What's in a name?
Callinectes sapidus, Orcs, and the U.S. Presidential Elections
Blue Crabs. Like many, Minette and I always have a wall calendar hanging in the kitchen: usually something with pictures of Nature or Art. As a child our family’s monthly calendar was always hanging beside the telephone, assiduously filled with important dates by my Mother. In as much as it’s possible to call a paper calendar ‘anachronistic’, these days it does still seem like a bridge to the past. The rotary phone hanging on the wall is gone; perhaps the physical calendar will soon be replaced by a smart device.
Our 2024 monthly calendar is entitled “Discover Wild Animals” and each month features an abstract, colorful painting of a different animal along with a short bullet list of related facts. July’s animal was the “Atlantic Blue Crab”. From its factoids I see some some middle-school items like “Crabs are bottom dwellers”, and “Blue crab females have red-tipped claws”, but then the third bullet gives me pause: “Their scientific name means ‘beautiful savory swimmer’”.
[The blue crab’s] scientific name means “beautiful savory swimmer”.
My mind finds this both darkly funny and sad. It’s something akin to calling pigs the latin for “hoofed breakfast meat”, or calling bluefin tuna “big fast sushi fish”. Atlantic blue crabs were given their latin name - Callinectes sapidus - by Mary J. Rathbun in 1896. History tells us she had a dry sense of humor, but somehow I can’t forgive her this one. It’s one thing to engage in dark humor but another to etch it in stone, a species forever known to science as ‘yummy’.
Orcs. Sometime after Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea the Ukrainian defenders began calling the aggressors ‘Orcs’. We can ask ourselves “Why shouldn’t they? If the shoe fits…” The Russians certainly behaved like the Orcs of Tolkien’s stories. Currently it only takes one pro-Ukraine click in Twitter or Youtube to have those algorithms serve up celebratory videos of orcs being killed in battle. Most of the videos are short and set to a metal soundtrack, tanks or soldiers attempting to evade drone strikes, ghostly infrared images of soldiers at night being killed by sniper fire. The video is over before you remember that you just watched someone die.
Dehumanization. While Blue Crabs can’t suffer from dehumanization, we still take away their dignity as living things with this type of reductive naming. Humanity often uses convenient labels like this to soften the blow of how we treat something. When we permit ourselves to see people or animals as somehow lesser it legitimizes our behavior towards them. The Belgians in the Congo called the native people monkeys as they subjected them to horrors. We group anyone living on the streets as The Homeless and strip them of their agency as individuals. We do the same with Immigrants. The Nazi party did it to the Jewish people, now it happens in Israel between Jewish settlers and Palestinians, the Israeli military and Hamas. Science Fiction takes this to the extreme in Soylent Green, where mass euthanasia is presented to the populace as a nutritious, flavorful wafer.
Beings. This is about constantly reminding ourselves of the living beings behind our convenient labels: for us meat eaters, “Dinner” was previously a living being and we can take the time to honor that. As we enter the heaviest part of the quadrennial U.S. Presidential election/clown show it is incredibly easy to buy in to the labeling: Democrats bad/good, Republicans bad/good, Issues with The Homeless, Issues with Immigrants, and so on. Everything is painted with broad brush strokes and little nuance, complex issues made palatable by telling us we should just pick a team and think like the rest of the group. All of a sudden anything different just looks like an Orc.
What’s in a name? Strong99 is about embracing discomfort so that we can be strong enough to thrive later in life. What is discomfort if it isn’t remembering that the homeless person is a living, complex person? Or remembering that the whole species of crabs we’ve dismissively called ‘flavorful’ are actually part of a complex ecosystem that supports all of the natural things we experience? Or that the people supporting candidate X are individuals with needs, desires, and fears? The way we name other beings can affect how we view them and how we place ourselves as different from them … but they aren’t ‘They’, they are ‘Us’.