Sydney J. Harris who wrote a column for the Chicago Sun-Times called, "We Read the Label but Ignore the Jars Contents." In this column, he speaks of the psychological affect that comes along with the use of names and labels. One of his examples is the "myth of [his] city, Chicago..." Chicago is known as the "Windy City" and Harris explains how this affects the way people view this city. In reality, "Chicago ranks about 30th among American cities in wind velocity." However, the fact that it is known as the "Windy City" takes a psychological effect on people. When people visit Chicago they insist that it is the windiest place they have ever been. Harris calls this a "mind-fix." He feels that, "we live by names and tags, rather than by realities; we distort our perceptions to fit our preconceptions." In other words, the people who visit Chicago and view it as the windiest place they have ever been, have listened to the myth for years and are pre-convinced that it is the "Windy City." Harris and Bosmajian are pointing out the same matters that language changes our views about many different things. Harris notes that when we define something with a label, "we tend to look for and find substantiation of our prejudice." His example for this is a person who doesn't like dogs. He will always see only the dogs that "snap and snarl." He will most likely overlook any nice dogs, because he is expecting the mean dogs. Language can set ideas in a person's head and that person may not even know it. Although names are needed to define us, "names can kill us if enough people call us 'Huns' or 'Reds' or 'Jews' when we are just individuals as diverse and as innocent as themselves." I have experienced the words of oppression that Bosmajian speaks of. When I was in sixth grade, we were studying the Holocaust in history class. My last name is Levy, which happens to be a Jewish name. My father's ancestors were Jewish, and the last name o...
