One of the aims of progressives in higher education ought to be to use their privileged position to spread knowledge to their fellow citizens. In the all but forgotten world of the original socialist movement, radicals aimed in the words of the Workers Educational Association (founded 1903) to bring ‘education within reach of everyone who needs it’.
How does this noble aim fit with the constant and needless urge to police and rewrite the language 99 per cent of the population use? To create elite discourses, to exclude and obfuscate, to launch linguistic heresy hunts, to preen yourself on knowing the latest jargon, and to punish the untutored for no valid intellectual reason whatsoever?
The latest example comes from the Cambridge University Press. It has decided that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is no longer a description of the Germanic tribes who invaded southern Britain after the departure of the Romans, fought the Vikings, became the subjects of Norman colonial overlords, and gave us much of our language, but is in some unspecified manner racist.
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