Apr 4, 2013 3 min read

The meanings of words, and their implications, can change over time.

For example, the word “negro” was once considered acceptable in everyday conversation, but it gave way over the years to “black” or “African American.” For those to the left-of-center on the political spectrum, “liberal” was once a perfectly fine descriptor until it became the dreaded “L word,” used in the Reagan era as an epithet. Liberals weren’t necessarily the people who brought you the New Deal, the New Frontier or Medicare in this framing; they were the excessively permissive who were pilfering the public coffers for wasteful, do-gooder endeavors for the undeserving.

And, of course, Washington City Councilman Matt Staniszewski recently provided a well-publicized lesson in how the meaning of the simple three-letter adjective “gay” has changed over the last 50 years or so.

“Names make news, an old newsroom motto has it,” columnist Hendrik Hertzberg writes in this week’s edition of The New Yorker magazine. “But names also make opinions. What something gets called can have more spin on it than a Mariano Rivera cutter, whether the person doing the calling intends it that way or not.”

Perhaps undeservedly, the name of Pennsylvania’s Department of Public Welfare has taken on an unsavory odor. Even though the Department of Public Welfare provides a panoply of aid to citizens across the commonwealth, from the management of state psychiatric hospitals to overseeing juvenile justice and foster care programs, a government agency with “welfare” in its title is bound to be unfairly stigmatized as the home office of the dole, where the incorrigibly indolent collect their alms.

There’s a move afoot in Harrisburg, however, to change the name of Pennsylvania’s Department of Public Welfare to the Department of Human Services. A bill sponsored by Rep. Thomas Murt, a Republican from Montgomery County, made it out of the House Human Services Committee last month, and is bound for a full vote in the House. The state Senate is expected to take up identical legislation. Under Murt’s plan, the change in nomenclature will be gradually phased in to lower the costs associated with it, and it has the support of such organizations as Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children and Pennsylvania Association of Area Agencies on Aging.

With the exception of William Scranton, the Keystone State’s living former governors have also thrown their support behind it, as have six living former department secretaries. In a letter that appeared in the Observer-Reporter Sunday, George Leader, Dick Thornburgh, Tom Ridge, Mark Schweiker and Ed Rendell argued that “Words matter. Names matter. Stigma lasts,” and that “Pennsylvanians who are served by the department are our mothers and grandmothers in need of long-term nursing care. They are our neighbors struggling with mental illness, children with physical disabilities and family members with a terrible addiction.”

The former governors also pointed out that Pennsylvania is the only state still using the designation Department of Public Welfare rather than the Department of Human Services. Considering that wine and liquor sales in these parts haven’t changed much since the curtain came crashing down on Prohibition, this should raise not a single eyebrow.

It may all seem rather small, a matter of mere semantics. But semantics matter. The Department of Public Welfare should become the Department of Human Services.