In this past Thursday’s U-T “Watchdog” appeared a protest by Elizabeth Schwartz against the “Gypped: A Regan Reilly Mystery,” by Carol Higgins Clark. Ms. Schwartz protested that the word “Gypped” constitutes a racial slur and “is beyond offensive to the Roma, because it suggests they are venal and dishonest.” She asked that the book signing in Mysterious Galaxy in Kearny Mesa be canceled.

I fully agree that we must be ever vigilant of perpetrating and perpetuating racial and religious slurs in our speaking and writing. Using “Jew” as a verb is unconscionable, and president Bill Clinton was rightfully upbraided by a national Welsh group for using “welsh” as a verb to mean “to fail to honor a promise.”

The verb “gyp” does turn out to be a clipping of the word “gypsy” (itself a clipping of “Egyptian”) and hence a disparagement of that group. But I feel the word “gyp” has evolved so far beyond the history of gypsies that we need not banish it from our language. If so, we would have to jettison a host of common words in our English language:

Two words we use to praise skill are “dexterous,” from the Latin dexter, “right,” and “adroit”, from the French a droit, “to the right.” On the other hand (the left one, of course), sinistra, Latin for “left hand,” yields the pejorative “sinister” in English. The French for “left hand” is gauche; in English it means “crude, lacking in social grace.” A descendant of gauche is “gawky.” Should “sinister,” “gauche” and “gawky” be excised from our vocabulary because their origins libel the left-handed?

The ancients, in their finite wisdom, believed that the womb–hyster in Greek–was an unfixed organ that floated around inside a woman’s body, tickling her and making her emotionally unstable, or “hysterical.” Hence, hysteria is a subtle dig at women, stereotyping them as flighty and emotionally volatile. It was Sigmund Freud who first popularized the notion that men could be hysterical, too.

“Yankee” may well have begun life as a slur that English colonists hurled at Dutch freebooters in early New York. The Dutch love of cheese was well known, so the English fashioned Yankee from the Dutch “Jan Kass,” which literally meant “John Cheese,” combining the Dutch first name “Jan” (pronounced “Yahn”) with “Kaas,” the Dutch word for “cheese,” the country’s national product.

Should “sinister,” “gauche,” “gawky,” “hysterical” and “Yankee” be ripped from the pages of our dictionaries? Mark Twain once quipped that “simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.” It’s the same with political correctness. It’s all right, but you can carry it too far.

Richard Lederer

Lederer is a founding co-host of “A Way With Words” on KPBS Public Radio. He is launching a series on presidential trivia in the U-T.