Language Emergency – they are cleansing our vocabulary!
As more and more words are rendered unacceptable, we face a language emergency.
Why have so many words and expressions used in everyday conversation for centuries become the target of the language police?
Why are they forcing people to embrace newly invented terms, pronouns and expressions?
Why are cultural and educational institutions and public sector bodies such as civil service ceaselessly issuing lists of approved words and terms?
Some of the most taken-for-granted, everyday expressions are now deemed unacceptable by the seemingly never-ending publication of new ‘inclusive language guides’. Words like ‘mum’ and ‘dad’, ‘homeless’, ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’, ‘ex-pat’, and terms like ‘deprived neighbourhoods’, ‘second generation’, ‘lifestyle choices’, and ‘economic migrant’ are now deemed unacceptable by the Inclusive Language Guide published by the Local Government Association. As a ‘positive’ alternative to objectionable terms like ‘mum’ and ‘dad’, the LGA suggests using the infelicitous ‘birthing parent’. The LGA has not yet coined the term ‘non-birthing parent’ but watch this space!
Inclusive language guides are now published on an industrial scale by a zealous cohort of semantic engineers. Twenty or thirty years ago, the ambitions of yesterday’s semantic engineers were relatively modest. The old guard wanted to feminise language and insisted that terms like ‘chairman’ must give way to ‘chairperson’ or words like ‘negro’ had to be replaced by ‘black’. In the contemporary era, just about any phrase that supposedly makes someone feel excluded is regarded as a legitimate target for censorship. The University of Washington’s Inclusive Language Guide cautions against using the phrases ‘lowering the bar’, ‘jerry-rigged’, ‘blind spot’, ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’.
The authors of the University of Washington’s guide are obsessively driven in their attempt to justify why reasonable and hitherto uncontroversial words must no longer be used. For example, it justifies the need to abolish the term ‘housekeeping’ on the ground that ‘in reference to office work, this language can feel gendered’.
If indeed the numerous suggestions of the Inclusive Language Guide were to be adopted, people would end up speaking a very different language: a language that decries the making of distinctions between good and bad, accomplished and ordinary individuals, or men and women. That is why it communicates an intense hostility towards using the term ‘first-class’. It notes that the word implies ‘that this particular value is the best quality or in the highest grade, and thus others under this group are second-class or lower class’.
Sky Sports has banned the term ‘nitty gritty’. In their wisdom, the National Theatre of Scotland has decided that the word ‘spooky’ should be censored because of its supposed racist and oppressive connotations. Since it is unlikely that anyone has used ‘spooky’ as a racial slur, it is evident that potentially any term can become a target of the language police. Offence archaeologists at Brandeis University thought they had struck gold when they found a good historical justification for banning the word ‘picnic’. They claim that the word ‘picnic’ was ‘often associated with lynchings of black people in the United States, during which white spectators were said to have watched while eating, referring to them as picnics or other terms involving racial slurs against black people'.
The American Medical Association put out a 54-page guide on inclusive language. It tells its readers to replace the terms ‘Ex-con’/’felon’ with ‘formerly incarcerated’/ ‘returning citizen’/ ‘persons with a history of incarceration’. It rejects ‘Sex/gender/gender identity’ in favour of ‘Sex assigned at birth/ gender/gender identity’. According to its outlook, people should no longer be called disadvantaged but referred to as historically and intentionally excluded.
Increasingly, the project of linguistic engineering has acquired a surreal and positively weird tone. An inclusive language guide titled ‘Evolving From Violent Language’ created by Anna Taylor of the technology company Phenomenex finds the most seemingly unobjectionable phrases quite objectionable. It warns against using terms like ‘jump the gun’, ‘roll with the punches’ and ‘deadline’ as they are too violent. Instead of ‘that’ll kill two birds with one stone’, it suggests ‘that’ll feed two birds with one scone’! The phrase ‘I was blown away by her presentation’ must give way to ‘I was impressed by her presentation’.
Changing reality
Under the banner of promoting a new ‘inclusive language’, semantic engineering aims to change public language to transform prevailing cultural attitudes and norms. It does not merely police the use of language and censor and abolish words it finds objectionable. It also re-engineers the meaning of words and introduces terms that communicate its ideals and norms. It targets words that intrinsically reflect traditional human relationships. It is particularly hostile towards classical kinship terminology – mother, father, grandfather, grandmother, sister, brother, wife or husband – and seeks to replace them with a supposedly neutral-sounding vocabulary that deprives them of their widely held normative status.
Their language deprives intimate relationships of their unique normative status. In some instances, it makes them disappear. This was brought home to me when my fatally ill mother lay in a hospital 14 years ago. At this moment, I realised how newly invented words could be used to diminish and alter our identity and pressure us to adopt new values.
