Category: language

CNN’s guide to “neopronouns”

August 28, 2023 • 9:45 am

I’ve always said that in person I’ll call anyone by the pronoun they wish to be called, and I intend to abide by this as a simple matter of civility. But I’m not sure I’d do that when talking about someone who uses a “neopronoun” when they’re not present, because some of those pronouns seem pretty bizarre and would stick in my craw (see below for examples).

Pronouns like “they” for bi-gender people are okay by me, as are “he/him” for trans males or “she/her for transfemales. But when you go on, and look at lists of other ones, it seems like going down the rabbit hole. The article below mentions over 200 different neopronouns!

For your delectation and social harmony, CNN offers “A guide to neopronouns, from ae to ze.”  First, what is a neopronoun? The site explains:

The most common third-person pronouns include “she,” “he” and “they.” While “she” and “he” are typically used as gendered pronouns to refer to a woman and a man respectively, “they” can be used as a gender-neutral descriptor for an individual person or a group of people. Celebrities like Janelle Monáe, Emma Corrin and Jonathan Van Ness have each said “they” is a pronoun that works for them. [JAC: I use “they” when referring to a generic person.]

Neopronouns, meanwhile, are less commonly used than those three familiar pronouns. They’re often used by nonbinary, transgender and gender nonconforming people because they offer more freedom of identity. In his book “What’s Your Pronoun?” Baron wrote that neopronouns “expand the ways that people are able to indicate their gender identity to encompass anyone who is trans or nonbinary, as well as those who choose an altogether different term to characterize their gender.”

Per the LGBTQ advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign, neopronouns are a “step towards a society where people can more fully express all parts of themselves.”

And here’s a handy list from the article. As I said, I’d use them to a person when encountering them directly, but I’m not so sure if, when talking about such a person to another, I’d use them.  In fact, while I’d use them as well in writing about a person, I would probably refer to a neopronoun user by name rather than use these words, which seem awkward. Actually, for most of the examples below, you can use a person’s name instead of their pronoun (i.e. “I asked Sammi to come to the movies. Sammi said yes!”, and so on).

xe/xyr (commonly pronounced zee/zeer)

I asked xyr to come to the movies. Xe said yes!

ze/zir or ze/hir (commonly pronounced zee/zeer or zee/heer)

The teacher graded zir paper today, and ze got an A!

Ze said hirself that I’m hir favorite neighbor.

fae/faer (commonly pronounced fay/fair) 

Fae told me that faer best friend is in town this week.

ey/em/eir  (commonlypronounced aye/em/air)

I’m taking em to the park today. Ey wants to bring eir camera to capture the garden for emself!

ae/aer (commonly pronounced aye/air)

Ae is my best friend — most of aer’s weekday evenings are spent at my house.

I’m not sure exactly how these pronouns express a person’s identity, beyond reject the familiar “binary” pronouns, but that’s their business, not mine.

The article notes that some neopronouns were introduced in the 1700s, but an expert weighs in on their history. (The expert is “Dennis Baron, one of the foremost experts on neopronouns and their histories and an emeritus professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign”.)  Baron notes that

Even though there were dozens of neopronouns that made it into print in the 19th and 20th centuries, most of them didn’t make a huge impact upon their introduction or were lost to time, Baron said. During that time, the public was resistant to language change, and men in positions of power often didn’t take issue with a lack of gender-neutral pronouns, Baron wrote. [I suspect you can’t pin this solely on “men in power”, as these neologisms would seem strange to many people.]

And I don’t think I’ve ever see any used in literature, whether fiction or nonfiction. But times have changed:

Some neopronouns were created by writers as far back as the 18th century, many of whom did not publicly identify as nonbinary, because they wanted a genderless word to describe a person or group of people —only recently have pronouns been used as a political tool for the way they’re used by nonbinary and trans people, Baron wrote.

The “political use”, says Baron, is that ” Understanding and using someone’s pronouns is one way to show solidarity and respect toward trans people.”  And that’s why I’ll use these terms to people’s faces, but there’s an element of compulsion about using them otherwise that smacks of virtue signaling and attempts to appropriate power through language change. I’d rather use someone’s name.  And really, are you being a good ally when you use the ones below?

Leaf, sun, star — nounself pronouns are neopronouns that use nature and other inspirations as nonbinary or genderless descriptors. Linguist Jason D’Angelo told The New York Times that nounself pronouns were popularized on the social platform Tumblr around 2012 and 2013 and remain in use among members of fandoms who may take their nounself pronouns from the properties they enjoy.

For someone who uses the nounself pronoun “leaf,” that may look like: “I hope leaf knows how proud we are that leaf is getting to know leafself better!” or “Leaf arrived at the coffee shop before me; I was mortified to have been late to meet leaf.”

I don’t think I could force myself to say such things.  And I get that someone might have a non-standard identity and want a novel identifier, but who identifies as part of a tree, or as an astronomical body? Really, would you refer to someone as “leafself”?

Why we can’t say “pipeline” any longer

July 9, 2023 • 1:15 pm

Here’s a short piece from the Journal of the American Medical Association Open that explains why we can no longer use the word “pipeline” when referring to the progress of human beings from birth until adulthood. The word is often used when discussing ethnic diversity, referring to a pipeline from birth to adulthood and its concomitants: college, jobs, and so on. If the pipeline is meant to include college and one’s achievements there, as well as jobs based on those achievements, the people who leave that career path are said to instantiate a “leaky pipeline.”

Now we are told that we can no longer use the “pipeline” simile, because it’s not inclusive. But on the other hand “American Indian” is a term that’s okay again!

Click to read:

I’m just going to quote from the short piece and make one or two brief remarks.

For many years, the term pipeline has been used metaphorically by researchers and policy makers to refer to the progression of students advancing toward a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) degree or a career in medicine. Past criticisms of the term pipeline highlight how students, especially those from historically excluded backgrounds, such as American Indian, Black, and Latino/a individuals, “leak” out of the “pipeline” for a variety of personal, social, financial (economic), or cultural reasons. For American Indian and Alaska Native individuals, the term pipeline is especially offensive. More specifically, this term is pejorative for communities where pipeline projects in the US threaten sacred homelands and water supplies. Many people will recall the resistance of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their allies to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Recently, a new pipeline project impacting racially marginalized residents, including Black and low-income residents, living in the Southwest Crossings neighborhood of Houston, Texas, highlighted the continuing practice of divestment and displacement faced by these communities.

