Scarcely a day passes without a newspaper story about some absurd ‘language guide’ issued by a public body. This week the Daily Mail reported that Wokingham Borough Council had told its staff not to use the phrase ‘hard-working families’ in case it offended the unemployed. Other verboten words included ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitewash’, and staff were warned that ‘sustained eye contact could be considered aggressive’ in some cultures. I don’t think they meant supporters of Millwall football club, but you never know.
Not to be outdone, Cardiff University has told its students to avoid using ‘British-English’ phrases such as ‘kill two birds with one stone’, ‘break a leg’ and ‘a piece of cake’ because they won’t be understood by people who didn’t grow up speaking English. Couldn’t you make the same argument for removing all the Welsh road signs in Cardiff? After all, less than 30 per cent of Welsh people actually understand the language, so that’s a majority of the indigenous population who stare at them in bafflement.
The university’s guidance – which also cautions against using ‘sexist’ idioms such as ‘man up’ or ‘like a girl’ – is part of an ‘equality, diversity and inclusion awareness module’ that’s mandatory for all first-year students. Surely any self-respecting fresher handed this list of banned phrases would try to cram as many of them as possible into his first essay? That was my response when, arriving at Vanity Fair in the mid-1990s, I was given a list of words by the editor that he never wanted to see in the magazine. They included ‘bed-sitter’, ‘chuckled’, ‘honcho’ and ‘funky’.
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