Maybe my idle mind is a little too, uh, idle this lovely Sunday afternoon.
With that, I’ll get something off my chest. It’s piddly and not too terribly significant, but it has to do — I think — with what I perceive to be a tilt toward political correctness.
Looking through my local newspaper — the Amarillo Globe-News — today, I noticed two captions under pictures on the Outdoor page of the Sports section. The pictures showed two hunters who had shot wild game. One was a water buck in South Africa; the other was a feral hog. The text under the pictures said the hunters “harvested” the animals.
This is not a new use of a common term. When I think of something being “harvested,” though, I think of cotton being stripped, of wheat being cut, of kids picking raspberries off the thorny bushes (which is what I used to do in the summer growing up in the Pacific Northwest).
Perhaps I should ask a newspaper copy editor, but short of that, I’ll pose the question here: When did the terms “shot” and “killed” become unacceptable for use in a daily newspaper in describing the act of hunting wild animals?
The animals shown today, as are the critters displayed all the time on that particular page, are pretty darn dead. Does the text below the pictures need to somehow soften for readers what they already can see with their own eyes?
Some folks — particularly those on the right — just love to criticize those who tend to use politically correct terminology rather than dealing straight up with whatever they’re trying to describe.
Is that what’s happening to our region’s hunting community, for crying out loud? Please tell me it ain’t so.