‘Picnic’, ‘women’ among list of words now deemed too offensive
We are living at a bewildering time, as yesterday’s euphemisms and woke terminology become tomorrow’s taboos. If you think language policing is largely practised by US arts students, think again.
Picnic. Women. Young. Old. Smartphone. Addict. All these words have something in common: they belong to a growing list of seemingly innocuous terms that have been deemed by universities, government departments and professional associations to be offensive or problematic.
In our era of performative kindness, representation and inclusion – not to mention sensitivity readers and open letters aimed at cancelling writers and thinkers deemed to have crossed a line – we are seeing a laudable rejection of racist, homophobic and sexist slurs turn into something more troubling: a regime of language policing that makes George Orwell’s Newspeak sound reasonable.
In June 2021, the Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Centre (PARC) at America’s Brandeis University released an “Oppressive Language List” which included the words and expressions “killing it” and “trigger warning” – because of their purported “connections to guns” – as well as “picnic”, “people of colour”, “crazy”, “addict” and “homeless person”.
Among the new additions was the expression “whipped into shape” which, according to PARC, could evoke “imagery of enslavement and torture’’. PARC also urged students to replace “addict” with “person with a substance abuse disorder” – such terminology is being increasingly used in the health field – and recommended that “homeless person’’ be abandoned in favour of “person who is experiencing housing insecurity’’.
Clearly, if Brandeis’s language launderers have their way, songs from Beyonce’s Crazy In Love to Queen’s Crazy Little Thing Called Love would come with trigger warnings – sorry – content notes.
If you think such language policing is largely practised by American arts students with too much time on their hands, think again. It’s happening in Australia too, in bureaucracies, universities, schools, the health sector and corporate human resources departments, and it extends to everyday words and phrases including “women”, “he”, “she”, “old”, “young”, “disabled parking”, “ethnic group” and “special education”.
All of these terms are being deemed exclusionary or potentially offensive by an army of right-thinking academics and bureaucrats who believe they can empower minorities by engaging in a kind of linguistic puritanism.
Harvard University Psychology professor Steven Pinker, who is giving a keynote address at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas tomorrow, coined the term “euphemism treadmill” back in 1994. Professor Pinker said this involved inventing “new polite words to refer to emotionally laden or distasteful things, but the euphemism becomes tainted by association and the new one that must be found acquires its own negative connotations’’.
One example that comes to mind is how the word “handicapped” was replaced by “the disabled”, then “differently abled”. This term was (thankfully) ditched in the shift towards people-first language such as “person with a disability”. But recently, some disabled people have said they prefer the more succinct “disabled person”.
At the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Pinker will ask whether we are entering a new dark age and whether Enlightenment tenets – reason, science and humanism – are being eroded “by a desire to burn it all down’’.https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/picnic-women-among-words-deemed-too...Good question.
And a good summary:
Writing in The Atlantic in response to the widely-mocked PARC list, US author and academic John McWhorter argued: “We are being preached to by people on a quest to change reality through the performative policing of manners’’. He said the list was “a sign of our times, in which language policing has reached a near fever pitch, out of a sense that labelling common terms and expressions as ‘problematic’ – that is, blasphemous – is essential to changing society”.
McWhorter, author of the incisive and provocative book Woke Racism, rightly concludes that “in the end, working to change conditions is much more important than obsessively curating the words and expressions we use to describe them”.
The woke talk shite so as not to actually DO anything. Isn't it, tsk, tsk
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