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Points of View
"A Word for History's ScrapheapEvery group of people produces its saints and rakes.As Americans, we pride ourselves that our system of government is based on the principle of free speech. There are some words, however, that are just so specific, so mean-spirited, so insulting, that they should never be used.I was reminded of this recently when one of my friends let slip a complaint about being "gypped" in a business transaction. I am aware that the term has slipped into letters to the editor and the economic columns of USA Today and some weekly newsmagazines. But I expect more from intelligent people in this age of sensitivity to racial and ethnic slurs. There is no mistaking the etymology of the word. It refers to a group of tribes (the Rom, Sinti, Kale) displaced from India who then migrated toward the West about 800-950 C.E.The Greeks called them atsingani (heretics or untouchables), hence the Hungarian or German term, Zigeuner. The Roma people claim their name, with which we are more familiar, Gypsy, originated in Egypt where they were persecuted for their Christian beliefs.They fared no better upon their arrival in Europe. Unwelcome in churches or towns, they were barred from marrying the local inhabitants and denied the right to own land. As were the Jews, they were accused of being in league with the Devil, spreading diseases, supporting the hated Turks, kidnapping children, and engaging in cannibalism.One of their lesser offenses, if only by comparison, was the charge that they were swindlers and cheats as well. And as were the Jews, their group name was transformed into a verb that connoted business fraud.Small wonder, then, that by the start of the 20th century nearly every European state outlawed nomadism and established police bureaus to monitor the activities of the hated minority. In France, authorities meticulously assembled hundreds of pages of documents on a single family. In Germany, anthropologists observed the arcane customs of a people more Aryan than the neo-Aryans. In Romania, many Gypsies slaved in the fields, iron clamps attached to their heads, cangues or yokes over their shoulders.And when for Europe undertook its first ethnic cleansing, the Nazis made certain, before the 1936 Olympics, that the Gypsies were put away in temporary detention camps. During the Second World War, Nazis and their minions murdered an estimated 250,000 Gypsies -- men, women and children -- in the forests and in the concentration camps of Eastern Europe.Every group of people produces its saints and rakes. No people merits a linguistic smear. The perjorative that some use in reference to the Roma should be tossed on the scrapheap of history."