“You Can’t Say That!”
Many years ago, as a social psychologist specializing in gender equity, I was invited to attend a weekend workshop at the Air Force Academy, designed to suggest ways to reduce prejudice against women, who were inching up to the 10% level. At one of our first sessions, the topic of sexist humor arose. A senior officer grumbled that he always asked his junior officers if it was OK with them if he told them a joke, and they invariably said yes.
Here was his joke:
Q: Why do doctors always spank a newborn baby?
A: So the penises will fall off the dumb ones.
The room fell silent, though I imagined every female subordinate thinking, “Who among us will say no, sir, I’d rather not hear your joke, which for some reason I suspect won’t be funny?” And then the department secretary, an elegant woman in her 60s, rose to her feet and said to the officer, as if to a misbehaving schoolboy, “I was always raised to believe that if you have to ask permission to tell a joke, you know you shouldn’t.”
In the endless (hopeless) quest to scrub humanity of prejudices and rudeness, along with bad jokes, the gentle-but-barbed approach of the secretary has been superseded by efforts to specify every action, joke, phrase, and word that might be offensive—not only to the recipient, but to any observer. The University of California, Irvine (UCI), is the latest to attempt to demonstrate their commitment to “equity, diversity, and inclusion” (DEI) by providing helpful guidelines on what words and terms “reflect these values.” In so doing it joins many other institutions that are trying to cleanse the language, including Brandeis, the University of Iowa, Louisiana State University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Rutgers, and countless others, all in the name of following “best practices” for DEI.
UCI’s Inclusive IT Language Guide was produced by the Office of Information Technology. It is a style guide and workplace policy memo intended to help staff make appropriate and professional “terminology choices in your documentation, codebase, and discussions” during “day-to-day business activities with team members and stakeholders.” Much of the document deals with evolving technical jargon and software development slang, and follows industry leaders such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft. For example, both the UCI Guide and Apple’s style guide recommend losing the computer science term “sanity check” (meaning a brief test of a system’s basic functioning). According to Apple, this term “associates mental health with being functional. In general, it’s a good idea to avoid describing software or hardware using human or biological attributes; doing so can lead to unintended hurtful implications.”
Insult and offense are not inherent in a descriptive word but in the speaker’s intention and the recipient’s interpretation.
Other sections of the UCI Guide offer all-purpose, benign advice for workplace communication, such as “Favor gender-neutral terms whenever possible” (such as “chairperson” or “chair” rather than “chairman,” as if that hadn’t been the practice for decades now) and good old-fashioned motherly advice (such as “Don’t make generalizations about people, countries, regions, and cultures”).
All this effort is part of a larger cultural reassessment of words that insult and harm—not only the obvious slurs but also the subtle, embedded terms. (My late Irish husband used to fulminate over the American use of “to welsh on a bet,” as most Americans are unaware that it refers to people from Wales.) The more sociological interpretation is that the legions of administrators hired to promote DEI in their places of employment must find something to do to warrant their salaries, and writing guidelines seems easy enough.
I get the impulse for language cleansing, I do. Who would not share the Guide’s wish to build a “positive and inclusive environment that drives engagement, supports development, and enhances performance”? But for anyone who also cares about language—about the rich, dare I say, diversity of English in all its nuance and subtlety—concocting lists of approved and disapproved words is a fool’s errand. (A “fool’s errand” is any “needless or profitless endeavor.” I apologize if any jesters were offended.)
In particular, the efforts to replace words that might possibly offend a listener or reader rarely make communication clearer; they obfuscate and muddle. The Guide says that “cripple” is “ableist” and should be replaced with “hinder.” But hinder is not the same as cripple. If I hinder your efforts to finish a task, perhaps I’m just taking your time by gossiping with you and distracting you. If I cripple your efforts, I am actively, malevolently interfering. If I pull a muscle in my calf, I am hindered in my ability to walk. If I cannot use my leg at all, I am crippled.
I wish the committee had begun its task by reading Nancy Mairs’ acclaimed 1992 book Plaintext, which includes her classic essay “On being a cripple.” Mairs was not ashamed of the word; it described her correctly and bluntly, she said. No mealy-mouthed, patronizing, linguistically ugly “differently abled” for her.
Insult and offense are not inherent in a descriptive word but in the speaker’s intention and the recipient’s interpretation. The Guide tells us to say “hard of hearing” but not “hearing impaired,” although for the life of me I don’t know how the former term improves the latter; either way, I still have trouble in noisy restaurants. At least it advises us to “research the community you’re discussing,” because some blind people don’t mind being called blind—”which is what I am, unfortunately,” says my dear blind friend Elliot—while others prefer “a person with blindness.” God help you if you use the wrong form with the wrong blind person.
The efforts to replace words that might possibly offend a listener or reader rarely make communication clearer; they obfuscate and muddle.
