Friday, August 16, 2019

Contextualizing Southern Heritage

 

A semantic technique that has worked well for political types is renaming things to make them more acceptable to the public. This has occurred countless times in our society. Here are two examples from the past.

Beginning with our first President, we had a cabinet post called Secretary of War. But in the late 1940s, this designation was changed to Secretary of Defense, the implication being that the United States is not a warring nation, but it should defend itself. The name was made more amenable but the duties of the office didn’t change.

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