Alphabetical Entries: E
51 entries found.
recurring seizures. Seizures are a symptom of epilepsy, but not every person who has seizures has epilepsy. See also epileptic, fit.
in 1945, congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas said, "We cannot legislate equality but we can legislate ... equal opportunity for all." Decades later, inequalities of opportunity still exist on sexual, racial, ethnic, sexual orientation, age, and other grounds. Anecdote: a female anchor was reassured that she and the new male anchor were indeed equals, that he had been hired simply to co-anchor the show. But, as a subsequent court case showed, he was in fact the lead or primary anchor. The broadcasting company president testified that the media consultant told him a male-female anchor team should be equals. But another anchor said he was told by that same media consultant that the "male is the first among equals." The concept of equal opportunity, which has been closely tied to affirmative action programs designed to ensure equal access to jobs, housing, and schools, has been difficult for people to comprehend, whereas most people understand that equalizing the playing field in golf means that golfers of varying abilities have somewhat equal chances of competing with each other.
the Equal Pay Act of 1963 requires that women and men receive equal pay for equal work. "Equal pay" means people doing the same job receive equal pay: female and male nurses of equal seniority working on the same hospital floor receive the same pay. Comparable worth refers to pay schedules that offer equal pay for jobs similar in education requirements, skill levels, work conditions, and other factors. "Comparable worth" means that a female clerk-typist might earn the same as a male warehouse employee. However, even the most carefully constructed comparable worth plans have serious difficulties weighting job dimensions. Dr. Marc S. Mentzer gives an example: women historically have been concentrated in jobs requiring communication skills (assistants, telephone operators, teachers) while men have historically been concentrated in jobs requiring physical skills (manual laborers, construction workers). In a job evaluation plan, how should these be weighted? Are communication skills equal to, double, or half the weight of physical skills? Job evaluation is not an objective, scientific process. Underlying attitudes pose more serious issues: "In just about every [society], whatever men do or produce is valued more highly than what women do or produce, even though what a man does in one society is done by women in another society. In most societies, it is not the thing done, nor the objects produced, but the sex of the doer that confers distinctions upon acts or products" (Marilyn French, Beyond Power).
equestrian. See also feminine word endings.
errand runner, runner, messenger, courier, page, clerk, office helper, gofer.
prostitution service. (Organizations that provide drivers or companions to assist older persons with shopping, errands, and appointments are sometimes called escort services. Use instead: transportation/dial-a-ride/chauffeur/elder/transportation services.)
in 1977, at the Inuit Circumpolar Conference in Alaska, the term "Inuit" was adopted as a preferred designation for collectively referring to peoples of northern Canada, Greenland, Alaska, and eastern Siberia known as Eskimos. "Eskimo" has long been considered (incorrectly) to come from a term meaning "raw meat eaters." The native people of Alaska's North Slope call themselves Inupiat Eskimos and say that "Eskimo" comes from a word meaning "she laces a snowshoe" (Jean Craighead George, Julie of the Wolves ). "Aleut" is the accepted designation for people of the western Alaska Peninsula, the Pribilof Islands, and the Aleutian island chain. Those native to the Cook Inlet and interior regions of Alaska refer to themselves as "Athapaskans." Inuk (or Innuk) is the singular of Inuit (or Innuit). In Alaska, "Natives" and "Alaska Natives" are accepted terms for the Inuit, Aleuts, and Indians.
it is correct to address a letter to an attorney of either sex in the U.S. using this courtesy title, for example, Marian Chernov, Esq. (In Great Britain, "Esq." signifies rank.)
genocide. See genocide.
epithets and slurs label people as less-than-human, which then makes them easier to discount, degrade, and destroy. In Contreras v. Crown Zellerbach, Inc. the Washington State Supreme Court held that "racial epithets which were once part of common usage may not now be looked upon as 'mere insulting language.'" They constitute instead a tort of outrage, or "intentional infliction of emotional distress." According to Irving Lewis Allen in his excellent Unkind Words: Ethnic Labeling from Redskin to WASP, "Well over a thousand abusive nicknames aimed at more than one hundred different American ethnic groups have been recorded in dictionaries and other studies of our popular speech ... If epithets were added for quasi-ethnic groups, such as the hundreds of terms for poor whites and rustics, mostly various white Protestant groups, the number of ethnic epithets in historical American slang and dialect would rise to nearly two thousand terms." Terms like the following range from moderately to deeply offensive: banana, camel jockey, chico, chink, cracker, dago, frog, gook, goy, greaser, gringo, guinea, honkie/honky, jap, kike, kraut, limey, mick, oreo, paleface, Pancho, Polack, slant, slope, spade, spic/spick, spook, towelhead, white trash/poor white trash, whitey, wop. See also brave (Indian), Chinaman, Chinaman's chance, Dutch treat, half-breed/half-caste, Indian giver, Injun, Jew boy, "Jew down," Jewish American Princess/JAP, the n-word, Nip, ofay, Oriental, redskin, shanghai, squaw, welsh (v.), wetback, Yid.