. . . .In place of pipeline, the term pathways has come into favor by many, including the AMA and the Association of American Medical Colleges. Pipeline implies that there is only 1 entry point and 1 exit, and frames career development as a passive process in which individuals are commodified as a resource to be delivered as a final result. Pipeline leaves out the contexts, complexities, and variations of the myriad pathways students may take in education from elementary and secondary school, through higher education, and on to a STEM or health professions field. Pipeline connotes extraction, transport, and removal from community, rather than investment in and nurturing of people and resources in place. Since many historically marginalized or minoritized racial and ethnic groups of students may take nontraditional or divergent career pathways, it remains critically important to use the more inclusive, accurate term of pathways. Use of pathways for this purpose communicates respect for students’ choices, agency, and career exploration.

Note first that the term “American Indian” is used. More on that in a second. What I am wondering here are two things. First, has anybody besides these three privileged authors ever objected to the use of the term “pipeline”—which is reserved for intellectual discussion of academic and social achievement—as insulting to their community? If so—and I do follow these things—I’ve never heard it.  Second, do the authors seriously believe that replacing “pipeline” with “pathway” is going to improve society? How, exactly, will that happen?  Are some “American Indian” and “Alaska Native” individuals who previously refused to discuss career achievement because the discussion involved the p-word, now going to participate eagerly with the new, improved word “pathway.”

I don’t believe it. what we have here is exactly what the authors decry in the next paragraph: “performative allyship”!

Equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts have been challenged by performative allyship and the persistent lack of commitment to equitable access from institutional leadership. Proclaiming representative diversity as the end goal establishes dominant cultural norms of tokenism, deficit framing, and devaluation of historically excluded students and their communities. The messaging must evolve to value diversity as a shared value that benefits individuals, communities, institutions, and ultimately, patients. Using pathways terminology can help move beyond representation to inclusive excellence. Medicine as a profession must decommodify the language around workforce development challenges and focus on the power of diversity and inclusion to enhance and improve medicine, primary health care and health equity.

But the authors’ entire article is an example of useless language policing—”performative allyship” from three privileged academics and physicians.  As for the rest of the paragraph above, it is so badly written that I am not sure what they are trying to say except that they are in favor of more diversity and less oppression.  Oh, and that medicine will improve when we substitute “pathways” for “pipeline”.  If you believe that, well, all I can say is, “Show me the data.”

One more point. For years now, the term “Indian” or “American Indian” has been considered pejorative itself, like saying “Negro” instead of “African American” or “black”.  Now it’s apparently back again:

Allies who do not identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, including influential medical educators, researchers, clinicians, authors, and journal editors in the US, should update their language with preference for the terms American Indian or Alaska Native.

The updating by the Language Police happens so fast that I can’t keep up with it.

The Associated Press’s Orwellian recommendations for journalists

June 22, 2023 • 10:00 am

If you’re going to use the adjective “Orwellian” to refer to authoritarianism and unsavory manipulation of people’s thoughts, you must have read at least two of his pieces: the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and his essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946), free online from The Orwell Foundation. They are of course connected; both involve the psychological manipulation of people for bad political ends, the former by government actions and the latter by manipulation of words.  Here are two bits from his essay:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

. . . Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

I’m sure that investigative journalist Gerald Posner didn’t write this piece out of right-winged animus or transphobia (he used to be the investigative reporter for The Daily Beast), but rather out of outrage about how other people are trying to change language to achieve political ends. And, at any rate, what matters is not his politics, but the veracity of his reports, which you can check for yourself.  His issue is the language around coverage of transgender politics, and his object is the Associated Press Style Guide, which, as he notes, is

. . . . the leading style and usage guide for many newspapers, magazines, newsrooms, and public relations offices. Journalists and editors largely abide by its grammar, spelling, and punctuation rules and specific styles for everything from numbers to acronyms.  AP editors are supposed to regularly update the Stylebook in order to keep up with changes in language and societal norms.

Modern woke political language however, doesn’t undergo a natural evolution over time; rather, it is imposed from above, and here it’s imposed by the AP Style Guide.

Click to read the piece on his “Just the Facts” Substack site:

Posner is approaching the 3,000 word (!) article on “Transgender Coverage” as an investigative journalist, giving examples of recommended and un-recommended usages. But he does come to a conclusion: it’s ideological and inaccurate.  You can see the data at the “Transgender Coverage Topical Guide” entry at the AP Stylebook.

And here’s Posner’s take on it all. Most of it I agree with, but one or two of his criticisms seems to me not wrong, but a tad exaggerated.

The revised Transgender entry runs 3,000 words, setting forth what it says is the acceptable standard for journalists when “writ[ing] about and interview[ing] transgender people.”  It starts with what seems like a good rule, that reporters must use “accurate, sensitive and unbiased language.”

The editors then proceed to trash the concepts of accuracy and “no bias.” The guide dictates the use of language that in some cases is factually incorrect. Or, as Orwell might have said, the AP editors did their best “to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Language matters.  Unfortunately, those in charge of setting the rules for the use of it are titling the standards to affect the coverage.

Sometimes, the AP Stylebook contradicts established science, other times ignore inconvenient evidence to the contrary, and repeatedly adopts rules that endorse only one side of what is a vigorous ongoing controversy.

Here are two examples of bad recommendations and one that I think doesn’t matter all that much. Posner’s words are indented, and the AP Stylebook recommendations in bold, italic type. My words are flush left.

BAD ONES:

 “Use the term sex assigned at birth instead of biological sex, birth gender, was identified at birth as, born a girl and the like…. Avoid terms like biological sex, along with biological male and biological female.”

On the issue of biology being so passé, the AP is insistent. A dozen times the style guide reinforces that a person’s gender is “assigned” at birth.  Richard Ostling, a former AP national reporter (now a GetReligion contributor), notes that, “That’s central to LGBTQ+ insistence that each infant’s gender is arbitrarily imposed from outside and subject to change, so this word allies the news media with one outlook in an intense societal debate.”

