“ No name calling!” my mother used to say whenever she heard us children doing it. The reason she gave at the time was it wasn’t polite. So many things weren’t polite that by the time the Viet Nam war came and dragged us into the streets in protest, politeness itself had become a bad name.

But even then the real reason was name calling is a threat to ending relationship. It's the oversimplification of a real person, place or thing to the status of non-entity. The more polite adult word for this is “stereotyping.”

Just a little more than a year ago, the man who would become our current vice president let go a denigrating comment about “childless cat ladies,” and I found myself suddenly pinned to the wall. I actually owe him for that, because I don’t think I’d ever experienced the pained

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