The war against words

The University of Washington technology department has banned the word ‘housekeeping’. Not because the ‘problematic’ noun is overtly ist (ableist, sexist, racist, ageist…; by now, you must know the ist list). No, because it ‘feels gendered’. Would that they’d simply banned housekeeping. I hate scrubbing the shower.

This month, the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work proscribed the word ‘field’. ‘Field work’ might have unpleasant connotations for the descendants of slaves. (Sorry! Descendants of ‘enslaved people’. Nouns that reference persons – like, you know, ‘doctor’ – are reductive and dehumanising.) A ‘field of study’ is henceforth a ‘practicum’. Presumably we’ll now protect corn crops from ‘pasture mice’ and the British army’s highest rank will be a ‘meadow marshal’. What about Matthew 6:28? ‘And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the practicum grow. They do not labour or spin.’

Righteous, underemployed academic mischief-makers once occupied themselves with euphemism churn: we’ve no sooner biddably started calling black people in the US ‘African-Americans’ than we’re informed that hyphenation is ‘othering’ and we’re meant to employ the jagged acronym BIPOC instead – which sounds like a disfiguring  disease. But lately, these strong-arming semantic scolds are keener on simply smashing to smithereens whole flights of freshly verboten vocabulary, the linguistic equivalent of clay pigeon shooting.

So if you think you’re modern for having registered that ‘gyp’ is rude, you’re way behind the times. ‘American’ is rude; only ‘US citizen’ will do. ‘Seminal’ is sexist. ‘Ballsy’, alas, ‘attributes personality traits to anatomy’. Forget ‘lame’, lest you ‘trivialise’ the experience of the disabled – yikes! – I mean, people living with disabilities. Why, speaking of lame, Stanford University’s Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative released its recommendations in December. Our compendium of terminological traif runs to 13 pages. After ploughing through this whole po-faced document, whose philological massacre would erase the very history it feigns to respect, I was dismayed to learn that I can’t even ‘commit suicide’ any more.

Most popular

Kristina Murkett

There’s an obvious reason pre-school children are falling behind

Much as we can now only have pretzels on planes, we can’t play to the ‘peanut gallery’, either, as it refers to ‘the cheapest and worst section in theatres where many Black people sat during the Vaudeville era’.