Ditching biological sex in one species of animal but not in every other species is unconscionable.  Why is human “gender” (they of course mean “biological sex”) assigned at birth instead of recognized at birth? When I divide piles of fruit flies into sexes, I am not “assigning their sex”, but recognizing it based on sexually dimorphic characters that are nearly perfectly correlated with biological sex. (Remember biologists define sex by the nature of the reproductive system that produces either large, immobile gametes [“females’], or small, mobile gametes [“males’]). I’ve dissected gazillions of male and female flies, and I’ve never seen a “normal-appearing” male with ovaries. (We very rarely get gynandromorphs: flies that are part male and part female, produced when an X chromosome gets lost during cell division in an embryo. But these are developmental accidents, not a “third sex”, and gynandromorphs occur in many animal species).  It would be strange indeed if sex was defined and recognized in animals and plants—except in H. sapiens!

This wording in bold is, of course, there to reinforce the gender activists’ wrongheaded claim that sex a “spectrum” and not binary.  And they claim this because gender (social sex roles) are more of a spectrum—though still bimodal.  It’s the reverse naturalistic fallacy: what you want to be true in nature is what you must see in nature. This language is used to reinforce that fallacy.

Also,

If children meet guidelines and are showing signs of puberty, they can begin taking puberty blockers — fully reversible prescription medication that pauses sexual maturation, typically given in injections or skin implants.

The AP editors — without any supporting citation or caveat — set the rule that journalists writing transgender stories must remember that puberty blockers are “fully reversible.”  Mixing some incorrect science into the style guide might be simple enough but has serious consequences.  That is especially true when the science shows there is a litany of serious, long term adverse effects to children who have been on those drugs. I highlighted some of those side effects in my recent WJS piece, “The Truth About Puberty Blockers.”

At least the style guide admits that “the evidence is mixed” about whether hormone treatments and surgery resolve the “stress, depression and suicidal thoughts” to which “transgender youth and adults are prone.”

The effects of puberty blockers, as we are coming to learn, are almost certainly not “fully reversible.” Nor are they without side effects. Nor are they able to “pause” puberty fully and innocuously while a child makes up its mind. This language is straight-out deceptive, and again plays into the agenda of extreme gender activists, who argue that there’s no harm involved in stopping sexual maturation while you decide whether to assume a gender different from the one you have.

NOT HORRIBLE BUT STILL MISLEADING:

“[In reporting on transgender people in sports] Don’t refer to male or female hormones. All people have the same hormones; only their levels vary. If discussion of hormones is needed, name the specific hormone(s)…. If transgender players of any gender are banned from playing on teams in line with their gender, say that.”

This is embarrassingly disingenuous. Men and women do indeed produce estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone but the ways their bodies manufacture those hormones means they have completely different blood concentrations and interactions with organs and muscles.

By ignoring the differences between male and female hormones is to ignore the differences that are key to why biological males have a physical advantage over biological females in athletics. Bone size and strength, greater muscle mass, and higher rates of metabolizing and releasing energy cannot be fully reversed after puberty. Males are, among with biological advantages, are more powerful at kicking and hitting; jumping higher; extra endurance; faster swimming and running speeds.

The results of a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2020 showed that different hormones between transmen and transwomen made a significant difference in “body composition and athletic performance.”

I think by now people know this, but the levels of testosterone and estrogen do differ on average between males and premenopausal females, with average testosterone levels very different and the distributions virtually nonoverlapping.  Posner is right that hiding hormone names is a way to minimize the profound effects that different levels of testosterone and (to a lesser extent) estrogen have on secondary sex traits, especially those involved in sports like size and musculature.  But I don’t really care if they use “testosterone” instead of “male hormone” because, as the AP says, both hormones are found in both sexes. So long as writers emphasize the effect that different levels of these hormones (especially “T”) have on secondary sex traits, I’m satisfied.

I do recommend, by the way, that you read Carole Hooven’s book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. It’s a good, accurate, and enlightening read.

There are others recommendations from the A.P. that you can read and assess, and Posner finishes with the AP’s suggestions about how to use phrases that actually “present still contested concepts as settled,” like that it’s fine to use “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women,”

Posner finishes with a two-sentence zinger that sums up his take on these Orwellian attempts to control language. He puts the AP recommendation in bold italics:

Of course, these rules are often more about following an ideology than acting as the premier style guide. If anyone doubts that, “Do not use the term transgenderism, which frames transgender identity as an ideology.”

A critique of woke language

June 12, 2023 • 9:30 am

The Atlantic is beginning to publish a number of articles critical of wokeness, and the one below is one of the best.  George Packer, a staff writer at the magazine, makes the case that “equity language” (you’ll know what it is, but I’ll give some examples) is proliferating, and that’s part of a deliberate strategy to hide uncomfortable truths from people as part of an ideological strategy. It is also, as he says, a form of performative political action: pretending to change the world while actually doing almost nothing.  While the aims of the language-purifiers are good—to help those who are less well off—they do no such thing, and the exponents of language purification actually realize this.  The gap between their aims and their accomplishments, argues Packer, bespeaks a deep pessimism about their ability to actually change anything.

Click to read; if you haven’t read the magazine lately it’s free, and I also found the article archived here.

 

I’ll put a few main points (and quotes) under my own headings, and compare Packer’s thesis to that espoused in Orwell’s wonderful essay Politics and the English Language (free online), as there are many similarities. Quotes from Packer and Orwell are indented; unless I say otherwise, I’m quoting Packer.

The ubiquity of equity language:

Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. The American Cancer Society has one. So do the American Heart Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Recreation and Park Association, the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and the University of Washington. The words these guides recommend or reject are sometimes exactly the same, justified in nearly identical language. This is because most of the guides draw on the same sources from activist organizations: A Progressive’s Style Guide, the Racial Equity Tools glossary, and a couple of others. The guides also cite one another. The total number of people behind this project of linguistic purification is relatively small, but their power is potentially immense.

Indeed it is. While you may refuse to stop using “field work” to refer to biology done outdoors, terms like “Latinx,” “enslaved person,” and “diverse person” have worked their way into everyday prose.  I myself have used all three of these, and of course you have to be au courant since the words keep changing as the ideological arguments shift. But one result from reading Packer’s work is that I will no longer sacrifice clarity to truckle to the ideology of a few people who decide what terms are proper. Terms like “brown bag lunch,” “Americans”, “blind to this idea”, and similar ones (all demonized) will remain in my vocabulary

Examples of equity language:

In the spirit of Strunk and White, the guides call for using specific rather than general terms, plain speech instead of euphemisms, active not passive voice. Yet they continually violate their own guidance, and the crusade to eliminate harmful language could hardly do otherwise. A division of the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work has abandoned field, as in fieldwork (which could be associated with slavery or immigrant labor) in favor of the obscure Latinism practicum. The Sierra Club offers refuse to take action instead of paralyzed by fear, replacing a concrete image with a phrase that evokes no mental picture. It suggests the mushy protect our rights over the more active stand up for our rights. Which is more euphemistic, mentally ill or person living with a mental-health condition? Which is more vague, ballsy or risk-taker? What are diversity, equity, and inclusion but abstractions with uncertain meanings whose repetition creates an artificial consensus and muddies clear thought? When a university administrator refers to an individual student as “diverse,” the word has lost contact with anything tangible—which is the point.

