Sacrificing language and its rules on the altar of political hyper-sensitivity will have consequences.
Sacrificing language and its rules on the altar of political hyper-sensitivity will have consequences.
J argon is the closely guarded project of any profession working to form its own bubble — a club of the credentialed where only Realtors conversant with escalation clauses or contracting officers fluent in RFPs or human-resources personnel clutching the latest 14-letter acronym for conflict resolution gain admission.
This practice, I am sad to report, has escaped the professional fields. Capricious, anarchic, yet unrelentingly demanding, a network of actors is determined to construct a far more consequential bubble — not for podiatrists or chemical engineers or custody lawyers but for the culture at large. The project is not satisfied with merely creating terminology; it must sand down and render featureless the terminology that came before.
And so we witness these winning substitutions: Birthing people. Latinx. Bodies with vaginas. Cis-white heteronormative patriarchal institutions. These terms are not all new. But the degree to which they have been adopted is.
Take that first one. Earlier this year, President Biden’s 2022 budget proposal replaced the word “mothers” with “birthing people,” while, in a sign of how haphazard and perfunctory this exercise is, neglecting to replace words such as “maternal.” As my colleague Charles C. W. Cooke pointed out, this project has gone so far as to “correct” the language of one of progressives’ most revered icons. The ACLU this month tweeted a quote about abortion rights from the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg but swapped any reference to terms such as “woman’s,” “her,” and “she” for, respectively, “person’s,” “their,” and “they.”
What is the point of this? Is anybody, really, offended by the notion that it is women who give birth? Why are we pretending — and that is what we are doing — that anybody thinks or talks this way outside of a public forum, or believes we should?
It is important here to draw a distinction between ordinary evolution of language — whether in the name of inclusivity and sensitivity or a product of natural progression in speech — and what is happening today in the cultural jargon wars.
Periodically, words with ugly histories meet their destiny with dustpans, as they should. The term “Orientals” was one of several that a piece of 2016 legislation replaced in the language of federal laws. While still in widespread use several decades ago, the word nevertheless had become associated with grossly discriminatory times and actions including Japanese internment. The term “Negroes,” likewise associated with the ugliest eras in American history, was included in the same bill for replacement.
Good riddance.
The words “mother” and “woman” do not come freighted with such history. Neither do singular pronouns (which, it so happens, are not interchangeable with the plural form). Here, the scourges of Oldspeak are engaged in efforts not to purge words with offensive connotations but to reject — abruptly and peremptorily — the value and purpose of useful words for their sin of specificity, in favor of those covering as much territory as possible. It’s the linguistic equivalent of shouting “All lives matter!” the instant someone says black lives do. Mark Twain famously said the difference between the almost-right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and lightning. The language of today’s professors and madmen is teeming with fireflies.
Grammarian Bryan Garner, in the pages of National Review, offered an anecdote that can be instructive here, recalling his own role updating the definition of marriage in a particular dictionary to account for the same-sex variety. Removing reference to gender, he had changed the definition to “the legal union of a couple as spouses.”
Consider his explanation of why: “What’s objectionable today isn’t a reference to a particular husband or wife. It’s the suggestion that husbands must have wives, and wives husbands.” He concluded, “Husbands and wives will be with us forever.”
Likewise, using the term “parents” instead of “mother and father” in the context of child-rearing makes sense for that reason. In the context of birth-giving, however, mothers will be with us forever.
The same assault on language, laudably resisted by the very people who own that language, is reflected in the term “Latinx.” A revealing Gallup poll in August found just 4 percent of Hispanic respondents preferred that gender-neutral term which happens to obliterate a charming feature of the Spanish language (and other Romance languages) — the sorting of words for objects as well as people into the masculine and feminine.
Who thinks this is a worthwhile project? Four percent. Yet, a year earlier, Pew conducted a study that found one-quarter of congressional lawmakers use the term on social media, up from virtually none a few years ago. Nearly half of Democratic lawmakers use it.
The findings suggest this usage pleases precious few constituents. That elected representatives persist anyway only underscores the enormous persuasive power a tiny minority wields over a culture increasingly prone to deference once any change in language is introduced, if introduced in the name of the correct causes.
To give an idea of just how counterintuitive this project is, witness Justin Trudeau stumbling through his enunciation of a different kind of letter salad last week.
The campaign to deny definitions does not stop with words. It extends to things so seemingly immutable and incontestable as mathematical truth. California has run into fierce protest for — and had to postpone — a plan to inject social-justice considerations into math instruction, part of a movement that de-emphasizes things such as right answers. The same proposed framework included the following declaration: “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents.”
If you believe talent is taught, watch me try to throw a football.
What this leads to is a spiraling descent into the absurd. Terms lose meaning, and without any consensus on definitions or what constitutes polite/impolite speech, everything is a potential target. Some of these campaigns smack of satire but, sadly, aren’t. This quintuple-byline article for Scientific American titled, “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion,” is as utterly pointless as the headline warns it is:
The Jedi are inappropriate mascots for social justice. Although they’re ostensibly heroes within the Star Wars universe, the Jedi are inappropriate symbols for justice work. They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.). The Jedi are also an exclusionary cult, membership to which is partly predicated on the possession of heightened psychic and physical abilities (or “Force-sensitivity”).
What?
Absent any real baseline for determining which terms deserve reconsideration and which do not, once-respected corners of academia and white-collar America are allowing nonsense crusades to be waged. Some will comply, not wanting to invite reproof from those who wield power. However, there is one word that retains its meaning, unpolluted by the fumes of the woke-industrial complex. I recommend we use it, forcefully and repeatedly, until the natural evolution of language regains its bearings.
That word, you may recall, is “No.”