My list of banned words

North America’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Language Project has released yet another list of Bad Say. Scientists are to swap ‘male’ and ‘female’ for ‘sperm-producing’ and ‘egg-producing’ – as presumably most biologists are stuck in remedial learning and haven’t yet got to the chapter explaining that humans come in only two sexes. But rather than opt for another chortle at these petty rhetorical tyrants’ expense, I’m regarding turnabout as fair play. Behold, a by no means complete list of the expressions I’m banning right back.

‘Black and brown bodies’ – a bizarrely dehumanising reduction of people to biomass, often disconcertingly employed by the very folks in possession of said black and brown bodies. If others control or injure your body, they control or injure you. A person is a sentient being; a body is a thing. A person, once dead, as far as we know, is gone; a body can be a corpse.