Moving Toward Greater Awareness

I’ve been working rather determinedly on a book about growing up in West Kentucky. And using Microsoft Word’s “Editor” function for proofreading.

It examines all sorts of stuff: spelling, grammar, punctuation conventions, clarity, and so on. Two of the more intriguing to this old farm kid are “Sensitive Geopolitical References” and “Inclusiveness.” It was disappointing that the SGR function did not flag “hillbillies.” That sort of hurt my feelings, to be honest with you.

But, it’s been good for me with my leftover patriarchal Southern fundamentalist preacher tendencies to have Word monitoring my insensitivities. I’m catching on that not all do-it-yourselfers are handymen. Not everyone who leads a committee is a chairman. Not all plumbers wear short tee shirts and no belt. Wait a minute—what’s that doing in here? Never mind, forget that…

So, with some careful tutelage from the automated surveillance of a word processing program, I’m making some gains. It appears that I still have some way to go, though.

In recounting one of my youthful experiences, I described a rather clumsy moment from long ago. In that brief anecdote, I’d used a simile referencing a “crippled sow.” Uh-oh…

Yep, that’s right, Word Editor caught me!

Instead of such meanness, callused indifference, and insensitivity, I should substitute “disabled sow” or “sow with disabilities.”

Well, now, even swine need to have their feelings protected in those intervening pounds between weaned and turned into weinies? Between born and bacon? On the one hand, I found it dryly amusing and ironically entertaining. I used to think that how we treated humans and other animals was more important than how we talked about them.

But then I realized that how we talk about them is how we treat them.