When language no longer meats the aye

Will George Orwell’s allegory on totalitarianism, Animal Farm, be proscribed in future classrooms because of its reference to various forms of livestock? In deference to the growing numbers of vegetarians and vegans, educationists and sociologists in the UK propose ridding everyday idiom of any non-veg associations.

If what might be called the thin edge of the veg becomes a norm, phrases such as ‘bring home the bacon’, or ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’, might fall victim to the dictum that one man’s meat can be another’s verbal poison.

Proponents of such lingual housecleaning could also look askance at birds of a feather flocking together, the chickens coming home to roost, or anything that remotely resembles fishy business.


With vegan sensibilities in mind, profitable enterprises might no longer be deemed to be ‘milch cows’, nor a big shot described as a ‘big cheese’ who is ‘full of the milk of human kindness’.

Indeed, animal rights organisations could moot the deletion of all creaturely references in common parlance, be it the bears and bulls of stock markets, or the children’s game of Snakes and Ladders.

Such verbal weeding out could have repercussions on the Indian political arena where an all-too-common a practice is called horse-trading whereby adversaries seek to cook each other’s goose.