The Hoarchive

Satire, freshly squeezed from Warwick Uni

The Hoar book, pictured on a white studio background.

To say ‘appropriation’ is appr… erm… stealing

Mildly disquieting revelation emerges that the term used for accusing admirers of diversity of indulging in the output of other cultures is itself indulging in the output of another culture. In this case, sixteenth century ‘Late Latin’.

To say ‘appropriation’ is appr… erm… stealing

Famous nobody, Lena Dunham, recently lent her support to a campaign seeking to stop Oberlin College labelling the sushi-like product they serve as sushi, for the obvious and ill-explored reason that to imperfectly replicate an appreciated item of another culture’s is ‘cultural appropriation’.

Naturally, the wholesale response to this has been the rightful denouncement of pizza as ‘tomato and cheese bread’, Pokémon Go as “the mythical animal catching game”, and Welsh Rarebit as “only fucking cheese on toast”. Henceforth, only Platonic ideals of cultural products should be allowed to be served, and even then, only in their country of origin.

However, prominent loser, Peter Dantic, has noted that the term ‘appropriation’, and indeed, the bulk of so-called English words surrounding it, are themselves appropriated from Latin. In the case of ‘appropriation’, it finds its root in the Late Latin term ‘appropriātus’.

When this cultural oddity was brought to the attention of prominent ‘appropriation’ campaigner, Aiden T T Poly-Teek, he responded with “shit, I’ll have to find something new to appear social active in a way that distracts people from the actual injustices rife in the modern world. That, or just drop language altogether”.

Yet the revelation is not bad news for everyone. “I like my verb roots like I like my women. Latin, noted Graham Annaskul, a big fan of appropriātus. “Anything that gives me license to load up on shit curry whilst speaking Spanish and wearing a Sombrero is, in my books, a good thing”.

As a publication solely concerned with upholding a verisimilitude of social justice, the Hoar will henceforth look into ceasing appropriation of our web-hosting, make in-roads into dropping the Arabic numerical system, and break free from the bounds of poor Latin prose to furthermore communicate solely by a system of grunts and squeaks — and even then avoid any imitation of similar sounding species.