Or, as Orwell said, “words and meaning have almost parted company.”

Why these changes are ideological.

When the San Francisco Board of Supervisors replaces felon with justice-involved person, it is making an ideological claim—that there is something illegitimate about laws, courts, and prisons. If you accept the change—as, in certain contexts, you’ll surely feel you must—then you also acquiesce in the argument.

Likewise, banning the term “paralyzed by fear” (verboten because it’s ableist) has the rationale that describing one form of inaction or indecision somehow worsens the lot of people suffering from physical paralysis. There is of course no evidence for this; it’s an argument made purely to demonstrate that this kind of language hurts groups of people. If there were evidence that it really did, that would be one thing, but there is no evidence for such claims except in the worst cases of ethnic slurs. Can you find anybody actually injured by somone saying, “Tom is off in Montana doing field work”? No; the argument for harm is purely hypothetical. However, as Orwell realized, gaining power over language gives you political power—and that is the point of his essay (and one of the points of his book Nineteen Eighty-Four).

As Packer notes, these changes don’t occur the normal way words and phrases change: through an organic process that people adopt gradually. Instead, the ideological changes are imposed from above by diktat—imposed by a cadre of those who think they know what language will improve society and what language will not.

Why these changes suck the life out of prose. Both Packer and Orwell rewrote passages, putting them into politically correct language, to show how ludicrous the changes are:

Here’s Packer (by the way, I’m going to read Boo’s book):

Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a nonfiction masterpiece that tells the story of Mumbai slum dwellers with the intimacy of a novel. The book was published in 2012, before the new language emerged:

The One Leg’s given name was Sita. She had fair skin, usually an asset, but the runt leg had smacked down her bride price. Her Hindu parents had taken the single offer they got: poor, unattractive, hard-working, Muslim, old—“half-dead, but who else wanted her,” as her mother had once said with a frown.

Translated into equity language, this passage might read:

Sita was a person living with a disability. Because she lived in a system that centered whiteness while producing inequities among racial and ethnic groups, her physical appearance conferred an unearned set of privileges and benefits, but her disability lowered her status to potential partners. Her parents, who were Hindu persons, accepted a marriage proposal from a member of a community with limited financial resources, a person whose physical appearance was defined as being different from the traits of the dominant group and resulted in his being set apart for unequal treatment, a person who was considered in the dominant discourse to be “hardworking,” a Muslim person, an older person. In referring to him, Sita’s mother used language that is considered harmful by representatives of historically marginalized communities.

Equity language fails at what it claims to do. This translation doesn’t create more empathy for Sita and her struggles. Just the opposite—it alienates Sita from the reader, placing her at a great distance. A heavy fog of jargon rolls in and hides all that Boo’s short burst of prose makes clear with true understanding, true empathy.

Orwell did a similar thing:

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one.

Why the changes are made.  Of course we already know about the purpose of wokefying language. Although motivated by a form of compassion, the ultimate result, as the proponents may realize, is not only to gain linguistic and hence political power, but to take the sting out of hard reality: to make words like “slave” easier on the ear by calling them “enslaved people.”  And it of course is authoritarian, not only giving power to the language-changes but to demonize those who refuse to go along.  Both Packer and Orwell make these points.

Packer:

The whole tendency of equity language is to blur the contours of hard, often unpleasant facts. This aversion to reality is its main appeal. Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually easier to say people with limited financial resources than the poor. The first rolls off your tongue without interruption, leaves no aftertaste, arouses no emotion. The second is rudely blunt and bitter, and it might make someone angry or sad. Imprecise language is less likely to offend. Good writing—vivid imagery, strong statements—will hurt, because it’s bound to convey painful truths.

. . . and Orwell:

Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

(Note how well Orwell writes here, using metaphors that actually make you visualize something!)

In the end, politicizing language in this way (and I freely admit that there are a few words that should not be used; you can guess them), corrupts and kills language, corrupts thought, and gives power to those who don’t deserve it. The use of power is particularly invidious because those who mandate language changes are not the same group that the changes are aimed at helping. Language-changing is the purview of the privileged, of professors, and of those who realize that there’s an easy way to control the behavior of other people.

We all recognize that most of the suggested changes in words and phrases are performative; that is, they don’t effect any positive social change. (This is reminiscent of the drive to improve society by getting rid of the common names of all birds named after people, whether those people be good or bad.) The linguistic changes don’t bring different groups of people together or reduce divisions in society. Now perhaps some of the language police really think their efforts will make big changes in society, but it’s hard to argue that convincingly.

Instead, the main result is to make the privileged exponents of language change feel better about themselves—a form of linguistic narcissism.  But Packer does make a new and important point at the end: language-policing bespeaks a deep pessimism about the possibility of social change. Perhaps this is because its promoters realize that to really produce meaningful social change, we need long-term, difficult, and expensive work done to ensure, as far as possible, that all people get equal opportunities from birth. This is a practical impossibility, but we can surely get closer to that goal, though it will require real work and financial sacrifice from those who are better off off.  It’s curious, but not coincidental, that the both rejection of the idea of real progress and the drive to purify language, comes from the left, once the habitat of Free Speech.

Packer:

This huge expense of energy to purify language reveals a weakened belief in more material forms of progress. If we don’t know how to end racism, we can at least call it structural. The guides want to make the ugliness of our society disappear by linguistic fiat. Even by their own lights, they do more ill than good—not because of their absurd bans on ordinary words like congresswoman and expat, or the self-torture they require of conscientious users, but because they make it impossible to face squarely the wrongs they want to right, which is the starting point for any change. Prison does not become a less brutal place by calling someone locked up in one a person experiencing the criminal-justice system. Obesity isn’t any healthier for people with high weight. It’s hard to know who is likely to be harmed by a phrase like native New Yorker or under fire; I doubt that even the writers of the guides are truly offended. But the people in Behind the Beautiful Forevers know they’re poor; they can’t afford to wrap themselves in soft sheets of euphemism. Equity language doesn’t fool anyone who lives with real afflictions. It’s meant to spare only the feelings of those who use it.

