ instead of the bacon.

It's tempting to think that this might be some sort of hoax but PETA is deadly serious. In fact, every Tweet posted by the organization has the tagline “Bringing home the bagels since 1980”.

Unfortunately for PETA, the new crusade was not received well by Twitter users, and many Tweets have since been issued mocking the animal protection society. The animal-friendly idioms that attracted most scorn seem to be: “feed two birds with one scone” and “bring home the bagels”. As a matter of fact, my spellchecker is underlying scone at this moment and telling me to spell it stone, but that would mean feeding two avians with a stone, which frankly sounds more horrific.

In any case, hold your horses before dismissing PETA's campaign to reform anti-animal idioms. There are examples of expressions and idioms that have fallen by the wayside, especially in the US, for fear of being misconstrued. For example, call a spade a spade, which Wikipedia says “The phrase predates the use of the word "spade" as an ethnic slur against African Americans, which was not recorded until 1928; however, in contemporary U.S. society, the idiom is often avoided due to potential confusion with the slur”. Another expression, used exclusively in the US–to the best of my knowledge–that is now heard less and less is cotton-picking as in “Just a cotton-pickin' minute” and “keep your cotton-picking hands off of me” with its clear historical references to black slaves and cotton plantations in the Southern United States.

My Questions

• Why are the idioms listed speciesist?

• How likely will we be seeing or hearing anti-animal idioms replaced with the ones suggested by PETA in the future? Why/why not?

• In the history of English have there been any similar campaigns to remove or replace sexist, racist or ableist proverbs/maxims or idioms, and how successful were they?

Solution 1:

Language itself is not racist, sexist, etc.

• However, people use particular works or expressions to express group affiliation. When there is a group that holds a minority position on race relations, proper treatment of animals, etc., some people may use particular "code words" to identify themselves as sympathetic to that group's views. So then you see offensive language getting used with intent to offend.
• Much more common is that majority norms about acceptable behavior change faster than the linguistic forms themselves; and so "offsensive" language gets used without the speaker realizing that they could be offending someone. Idiomatic expressions and placenames are especially slow to change.

In both cases, someone could get offended, but the differences is in the heart of the offender. Language is recognized as "offensive" once enough of the speech community has agreed that "we don't talk that way." You can have a medley of the two dynamics, too: a minority group (PETA in this example) wishes to consciously shift norms about what kinds of behavior is acceptable (hunting birds, etc.), and they start trying to push certain usages into the second box. But it's usually the other way around: first people agree that certain practices are wrong; then they adjust their language slowly afterwards.

To be fair to them, though, getting the majority group to start to reflect on what they are saying is often a first step at getting some recognition for minority rights. I think the tactic has been deployed successfully by feminists and other civil rights groups...and unsuccessfully by countless others.

I think it's an uphill battle indeed for PETA, since humans have been hunting and domesticating animals for over 10,000 years.We have even domesticated cats to kill rodents for us, enslaving the cat and multiplying the slaughter of pests. They may as well also start demanding celibacy across the board. You will know that PETA is successful if we stop using words like "husband", which, etymologically speaking, are doubly sexist and speciesist.

Solution 2:

A close analogy to an agenda-driven revision of a shared body of literature, either oral or written, would be the the revision of Christian hymnody to reflect contemporary language and the theological/pastoral concerns of a particular age.

Each denomination has taken a slightly different approach to hymnal publishing, but many are striving to remove what they think is racist and sexist language.

Young said The United Methodist Hymnal, published in 1988, includes ''Joy to the World'' but has changed the words.

The second stanza of the Christmas carol now reads ''Let all their songs employ'' instead of ''Let men their songs employ.''

''Have Thine Own Way, Lord'' now reads, ''Wash me just now, Lord, wash me just now'' rather than, ''Wash me just now, Lord, whiter than snow.''

Beyond removing language viewed as racist and sexist, the Methodist hymnal also notes hymns that could be offensive to the disabled.

For example, the stanza stating ''leap, ye lame, for joy'' in ''O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing'' has an asterisk by it and a footnote stating it may be omitted. — Adelle M. Banks, “Old Hymn, New Words May Not Mix,” Orlando Sentinel, 28 Apr. 1990.

Later in the article, Banks points out what a Presbyterian discovered about hymn texts:

''When we were looking at a text, we had sometimes as many as eight parallel texts of the same hymn from all of the other hymnals . . . so we could see that it was not outlandish to think about changing because everybody else had,'' said Jane Parker Huber, a member of the 18-member committee that worked on the Presbyterian book.

While a given generation of church-goers might think of hymn texts as unchanging and invest a given text with particular personal meaning, throughout history hymn texts have quite often been updated to conform to social or theological trends. Both Christian and Jewish theologians heavily influenced by the European enlightenment eschewed anthropomorphic or zoomorphic imagery of God and revised hymn texts accordingly. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, this met with limited success because worshippers had often memorized all the verses of a particular hymn and they would simply belt out the old version. Contemporary worshippers are much more book-dependent, so “smolder and sing,” as the chief editor of the Methodist hymnal noted, may be the only strategy available.

These efforts, beginning roughly a half century ago, have for the most part been successful as long as those responsible for the revision are sensitive to melody and text — and especially careful with the first verse.

PETA does not have the authority of denominational hymnal committees. Proverbs, maxims, and similar idiomatic sayings eventually die out because they become trite or the message they put forth is no longer valid; they are hardly susceptible even to the same gentle revision as hymn texts, but pretty much frozen. The proof of the pudding, for instance, preserves a meaning of proof as ‘test’no longer current, but the maxim has never been updated. A better strategy, then, would be to ask people to refrain from using them at all.

