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.