The project of the guides is utopian, but they’re a symptom of deep pessimism. They belong to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions, argument is no longer desirable, each viewpoint has its own impenetrable dialect, and only the most fluent insiders possess the power to say what is real. What I’ve described is not just a problem of the progressive left. The far right has a different vocabulary, but it, too, relies on authoritarian shibboleths to enforce orthodoxy. It will be a sign of political renewal if Americans can say maddening things to one another in a common language that doesn’t require any guide.

And Orwell’s ending:

. . . one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs.

Speaking of dustbins, I’m making an effort to unwoken my language, and I’d recommend that you think twice before you automatically adopt the politically correct recommendations.  I’ve been using some PC language, even on this website—going along to get along. But that’s not a good reason for changing one’s writing.

h/t: Merilee

The University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute changes its name

April 24, 2023 • 10:10 am

104 years after its founding, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is no longer going to be called that; it’s changed its name to the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Africa & North Africa (ISAC).  Founded in 1919 with the approval (and funding) of John D. Rockefeller, it has a venerable history of research, and its museum, which I pass every day on my way home, is well worth visiting if you come here. (It’s “donate what you want” to get in.) Here are a few photos I took in 2018, especially of ducks and cats.

This is my favorite: it’s a “Human-Headed Winged Bull (lamassu), Palace of the Assyrian king Sargon II (721–705 BCE), Dur-Sharrukin (modern Khorsabad), excavated by ISAC’s Iraq Expedition (A7369). One of approximately 350,000 objects available in the collections search.” It’s HUGE, going from floor to ceiling (this photo is not mine but from the ISAC site). Imagine moving this from Iraq to Chicago (I hope the acquisition was kosher):

It’s a great place, no matter what it’s called, but, as Wikipedia notes, beginning with Edward Said the noun and adjective “Oriental” began to be seen as pejorative: reducing Asians to some exotic, mysterious aspect of their character—in other words, stereotyping them. As Wikipedia notes,

In the 2010s, multiple organizations within the U.S. began reconsidering the use of the word “Oriental,” as some scholars felt the word was alienating and that it had changed in popular meaning. In March 2023, University of Chicago administrators announced they would be changing the name of the Oriental Institute. Interim director Theo van den Hout said, “Our current name has caused confusion, often contributing to the perception that our work is focused on East Asia, rather than West Asia and North Africa. Additionally, the word “oriental” has developed a pejorative connotation in modern English.” In April 2023, the organization’s name changed to the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Asia & North Africa, abbreviated as ISAC. The institute’s new logo features a lotus flower, which is found in ancient Assyrian, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian art, as well as being a decorative motif on the ISAC building.

Well, I guess the confusion lasted over a hundred years, but we all know that the name was changed because “Oriental” began to be seen as either racist or “othering”.  In reality, I think, the Institute was named simply because “Oriental” meant “east of the Mediterranean”, which pretty much reflected the work going on there. It surely did NOT refer to people, but to an area.  So I’m a bit sad to see that concise and venerable name changed to something that’s a big mouthful. On the other hand, I can’t get too worked up about it because the connotation of words changes. I’ll just refer you to three articles on the Museum, and recommend that you come see it if you’re on campus. It’s well worth it, and right across the street from the main Quad.

From the University of Chicago News site:

From the Hyde Park Herald (local paper):

 

The Chicago Maroon (student paper):

Here’s the new lotus-flower symbol that the institution has adopted, and they’re busy now effacing “Oriental institute” from the building and its signs.

Man loses job after using the word “ladies”, deemed by DEI experts to be a microaggression

April 7, 2023 • 10:45 am

This article from the Boston Globe reports how the top candidate for the job of superintendent of Easthampton Public Schools (he’d been offered the job) had his offer withdrawn when it was discovered—horrors!—that he’d used the word “ladies” in an email to two women.  In the article, various DEI experts weigh in, all explaining why the term “ladies” (as often used in the salutation “ladies and gentlemen”) is offensive and even racist. First, though, see how the public defended him, which shows that they’re more sensible than DEI experts:

After the leading candidate for superintendent of Easthampton Public Schools claimed he lost his job offer for using the word “ladies” in an e-mail, he said he was “shocked” because he “grew up in a time when ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’ was a sign of respect.”

He wasn’t the only one; more than 150 people showed up to protest the school committee’s decision to revoke Vito Perrone’s offer, and the Globe’s initial story racked up more than 750 comments, with plenty of readers supporting the salutation.

Vito Perrone, leading candidate for superintendent of the Easthampton Public Schools, said his job offer was abruptly rescinded after he wrote an e-mail to the School Committee chairwoman and another female colleague, addressing them as “ladies.”

Click the article to read; if it’s paywalled, a judicious inquiry might yield you a pdf:

Now all the experts trot onstage, and without exception they say that the word “ladies” shouldn’t be used:

While not everyone will be offended, several diversity and inclusion experts told the Globe, the word has a long and complicated history, and can hold negative connotations when used in inappropriate settings, such as in contract negotiations in Perrone’s case. Instead, it’s best to ask people how they want to be addressed to avoid alienating or upsetting anyone, they said.

Here we go:

Elisa van Dam, vice president of allyship and inclusion at the Institute for Inclusive Leadership at Simmons University, said the word “ladies” can be infantilizing in a professional setting. Perrone had used the term to address two women in leadership positions, School Committee Chair Cynthia Kwiecinski and the committee’s executive assistant, Suzanne Colby.

The idea of lady does not correlate or does not lead you to a woman who is in charge and in power and has her work really under control,” Dam said. “It’s none of the things that you want to be thought of as a woman in business or in any kind of hiring situation.”

She said a candidate addressing women as “ladies” at any stage of the hiring process can raise questions about the candidate’s judgment.

“It’s tone deaf. It seems that he hasn’t been paying attention to the way language use has been evolving and how we are talking about diversity and equity and inclusion and belonging,” Dam said. “He’s operating on a very old paradigm.”

Infantilizing! Tone deaf! Diversity and equity and inclusing and belonging, oh my! (The phrase “tone deaf”, like “stakeholder” is nearly always a red flag, and “tone deaf” is not an argument but a slur.) And so, because a “man of age” is operating on an old paradigm (one that Christopher Hitchens often used), he can’t get the job.

