"As much as Poppy Bush scoffs at 'the D-word,' as he calls any reference to dynasty, the Bushes do consider themselves an American royal family."

"They have always pretty much divided the world into Bushes and the help. The patriarch once sent me a funny satire referring to himself and Barbara as the Old King and Queen, W. as King George of Crawford and Jeb as the Earl of Tallahassee. At 91, 41 is living to see Jebbie become president. He is mystified by a world in which Trump, whom he considers a clown, could dethrone the crown prince."

Writes Maureen Dowd, who's been looking closely at the Bushes for a long time. ("In 1993, I went on the road to watch Jeb run for governor in Florida and W. run for governor in Texas.... It was soon clear to me that the Good Son was not as scintillating a campaigner as the Prodigal Son... This was going to be the year that settled sibling scores. Jeb would get what his parents considered his birthright....")

I was interested in the phrase "divided the world into Bushes and the help." The help. That reminds me of a discussion here on the blog the other day. I'd written "Majed Abdulaziz Al-Saud allegedly yelled at 3 female servants in his mansion near Beverly Hills," and a commenter, Carol, said: "I had no idea they were still called 'servants' in this country." And SOJO said: "Servants"? Wtf? Employees." I scrambled to defend myself against what I see as a charge of political incorrectness. I posted 4 comments in quick succession.

1. I took responsibility:

That was my word choice. The LA Times called them "workers."

2. I defended myself:

What's wrong with "servants"? If something is wrong with it, then we shouldn't have switched to calling waiters and waitresses "servers."

3. I re-defended myself:

"Servants" seems like the right word for people who occupy the servants' quarters within a house, especially when the reference is to a big estate with a lot of personnel serving a rich person, a person who might say things like this prince did. ["I am a prince and I do what I want! You are nobody!"]

4. I retreated into scholarship and distanced humility:

From the OED, there's this historical context that might explain an aversion to the word: "b. In the North American colonies in the 17–18th c., and subsequently in the United States, servant was the usual designation for a slave.... 1852 H. B. Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin II. xxii. 67 Why don't we teach our servants to read?"

The idea that "employees" was the right word struck me as wrong. Particular jobs have names, and "employee" isn't the name of a job. What's the name for employees who live in someone else's house and do all sorts of work that might be required within the household? Is it the word Dowd used, "help"? Or did Dowd use "help" because it's amusing to deploy somebody else's euphemism? Is "servant" insulting?

Oddly enough, Jeb Bush likes to call himself a "servant":

"There are a lot of talkers in politics," Bush said. "Trust me, I was on the debate stage, I see it; some really good people that are really good talkers. I hope you want someone with a servant's heart, that acts on principles — that does things rather than just talks about them."

"Now, what could possibly be wrong with the description 'hard worker'?"

Asks Greta Van Susteren before playing video of Melissa Harris-Perry calling out a guest for saying that Paul Ryan is a "hard worker."

This is Harris-Perry's stern warning:  "I want us to be super-careful when we use the language 'hard worker,' because I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall, because it is a reminder about what hard work looks like."

Oh, so the slave is the idealized "hard worker"? Then why, just a couple weeks ago did a textbook publisher, McGraw-Hill, have to apologize and agree to change a geography textbook that referred to slaves as "workers"?

On reading a caption in his geography textbook that described slaves as “workers”, Coby Burren sent a photo and an annoyed message to his mother. "We was real hard workers wasn’t we," he wrote.

Roni Dean-Burren was also disturbed by the language, and posted about the book online. Her comments went viral and the publisher swiftly decided to rewrite the section....

"We are deeply sorry,"  said the publisher's chief executive for a map of "Patterns of Immigration" that had a notation: "The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations."

Even assuming you want to follow the instruction to "be super-careful," it's hard — if I may use the word — to figure out which way to go.

The McGraw-Hill incident teaches that you should never refer to slavery without framing it in somber moral terms. It can't be mixed in with other matters as if it were not a unique evil.

The "Paul Ryan is a 'hard worker'" incident teaches that slavery must be mixed into discussions of, well, perhaps anything. If someone complains about the heat, maybe you should get on their case for not acknowledging how much more slaves suffered from the heat. If somebody comments that the food isn't very good, you should lay into them about how poorly fed the slaves were? (That sounds like the opposite of "super-careful.")