"Gypsy moth" to get new, politically correct name

Wendy Mesley retired a few days ago. [Who she? Ed.] Glad you asked. At one time Ms Mesley was a star in the News and Public Affairs section of the Canadian Broadcorping Castration, the state-owned broadcaster of Canuckistan. 

When the Corpse chose a new anchor to replace the venerable Peter Mansbridge on the National newcast, she was passed over in favour of Liberal arse-licker Rosie O'Donnell. [Ed. Please check that. Might have been another Rosie.]

Ms Mesley was banished to the Siberia of Sunday morning TV, where she hosted The Weakly, a talk show about media, politics, and technology, until last June, when the show and Wendy got cancelled. Why? Because, in a staff meeting which included a couple of vizmins, she dared to utter the N-word. 

She was not referring to POC (Persons of Colour), but to White Niggers of America, the title of the English translation of Nègres blancs d'Amérique, a 1968 book by pseudo-Marxist Québécois journalist Pierre Vallières, who was banging the drum for the separation of la Belle Province from the rest of Canada.

Context doesn't matter to the PC police at the CBC. Wendy Mesley said the N-word out loud. Nya-nya-na-na-na. So she was seen and heard no more.

In our "woke" society, the N-word is, apparently, the very worst word one can utter, a "racial slur" (as it's referred to now), even more shocking and offensive than George Carlin's "Seven words you can't say on TV", which nowadays are heard on TV all the time.

But there is another "racial slur" which is almost as bad, one that you will never hear on the CBC or NPR, or read in the Times or Wapo. It refers to a tribe of people, mostly from central Europe, who have been discriminated against -- not without reason -- for centuries, in both Euroope and North America. The PC word for those people is "Roma".

[Roma? Who they? Ed.] Glad you asked. They used to be called Gypsies. The singular is Gypsy. I can remember my mother warning me that if I wasn't careful about talking to strangers and wandering too far from home, the Gypsies would steal me. (At other times she said I wasn't her child, that Gypsies had left me on her doorstep!)

So... the second-worst racial slur  you can use nowadays is the G-word. Which brings us [at last! Ed.] to the subject of today's headline: Lymantria dispar (or L. dispar), heretofore known as the gypsy moth.

It is not the gypsy moths, actually, but their larvae -- caterpillars -- which are causing incredible damage to trees and other greenery in areas around the Great Lakes, as reported by Agent 2 who says the buggers aren't just harmful but icky.

Indeed, the gypsy moth and the lesser-known gypsy ants have bad names for their destructive eating habits. But the experts at the Entomological Society of America, which oversees the common names of bugs, thinks they don't deserve a common name which is also an "ethnic slur...that's been rejected by the Romani people a long time ago." So says society president Michelle S. Smith, adding that "nobody wants to be associated with a harmful invasive pest." 

The society seems to have time and resources to spare, so is taking a hard look at some 2000 common insect names to remove those which are now deemed geographically inaccurate or "derogatory" (read: politically incorrect). 

University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum, a past ESA president, said the moths likely got their name because as larvae they have hair with small air pockets that act like balloons allowing them to float for kilometres, wandering like the group of people they were named after. Another theory is that male adult moths have a tan colour that could be similar to Romani people. 

The Entomological Society is now on the hunt for a new common name, a process that will take months. Ms Berenbaum, who has written about weirdly named plants and animals -- e.g. the "jewfish", now known as "goliath grouper" -- said that given the moths' destructiveness, she and other would have some ideas for a descriptive new name. But, she said, "You're not allowed to use obscenities, so that's out."

Footnote: The same woke reasoning explains why the meeja no longer calls the "Indian variant" of the Covid virus by that name. It's now the "Delta variant". Mustn't stigmatize anyone or anything, you know!