Here comes another DEI expert:

It might be common, and feel natural, to address a group of women as ladies, but Karl Reid, chief inclusion officer at Northeastern University, said it is still important to ask people how to refer to them, as a sign of respect.

“No one group is a monolith, everyone is individual,” Reid said. “And understanding what is acceptable to that individual, then we are a step towards welcoming a more inclusive environment.”

If you’re writing someone an email whom you haven’t written before, do you call them up and ask how they want to be addressed? Or do you just use “hello” as a salutation?

. . . . And another Pecksniff who finds the word racist and patronizing:

While some people may appreciate being addressed as “ladies,” it can be an informal and inappropriate word to use when negotiating contract stipulations and in the workplace, said Jen Manion, a professor of history and sexuality, women’s and gender studies at Amherst College. And if someone referred to them in such a way at work, Manion said they would “flip.”

“Nobody ever calls me a lady at work,” Manion said. “It’s one thing to say while speaking to friends.” The word has “historic baggage,” Manion said, as it was often associated with women-only spaces, such as passenger cars and public bathrooms, that were created for “keeping women separate and keeping women of color out of those spaces.” The term represented a group of women who fit a certain race or class, Manion said, and it also evokes a time when women weren’t allowed to work, and were expected to be soft spoken and demure.

But this is no longer true, and who on Earth even KNOWS about that outmoded usage? (Only the Pecksniffs who do the historical digging. Which reminds me of a story about Dr. Johnson and his dictionary. . . . ) Now “ladies” is simply a polite way to address women.

Manion goes on at length:

Because of that context, Manion said “ladies” can come off as patronizing and demeaning.

“It is a phrase people throw around widely without thinking,” Manion said. “How would [Perrone] have phrased the e-mail if it was two men?”

He would have said “gentlemen,” as I often do when writing to a group of men!  But Manion can’t shut up about how demeaning “ladies” is. She (if that’s her pronoun) even calls the use of the word “an accident”:

Manion said better ways to address a group of people could include “y’all,” “everyone,” “folks,” “friends,” and “people.”

Reid said it’s important for those involved in situations like these to learn from what happened and how the meaning behind certain words could be seen as offensive.

“When these accidents occur, there is an expectation that we should have meaningful discourse about what is acceptable … to create a more inclusive institution,” Reid said. “It’s an opportunity to have a meaningful conversation.”

Y’all??? That’s far more racist than “ladies”, and is used not only by black people, but by the southern descendants of enslavers.

So because of this one word, used with every intent to be polite, the Easthampton Public Schools lost its best candidate. That’s simply asinine and ridiculous. Look at the tradeoff: they gave away their best candidate so that the word “ladies” could be publicly and eternally demonized. These DEI “experts” should be treated with the ridicule and contempt they deserve.

h/t: Anna

Change the language of ecology and evolutionary biology! An example from sickle-cell anemia.

March 8, 2023 • 9:00 am

I may have mentioned this article from Trends in Ecology & Evolution before, as it outlines all the possible harms that the language of ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB) can cause. Click to read:

Here’s one bit:

In recent years, events such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and waves of anti-Black violence have highlighted the need for leaders in EEB to adopt inclusive and equitable practices in research, collaboration, teaching, and mentoring.

As we plan for a more inclusive future, we must also grapple with the exclusionary history of EEB. Much of Western science is rooted in colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, and these power structures continue to permeate our scientific culture.

Here, we discuss one crucial way to address this history and make EEB more inclusive for marginalized communities: our choice of scientific terminology.

By now you should be familiar with this kind of writing, which can be simply copied from one scientific field practicum to another. Chemistry and physics have their own papers calling for a new inclusive terminology, too.

And once again we see the unproven assertion that the “colonialist, white supremacist, and patriarchal” nature of EEB has excluded minorities, and also that the language of the field practicum has been partly responsible for that exclusion.

This is doubly fallacious. It is neither the nature nor the language of science that has kept minorities out of the EEB pipeline, but racism in the past, bigotry whose effects have never been repaired, creating a longstanding underclass. It is change in the nature of society, not in the nature of science, that will create the equal opportunity allowing oppressed people access to careers in science.

And frankly, I consider the claim that the language of our field has contributed to that exclusion a risible proposition. “Field”, for example, which refers to an area of study, has been deemed racist because it harkens back to the days of the plantation. The folks at Stanford have decreed that it’s to be replaced by “practicum.” Thus the age-old ecological tradition of “fieldwork” is now supposed to be “my practicum of studying ecology in the outdoors.” That suggestion would be hilarious if it weren’t true.

Further, the journal American Naturalist has suggested that EEB is ridden with ableist terms, including the population-genetic concept of “fitness”. (By the way, that is my most-viewed post of all time, with nearly 150,000 views.) If any disabled person has been kept out of EEB by this term, or any others, I’d like to know about it, for of course this article gives no such instances.

The article above links to a fill-in form in which you can suggest your own inclusive or innocuous term to replace harmful ones.  Go to this page by clicking on the screenshot:

This is part of “The EEB Language Project,”  which aims to increase equity in the field practicum by changing words. You are invited to note your own “harmful term”, suggest a more inclusive replacement term, and then give comments. In this way the language of EEB will be Newspeaked into equity.

Now despite the patronizing nature of this project, much less its futility, it’s amusing for those of us in EEB to think of such terms. A colleague and I came up with half a dozen in just five minutes. Here’s one that, I’m sure, has stifled diversity in the field greatly. But to explain it, I must give a biology lesson.

Harmful term:  “Heterozyote advantage”.

What it means: This is an example of where the genetic constitution at a single locus (chromosome site) is such that the heterozygote, containing two different gene forms, has a “fitness advantage” (substitute your own less ableist language) over either of the two homozygotes.  The classic example (and one of the few we know of) involves the genetic disease sickle-cell anemia.

There are two forms at this gene, which produces the beta chain of hemoglobin: “S“, the so-called “normal allele” (substitute more inclusive language), and the mutant form (you can say “alternative allele”) s, responsible for causing the debilitating disease sickle-cell anemia.

