This is the illusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, get a great deal on language, 30% off with only minor stains.

In this episode, we're returning to the theme of

renaming for two food-related renames, the first one that mostly happened, the

second one that mostly did not, but in a good way.

Content note, the first part of the episode concerns an ablest slur, so there are

incidences of that slur, and discussions of ableism and later anti-Black racism.

Also if you are involved or have been involved with a renaming project of any kind

then I'd love to hear about it. It's a topic I plan to keep returning to, get in touch.

On with the show. In the UK, there's a fairly common type of sweet, candy in US English, that is a kind of medium firm gummy that comes in fruit-esque flavours and vivid colours

shaped like very small truncated cones or pyramids decorated with little grooves.

And in 2022 some retailers started selling these sweets under a new name,

Mini Gems. But a lot of manufacturers and vendors still use the suite's previous name,

Midget Gems. And it took Dr. Erin Pritchard pointing out that

Midget is a slur to get any of them to do anything about it.

I'm Dr. Erin Pritchard. I'm actually a doctor of human geography but I specialise in job with these of disability and so now I am a lecturer in disability

and special educational weeds,

a member of the Centre for Cultural Disability Studies.

In August 2020, Erin published an article in The Big Issue North with the title,

Why don't we just stop using the word midget?

And then I thought, right, let's try and be proactive about it.

So Erin wrote to the supermarket M&S, which has more than 1,000 stores within the UK, as well as around 400 internationally.

And I wrote to M&S and I said, look, I don't think you're intending to cause any offense, But this word is upon hate speech and not many people know that because

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