the adjective "ethnic" is acceptable; the noun "ethnics" is not. Use instead members of ethnic groups, ethnic-group members. Although not everyone identifies strongly or consistently with an ethnic group, by definition everybody is ethnic; "Margaret Thatcher, Susan B. Anthony and Bach are just as 'ethnic' as Miriam Makeba, Indira Gandhi, and Johnny Colon" (Amoja Three Rivers, Cultural Etiquette ,). Irving Lewis Allen (Unkind Words) says, "An ethnic group can be succinctly defined as any racial, religious, mother-tongue, national-origin, or regional category of culturally distinct persons, regardless of the group's size (minority or majority), social power (subordinate or dominant), or when its members immigrated to the country (immigrant, native-born, or indigenous). The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, identifies 106 such ethnic groups who have lived in the United States. Slurs have been directed against most of these groups." "In writing about a multicultural society, authors should take care not to imply that ethnic groups are defined by their departure from some spurious norm—to imply, that is, that ethnic means 'not of the mainstream.' Not all minority groups are ethnic, and not all ethnic groups are minorities" (Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language of the Association of American University Presses, Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing ). See also ethnicity, ethnic slurs, race.
referring to a person's ethnic character, background, affiliation, or identification, this term lacks a great deal of precision in a culture in which most of us have more than one ethnic heritage. Those who self-identity with an ethnicity should be so acknowledged. In other cases, identify ethnic origin only when that information is central to your material and discuss all ethnic groups in parallel fashion. See also ethnic/ethnics, ethnic slurs, race.
this is the belief that the ways of one's own group are (1) natural, (2) right for everybody, (3) superior to others' ways, (4) require no designating adjectives. As it is most often used, "ethnocentrism" refers to white people seeing themselves as the center and norm, with everyone else being variations on the theme. To avoid inadvertent ethnocentrism in your writing, imagine the issue from another group's point of view.
use this word only in the literal sense of a castrated man, in which case it is a legitimate sex-specific word. For a metaphorical sex-neutral term, use substitute weakling, coward, wimp, pushover, doormat, lightweight, loser, craven. See also castrate/castrating (metaphor), emasculate, sissy, unman.
this can refer to a person of mixed Asian and European descent or to someone who lives in "Eurasia" (the land mass comprising the continents of Europe and Asia). It is ambiguous in some contexts, too broad for precision in others, and considered derogatory in still others.
this term is being seen more often, probably in response to the use of designations like Asian American and African American but also as a needed parallel for those designations (instead of the unparallel default "American" for whites). In your writing, alternate "European American" with white, particularly when you're alternating "African American" with black. See also hyphenated Americans.
this term, introduced by a fifteenth-century, middle-English morality play, described a person trying to achieve Christian salvation, and thus carries flavors of the male, the white, and the Christian. The concept has grown flabby as we realize the impossibility of one individual representing the species. If necessary, use instead: the typical/ordinary person, the archetypal/archetypical human being, Everyman and Everywoman (always use together). See also average man, common man, man in the street.
as used in reference to people with disabilities, particularly children with mental retardation, this term is vague and euphemistic. Be specific: someone with a learning disability/an emotional disturbance/a sensory impairment, someone who is deaf/hearing impaired/blind. See also disabilities, special.
speech and writing that excludes, intentionally or unintentionally, certain groups of people and their experiences makes them invisible to others and less valuable in their own and others' eyes. They become symbolically annihilated. For years, most of the advertising, writing, teaching, and speaking in our culture has been about, and directed toward, white, middle-class, Christian, heterosexual, able-bodied men. There is nothing wrong with this category of people; they have in fact contributed enormously to society. The problem is that there are many other members of society outside this category whose existence has been ignored by exclusive language.
executor, personal representative, administrator. In some states, "executrix" is still used in official legal matters; in others, the legal term is "personal representative." See also feminine word endings.
applied to human beings "exotic" is ethnocentric and racist. "It implies a state of other-ness, or foreign origin, apart from the norm. It is not a compliment" (Amoja Three Rivers, Cultural Etiquette ). Why are Chinese American New Year's dancers "exotic" when those dancing the Highland Fling or the Bohemian polka are not? In 2013, Sports Illustrated was in an "exotic" spotlight for its seven-continents swimsuit issue that juxtaposed, among others, a white, blonde model and an elderly Chinese man piloting her raft; another white bikini-clad model and a tribal-looking, half-naked Namibian man carrying a spear. By using "native" people as exotic fashion props, the photoshoot made a living mockery of human differences, contrasting the "exotic" with the beautiful and the "normal."
although based on the Latin for "country," patria (and pater , "father"), these words are functionally inclusive and their roots not as obtrusive as some "pater"-based words ("paternal," for example). If you prefer, use American abroad, exile, displaced person, émigré.
when journalists, producers, or writers need an opinion from an expert, they generally end up with young or middle-aged white male experts, even when equally knowledgeable women, minorities, older people, lesbian and gay folks, and people with disabilities are available. A rich source of these experts can be found at the Women's Media Center (WMC) SheSource, which matches up "media-experienced women experts from our extensive database with journalists, bookers, and producers" (WMC SheSource director Kate McCarthy).