The “s” allele arose when a mutation in the DNA coding for the beta chain (in the genetic code, GAG—>GTG), changed the amino acid in position six of the Hb β chain from glutamic acid to valine. That changes the charge of the hemoglobin molecule, affecting its behavior in the presence of the parasite. If you have only one copy of the mutant form (allele), ergo are a heterozygote with the genetic constitution Ss, you produce half normal and half abnormal hemoglobin, but half is good enough to allow you good health. And if you have two copies of the normal allele (SS), you’re of course also fine.

But if you have two copies of the sickle-cell allele (ss); you get sickle-cell disease, and will have a painful illness and in all probability die young.

The twist in this story is that if you are a heterozygote in West Africa, where malaria is prevalent and often fatal, the heterozygote has both good health and protection against malaria compared to the normal and abnormal “homozygotes”, SS and ss. We’re not sure why this is, but the presence of the single sickle-cell allele in a carrier makes its blood cells break open prematurely when infected by the malarial parasite. This impedes reproduction of the sporozoan parasite that causes malaria so Ss “carriers” gain some protection against the infectious disease. Normal homozygotes (SS) have blood cells that rupture on schedule, so if you’re SS, you can get malaria and die.

Thus we have a situation, but only in areas with malaria, where the normal homozygote is healthy but prone to malaria, the sickle-cell homozygote (ss) gets the genetic disease and dies young, but the heterozygote (Ss) is protected from both malaria and from sickle-cell disease. This is the classic case of heterozygote advantage (also called “heterosis”, “balanced polymorphism,” or “overdominance”).

If you measure the relative reproductive output of the three genotypes, giving the fittest one (Ss) a fitness of 1.0, you get these figures

SS = 0.85 (they produce 15% fewer offspring than Ss genotypes because of malaria)

Ss = 1.0. (genotype with highest production of offspring)

ss = about 0 (they don’t survive to produce any offspring).

Geneticists love this case because when the heterozygotes have the highest fitness, it actually maintains both alleles at stable frequencies in the population. Heterozygote advantage is a way to keep genetic variation in a malaria-ridden population. You can show that this fitness scheme will result in stable equilibrium allele frequencies of S = 0.87 and s = 0.13. As I said, this is a stable frequency, and if the gene frequencies deviate from it, they will return to the equilibrium.

In west Africa, the frequencies of the two alleles in fact match these predicted frequencies very well, supporting the value of mathematical population genetics. The frequency of homozygous ss individuals is the square of the frequency of the s allele, or about 1.7%.  It is a sad but ineluctable result of population genetics that because heterozygotes are the fittest genotypes, roughly 2% of the offspring will be born with a fatal disease, and this is simply because the individual with two different alleles has the highest fitness. There is no single allele whose homozygote has the highest fitness, and so, generation after generation, this fitness scheme above produces a large number of doomed infants. (One could take the absence of such an allele as evidence against God, who could have created one. Apparently the death of genetically diseased infants serves some purpose in the deity’s scheme.)

In the U.S., where malaria is almost unknown, the fitness scheme above reverts to one in which the SS genotype has the highest fitness, Ss is a tiny bit lower (Ss individuals can have occasional sickling “crises”), and that of ss remains zero. Eventually, in areas lacking malaria, every individual will become SS and the “s” allele will be eliminated.

It is because of the ancestry of many American blacks from West Africa that one sees sickle-cell anemia almost exclusively in the offspring of two individuals descended from that area (Ss X Ss, one-quarter of whose offspring will have the disease). But in the U.S., lacking malaria, natural selection will eventually eliminate the “s” allele. It will, however, be very slow.

One last note: sickle-cell anemia was the first “molecular disease” ever discovered: a disease caused by a mutation in a single gene that alters the protein it produces. And it was discovered by none other than Linus Pauling and his colleagues, who published this famous paper in Science in 1949 (click screenshot to read, or go here if you’re paywalled).

Now, on to the language issue:

Why the term “heterozygote advantage” is harmful. You notice in the above discussion I’ve used several verboten terms in EEB, including “normal allele”, “mutant allele”, and “fitness.”

To that I will add the term “heterozygote advantage” itself, which is harmful in two ways. First, the term “hetero” privileges heterosexual individuals over other LGBTQ+ individuals. And the idea that Ss individuals have a “fitness advantage” is doubly harmful, for it not only incorporates the ableist term “fitness,” but suggests that one genotype has an “advantage” over the other two. In reality, the SS and ss individuals are to be seen as “differently abled”, although I can’t manage to find a way that ss individuals with sickle-cell disease are “abled”. Some deep thought may suggest a way.

What the term should be replaced with.  This is dead obvious: “diversity advantage“.  The Ss genotype is best because it has the most diverse allelic constitution, possessing two alleles instead of one.  It privileges diversity over boring homogeneity, a result that is also a bonus.

From now on I suggest that my new term, which is mine, replace “balanced polymorphism,” “heterozygote advantage” (ableist), “overdominance” (that’s wholly offensive, conjuring up eugenics and superiority), and “heterosis” (again with the offensive “hetero”).

This is my contribution to inclusive language in EEB, which is mine. Lest you think the suggestion is dumb, remember that it’s no dumber than the notions of “relative fitness” and “fieldwork”, all slated for erasure in the new woke dictionary of EEB.

The Atlantic unpacks (and criticizes) woke language

March 3, 2023 • 9:30 am

I don’t keep up with the politics of The Atlantic much: even though I have a subscription, I rarely get time to read it. But reader David sent me a link to the piece below, which turns out to be a trenchant critique of the verbiage of the woke, which is called “equity language”, why it keeps constantly changing, and why there’s so much concentration by “progressives” on the ideologically proper use of words. It turns out, as we all knew on some level, that the usage and constant turnover is simply a way to demonstrate one’s belief in the need to change society without actually having to do so. In other words, the obsession with language is performative. You can read the many posts on ideology and language on this site by clicking here.

Click the screenshot below to read the piece (free); it’s by George Packer, a staff writer at the magazine.

While some changes in language are clearly salubrious, most seem either unnecessary, even ludicrous.  Most of the language changes are meant to elevate “the minoritized” (that’s one of the improved words), and so the names of groups keep changing.  “Latino” has given way to “Latinx”, and that to “Latine”, while in the meantime most Hispanics don’t even know about this and never use those “progressive” terms. “Field”, as in “fieldwork,” was eliminated because of its imagined connection with enslaved persons (another neologism) working on the plantation, along with “brown bag lunch” (racist), “stand up for your rights” (it’s abelist!), “felon” (now “justice-involved person”) and yesterday I discovered that even the notion of “gun control” was considered racist.

