A quick plea for help. So a few people, including your humble narrator, have been trying to figure out just what motivates the House Republicans to want to drop the French from French fries. This is probably a question for psychoanalysis, not philosophers/linguists, but there aren’t any psychoanalysts in the house, so we are going to have to make do with what we have. Let’s agree that we won’t get to the bottom of the trouble, can we try and answer one question. Is the phenomenom of removing French from various terms a manifestation of the same phenomenon as we saw in the 1910s as all kinds of German terms were removed from the language. I initially thought the two events were closely related, and it seems clear they are related in some way, but several people to whom I suggested this thought that there was something, and it is not clear what, different about the 2003 bout of renaming to the 1910s bout. (The most amusing story from that episode is that in South Australia all town names of German origin were removed, except for Adelaide, the name of the capital and largest town.) I’ve been convinced that I was originally wrong to treat the two events as on a par, in part because it was mostly proper names that were changed then, and one can sort of tell a plausible story about why one would change names. So a question, and this may well be the least well-formed question I will ever ask on this blog, or indeed anywhere. What, if any, are the differences in motivation and execution between the renamers of the 1910s and the renamers of 2003?