"If we create a word today, does an event that happened thirty years before the creation of the new word automatically get recategorized?"
I was asked this question last week. Should have written this post then, but things get in the way, important things like charity work for kids organizations kind of important things. I was asked this question by an acquaintance when in passing conversation, as we were watching the ticker tape line on the bottom of the tv during a muted newscast, a note scrolled by about marking the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide (which is memorialized on April 24th). The question is worthy of consideration. But the context in which it asked was to ask whether or not the Armenian Genocide was a genocide or not simply because the word genocide (genos cidere) was created in 1943 or 1944 by Rafael Lemkin roughly 30 years after the events in eastern Turkey (modern Armenia) and northern Syria. I am no fan of most words "created" since my own birth, finding most of them not worth the space they take to write. Words originate as a means of expressing, explaining, and naming items and as such are useful tools for humans to use regardless of their particular date of origination. My answer to my acquaintance was a curt yes without the meanderings of this paragraph.
And then my question in response was:
Do the Turks really think if they keep denying that the Armenian Genocide occurred and keep adamantly berating anyone who claims it did happen that the rest of the world will suddenly say that the Armenian Genocide did not occur?
I was asked this question last week. Should have written this post then, but things get in the way, important things like charity work for kids organizations kind of important things. I was asked this question by an acquaintance when in passing conversation, as we were watching the ticker tape line on the bottom of the tv during a muted newscast, a note scrolled by about marking the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide (which is memorialized on April 24th). The question is worthy of consideration. But the context in which it asked was to ask whether or not the Armenian Genocide was a genocide or not simply because the word genocide (genos cidere) was created in 1943 or 1944 by Rafael Lemkin roughly 30 years after the events in eastern Turkey (modern Armenia) and northern Syria. I am no fan of most words "created" since my own birth, finding most of them not worth the space they take to write. Words originate as a means of expressing, explaining, and naming items and as such are useful tools for humans to use regardless of their particular date of origination. My answer to my acquaintance was a curt yes without the meanderings of this paragraph.
And then my question in response was:
Do the Turks really think if they keep denying that the Armenian Genocide occurred and keep adamantly berating anyone who claims it did happen that the rest of the world will suddenly say that the Armenian Genocide did not occur?
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