Friday, September 09, 2005

Refugees? No. Evacuees? No. Skiddadlers? Yes!

Belle takes a look at what exactly we should be calling those leaving the Katrina disaster zone for safety elsewhere. In her post, she reprints the defintitions and the thesaurus entries for refugee, evacuate, and victim, and I'm so glad she did. The thesaurus entry for evacuate gives us the perfect word we should use to refer to these individuals: Skidaddlers (or skedaddler).

I would love to see the headline "Thousands of Katrina skidaddlers head for better environs". I would pay to see Brain Williams lead the NBC Nightly News by saying, "Louisiana skidaddlers today received good news with the disbursment of $2000 debit cards." And how offensive can skidaddler be? Who could offended by that? Could Jesse Jackson stand in front of the T.V. cameras and say, "The minorities they do paddle, when the media says skidaddle"? I don't think so.

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