Packer’s article gives a list of these words, shows how they change frequently, and discusses how the changes are promulgated by elite organizations and academics:

The liturgy changes without public discussion, and with a suddenness and frequency that keep the novitiate off-balance, forever trying to catch up, and feeling vaguely impious. A ban that seemed ludicrous yesterday will be unquestionable by tomorrow. The guides themselves can’t always stay current. People of color becomes standard usage until the day it is demoted, by the American Heart Association and others, for being too general. The American Cancer Society prefers marginalized to the more “victimizing” underresourced or underserved—but in the National Recreation and Park Association’s guide, marginalized now acquires “negative connotations when used in a broad way. However, it may be necessary and appropriate in context. If you do use it, avoid ‘the marginalized,’ and don’t use marginalized as an adjective.” Historically marginalized is sometimes okay; marginalized people is not. The most devoted student of the National Recreation and Park Association guide can’t possibly know when and when not to say marginalized; the instructions seem designed to make users so anxious that they can barely speak. But this confused guidance is inevitable, because with repeated use, the taint of negative meaning rubs off on even the most anodyne language, until it has to be scrubbed clean. The erasures will continue indefinitely, because the thing itself—injustice—will always exist.

Orwell would have a field day with this: in his famous 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language“,he discussed the use of euphemisms to soften hard truths:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

Modern euphemisms in equity language are less violent, but nevertheless, according to Packer, serve the same purpose:

The whole tendency of equity language is to blur the contours of hard, often unpleasant facts. This aversion to reality is its main appeal. Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually easier to say people with limited financial resources than the poor. The first rolls off your tongue without interruption, leaves no aftertaste, arouses no emotion. The second is rudely blunt and bitter, and it might make someone angry or sad. Imprecise language is less likely to offend. Good writing—vivid imagery, strong statements—will hurt, because it’s bound to convey painful truths.

Clearly Packer has read Orwell, whose essay said this:

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.

If you have time this weekend, do read Orwell’s essay, a classic piece that still resonates today.

One part of Packer’s essay that I like is that he translated a bit of Katherine Boo’s book Behind the Beautiful Forevers—a factual account of her three years spent living in the Mumbai slums—into equity language, just as Orwell translated plain language into Newspeak above. Packer argues that Boo’s book, which he sees as a “masterpiece,” could never be published today.

For this bit. . .

The One Leg’s given name was Sita. She had fair skin, usually an asset, but the runt leg had smacked down her bride price. Her Hindu parents had taken the single offer they got: poor, unattractive, hard-working, Muslim, old—“half-dead, but who else wanted her,” as her mother had once said with a frown.

. . . would, translated into today’s equity language, go like this:

Sita was a person living with a disability. Because she lived in a system that centered whiteness while producing inequities among racial and ethnic groups, her physical appearance conferred an unearned set of privileges and benefits, but her disability lowered her status to potential partners. Her parents, who were Hindu persons, accepted a marriage proposal from a member of a community with limited financial resources, a person whose physical appearance was defined as being different from the traits of the dominant group and resulted in his being set apart for unequal treatment, a person who was considered in the dominant discourse to be “hardworking,” a Muslim person, an older person. In referring to him, Sita’s mother used language that is considered harmful by representatives of historically marginalized communities.

That’s a bit overdone, but the point is that equity language is meant to soften the hard facts by putting a more empathic face on them. The change of “slave” to “enslaved person,” for instance, is meant to emphasize that slaves were people, not chattel. Does the change improve our understanding of or empathy for these people? I don’t know, and I’m not going to die on that hill, but it certainly makes language uglier, harder to use, and, most of all, intimidates nearly all writers and speakers into using ideologically approved language.

What hill I will die on is the contention that using such language, and the concentration of effort going into not just changing it constantly but policing others into using it does nothing to improve society. Yet these very changes supposedly are aimed at changing society.

The virus has struck biology, too: one example is the drive to change the common terms for species named after “bad” people, like Audubon, to more neutral names (see here and here). “Black holes” has been termed racist language, and evolutionary biology seen as ableist. Will all this linguistic Pecksniffery create social justice and improve the lot of the disadvantaged? You’d be hard pressed to make that case. But science, like everyday language, is constantly being trawled by the Purity Police.

Packer concludes, correctly, that the name changing reflects a desire for social justice. But it winds up as a displacement behavior, like that seen in animals. A bird who is pecked at by another, for instance, may in turn peck at a leaf in frustration. It doesn’t create avian equity, but at least the victimized bird can do something. Likewise, “progressives” displace their realization that society can’t be materially changed in an easy way into language-policing, which can change something (my emphasis). Packer’s conclusion:

This huge expense of energy to purify language reveals a weakened belief in more material forms of progress. If we don’t know how to end racism, we can at least call it structural. The guides want to make the ugliness of our society disappear by linguistic fiat. Even by their own lights, they do more ill than good—not because of their absurd bans on ordinary words like congresswoman and expat, or the self-torture they require of conscientious users, but because they make it impossible to face squarely the wrongs they want to right, which is the starting point for any change. Prison does not become a less brutal place by calling someone locked up in one a person experiencing the criminal-justice system. Obesity isn’t any healthier for people with high weight. It’s hard to know who is likely to be harmed by a phrase like native New Yorker or under fire; I doubt that even the writers of the guides are truly offended. But the people in Behind the Beautiful Forevers know they’re poor; they can’t afford to wrap themselves in soft sheets of euphemism. Equity language doesn’t fool anyone who lives with real afflictions. It’s meant to spare only the feelings of those who use it.

The project of the guides is utopian, but they’re a symptom of deep pessimism. They belong to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions, argument is no longer desirable, each viewpoint has its own impenetrable dialect, and only the most fluent insiders possess the power to say what is real. What I’ve described is not just a problem of the progressive left. The far right has a different vocabulary, but it, too, relies on authoritarian shibboleths to enforce orthodoxy. It will be a sign of political renewal if Americans can say maddening things to one another in a common language that doesn’t require any guide.

This is a good essay that makes a point that we’ve all known in our hearts, but makes that point as clear as water. Few of the changes suggested by the woke really eliminate offense to people (were “Latinos” offended by that term?), and almost none of them mitigate “harm.” They are there for one reason: to show the ideology and purity of the Enforcers.

I thought the Atlantic was generally pro-woke, but once in a while they publish something ideologically sensible, and this is one example.

 

h/t: David