I can't recall the last time I used any of the expressions you listed. Perhaps PETA is just...uh...beating a dead horse.

Solution 3:

• "Why are the idioms listed speciesist?"

  All the examples on the left column describe some sort of violence or otherwise negative action on an animal. The right column removes those. Violence against bagels is a perfectly accepted act nowadays.

• "How likely will we be seeing or hearing anti-animal idioms being replaced with the ones suggested by PETA in the future? Why/why not?"

  Likelihood in the future about things like this is an extremely opinionated judgement. I can imagine "bring home the bagels" working because that's not an uncommon thing to actually do. In the US however, 'scones' aren't as commonly fed to birds. Some of these may work and some of them won't. We could attempt to assess each one but each one could be a distinct very opinionated discussion. 'Feed a fed horse' sounds good to me, but 'be the test tube' doesn't sound like anything (at the moment; of course when we first heard 'be the guinea pig' surely that was opaque at the moment out of context).

• "In the history of English have there been any similar campaigns to replace or remove racist or ableist proverbs or idioms, and how successful were they?"

  Explicit campaigns by government agencies or individual NGOs or commercial organization and specifically for racist or ableist proverbs? That's very specific, to ask for all those criteria. Surely there are some but I just can't think of any. 'Ms.' magazine popularized that (existing) term to avoid female marital status. But the NAACP has never renamed itself even though 'colored' has gone through the cycle of what it's called (by whites) to disparaging to old-fashioned to silly to who knows what now, but still acceptable in that institution's name.

  Beyond that, the euphemism treadmill has been a very strong influence in an organic, non-official manner.

  Not to feed a fed horse or anything, but I see articles about 'word prohibition' all the time: don't call girls 'bossy', don't use the word 'just' (but also some pushback). These aren't organizational programs for questionable/taboo word avoidance/replacement.

  I mean, this ain't China (PRC) where similar sounding words to Winnie the Pooh (in Chinese of course) were banned by the government because something something used something describe something something current President Xi.

Solution 4:

I'm not a linguist or language historian, but I've read a bit about evolution of the English language, so take this with a grain of salt.

Language generally changes organically, I think it's pretty rare that intentional campaigns have the desired results. Euphemisms arise and change due to general societal attitudes. For instance, the advent of the civil rights movement led to derogatory terms for races and ethnicities becoming mostly taboo. "Mailman" became "letter carrier" as more women entered the occupation and American society became less sexist.

But there were no organizations waging public campaigns to stamp out the N-word and sexist language, for instance. In fact, I think such campaigns are likely to backfire, as people tend to resist being told what to do. Negative reactions from peers are likely to be much more effective. Some countries have organizations dedicated to maintenance of the language (like L'Academie Francaise); they exercise some control, but you can't stop people from talking the way they want to talk.

These particular replacement idioms seem pretty ridiculous. The originals are clear metaphors that make sense, the replacements were chosen simply because they sound similar. That's not to say they can't catch on, as many euphemisms are also sound-alikes (e.g. "Crikey" for "Christ").

PETA in particular has a history of going to extremes. For instance, while the organization probably officially denigrated such acts, people aligned with them have been known to throw blood on people wearing animal fur. And they've put up billboards that many have found offensive. They're a very polarizing organization, and this is likely to bias many people against this latest campaign.

This PETA campaign reminds me of when a faction in the US government attempted to rebrand French fries as Freedom fries because France opposed our invasion of Iraq after 9/11. The change was made in the menus of the Congressional cafeterias, but it never caught on more widely, and 2/3 of respondents in a poll at the time thought it was silly. The cafeterias changed their menus back 3 years later.

Perhaps if they could have convinced McDonalds to go along, it might have been more successful. But there's no analogous organization PETA could turn to to try to get their phrases popularized, so it's likely even more doomed than that was. It will probably be the butt of a joke on Weekend Update this week (as the Freedom fries attempt was 15 years ago), and then promptly forgotten.

Solution 5:

Referring to question 3, the mentioned changes in the usage of "offensive" expressions appear to have an old history as the following extract notes:

1.1. The protective euphemism — to shield and to avoid offense

• Euphemisms are characterized by avoidance language and evasive expression. We create them when we are faced the tricky problem of how to talk in different contexts about things that for one reason or another we would prefer not to speak of unrestrainedly in the prevailing context. In this primary function, euphemisms are verbal escape hatches created in response to taboos. These include the usual suspects — private parts, bodily functions, sex, anger, dishonesty, drunkenness, madness, disease, death, dangerous animals, fear, God and so on — as Adams and Newell [1994: 12] describe ‘an infinite variety of things that go bump in the night’.

• There will always be significant differences between individual societies and individuals within those societies with respect to the degree of tolerance shown towards any sort of taboo-defying behaviour — much will depend on the values and belief systems at the time. Taboo is also dynamic, and notions about what is forbidden will change, sometimes dramatically, across cultures and across time. The Bowdlerites of the 19th century targeted profanity and sexual explicitness and this triggered the progressive sanitising of a range of works, including the Bible.

As for question 2), with all due respect, I really doubt that PETA will be able to exert any real influence on the usage of the above mentioned idioms. I do love and respect animals, but if I need to “take the bulls by the horns”, I’ll say it without any sense of being guilty.