Sometimes the “people first” language that the UCI Guide (and dozens of others) advise creates clumsy jargon that would invite mockery if it weren’t so earnest. We are told not to speak of homeless people, but rather “people experiencing homelessness.” I suppose the justification is that throwing in the academic, jargony verb “experiencing” conveys more dignity or seriousness. But who do you know who says “the number of people experiencing homelessness in my neighborhood is a growing problem”? Does anyone actually speak this way? Does this pompous locution do anything to alleviate the stigma of the group it refers to—or to address the tragic problem?
Consider efforts to drop the terms “master” and “slave.” For programmers, this is an easy symbolic change that costs very little, undoubtedly the reason that Canon and Nikon have dropped these terms as descriptors for devices that control other devices. “Slave” does have an ugly, distracting primary meaning, after all. But “master” has many meanings; must we retire the word altogether? These days the real estate industry avoids the term “master bedroom,” as if modern houses might also have quarters for your enslaved staff; but master bedroom became a common marketing phrase in the 1920s and has no connection to the shameful history of slavery. Can we no longer master a new skill? Make copies from a master print? Produce a master recording? When I gave an honorary Master’s Lecture at the American Psychological Association years ago, should I have called it the Mistress Lecture? The last, lowest meaning of master in Merriam-Webster is “a person who holds another in slavery.” Too bad. Out it goes, and we lose the functional, charming, far more common variations of the word’s meanings, along with the one usage that nobody uses any more.
In a section advising us to “avoid violent language, as it will detract from your meaning,” we are admonished to “delete” something, not “nuke” it; “halt” or “stop” a computer process, not “kill” it. But surely these are obvious metaphors; no university professor or software developer is in a position to literally nuke anything, and newspaper editors will go right along “killing” stories they don’t like. And does violent language always “detract from my meaning” in general communication? How do you know what my meaning is, until I write or say something? Maybe a “violent” metaphor conveys precisely what I mean. Are the Guide writers really going to try to stop the constant evolution of slang terms, like hang and nuke?
Writers who use “violent” words in a benign, slangy, or joking way are, as far as I’m concerned, far less a problem than politicians and military personnel who use benign, even pacifistic euphemisms for the barbarous wars they pursue. As George Orwell wrote in his classic “Politics and the English Language” (1946), euphemisms were “needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” Collateral damage is more tolerable than accidental deaths of dozens of babies, children, civilians. Actually, I would really like to nuke the term collateral damage.
Of this anti-violent list, surely the silliest is the Guide’s instruction to replace “kill two birds with one stone” with “feed two birds with one scone.” How sweet. This childish phrase is one among many “updated, animal-friendly idioms” that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has proposed to replace “phrases that condone violence toward animals and perpetuate speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.” Leaving aside the sheer awkwardness of the scone version, the two expressions are not equivalent. To kill two birds with one stone (not that anyone could actually do this, birds being quite adept at flight) means to accomplish two actions with one intervention: one overtime project gets you both a promotion and support from that surly colleague. You can feed two birds with one scone, but then each gets only half the benefit of your largesse—a free lunch coupon and a muttered greeting from your colleague.
I get why I should not refer to having a “right-hand man,” which obviously omits left-handed people and women, but is “counterpart” the best replacement? No. Someone who is your good right-hand man or woman is not necessarily your counterpart. That person is your valued assistant, your Sancho Panza, your trusty sidekick. The Guide will let you use “indispensable,” which, last time I looked, is not a noun. “She’s my indispensability”?
I think they are tone deaf, unable to hear the nuances and subtle meanings of words. They hear the words but not the music.
All efforts at language guidelines obliterate a word’s variations and multiple meanings, even when they are benign. I fully understand the stigmatizing uses of “black” as a color throughout history, with its associations with evil and villainy—hence the impulse to, dare I say, whitewash all uses of black. But “black” is not always and everywhere a bad word; it is defined as “the color of coal, ebony, and of outer space. It is the darkest color, the result of the absence of or complete absorption of light.” It is the color of onyx, mystery, night. The Guide recommends replacing the term “blacklist” with “denylist” or “blocklist.” Who actually thinks a blacklist refers in any way to Black people? There’s no need to whitewash the word. Or should we blacklist “whitewash” instead? To whitewash is to “deliberately attempt to conceal unpleasant or incriminating facts about (someone or something).” White is the color of surrender. It’s the (non)color of illness, death, ghosts and spirits. And “denylist”—really? The word police are tone deaf—wait, we can’t say that either. I’m supposed to say “inconsiderate, thoughtless, careless.” But I don’t think that the Guide writers are inconsiderate, thoughtless, and careless. I think they are tone deaf, unable to hear the nuances and subtle meanings of words. They hear the words but not the music.
The determination to try to identify every bad word, every insulting phrase, every hint of a possibility of offense before it happens is doomed. Worse, what kind of writing will we get from those who try their damnedest to follow the guidelines? Writing that is polite, clean, soft, unobjectionable. And also bland, boring, jargony, clumsy, and humorless. The writers of these guides are people experiencing deficient writing skills.
A shorter version of this essay was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review on September 15, 2021.