As soon as I heard that my mother had a stroke, I went to see her at our local hospital. Upon arrival, I introduced myself to the nurse with the words, ‘I’m Frank Furedi; I’m Clara’s son.’ The woman looked up at me and said, ‘You mean you’re her carer’. ‘No, her son’, I responded. But she was insistent: ‘No, you are her carer.’ Later one hospital administrator explained that they used the word ‘carer’ because it included all; apparently, not every patient has a close relative to look after them. For the hospital, this was an obviously inclusive word.
That is why in Australia, the Department of Health defines everyone who provides help to an ill or frail person as a ‘carer’. Its website notes that ‘many carers don’t consider themselves to be carers – they see themselves as just family members’. Outwardly, this is a simple and uncontroversial statement of fact. But when you examine it closer, this statement offers a chilling reminder of who defines your identity. You may think you are family, but according to this administrative formula, you are a ‘carer’.
The word ‘carer’ may be inclusive, but if a special connection between mother and son is transformed into a bureaucratic typology, something significant has been lost. The relationship between patients and their family, friends, and paid help involves ‘care’, but the term conveys a fundamentally different meaning to the people concerned.
The tendency to redefine human relations through a vocabulary that corrodes its special, unique and intimate quality is often promoted on the grounds of making us all feel included. The first time I felt ambushed by linguistic policing was in the 1990s when I read a report on how to deal with child abuse in a religious setting. The author, Helen Armstrong, wrote that the church should respond by changing its traditional language. Why? Because ‘religious language often depends on a positive view of the value and trust placed in fathers, parents and family’ and it may offend victims of abuse. The report warned against the use of language which ‘represents God as father or as protector’, and ‘the range of “family” language used in religious thinking’.
Armstrong’s statement implied that the positive valuation of the family discriminated against the victims of abuse, and therefore a new language was now mandatory. If the celebration of the family is seen as troubling to those who have had negative experiences with their parents, what intimate relationship can be unashamedly avowed?
Semantic engineering aims to acquire control over language and the cultural power it provides. Through gaining mastery over the use of language, it seeks to gain control over what we value and how we think. This point was recognised decades ago by the culture warriors, who gained institutional authority by imposing politically correct speech codes on university campuses. Today, this approach is widely practised by institutions in both the public and private sectors.
The Australian feminist writer Dale Spender in her book Man Made Language systematically elaborated the relation between verbal purification and altering the way we think. Published in 1980, Man Made Language provides one of the earliest and most coherent defences of the re-engineering of language. Spender argued that humans make their existence meaningful through the rules they adopt to make sense of their lives. Such rules are not simply cultural constructions but become everyday reality because as ‘we use these rules we confirm their validity, we make them “come true”’. She contends that beliefs about ‘male superiority’ are underwritten by the rules and assumptions that justify male power. Spender argued that one of the most important ways male domination is perpetuated is through the rules about the use of language. She wrote that
‘Language is our means of classifying and ordering the world: our means of manipulating reality. In its structure and in its use we bring our world into realisation, and if it is inherently inaccurate, then we are misled. If the rules which underlie our language system, our symbolic order, are invalid, then we are daily deceived’.
Spender’s arguments about the role of language in classifying and ordering everyday reality are well observed. The experience of history demonstrates that language does not simply mirror people’s reality but, to some extent, also constructs it. However, what was important about Spender’s contribution was not her reflection on the role of language in the construction of reality but her advocacy of the displacement of the rules of language and, by implication, the existing reality by new ones.
Spender’s call for purifying language through ridding terms that legitimate male power was expressed in rhetoric usually associated with the language of a moral crusade. ‘Every aspect of the language, from its structure to the conditions of its use, must be scrutinised if we are to detect both the blatant and the subtle means by which the edifice of male supremacy has been assembled’, she argued. During the decades that followed the publication of Man-Made Language, the campaign of scrutinising language has acquired a dynamic of its own. The project of changing the rules of language has crystallised into a never-ending campaign of verbal purification.
The ascendancy of trans-language
What began as an attempt to feminise language gradually acquired an increasingly coercive and censorious tone. The culture of censorship that eventually emerged out of the language reform movement is very different to previous attempts to police language. Historically censorship aimed to defend and reinforce the status quo. The new wave of censorship – which first engulfed universities and then other institutions – sought to overturn it and promote social and political change.
In effect, language became the primary medium for altering the world and changing people’s reality. Supporters of ‘transgender language reform’ stridently advocate this approach. As one trans activist explained:
‘Because one of the most important ways cissexism is constructed is through language, the identification and dismantling of cissexist language is a central part of trans activism and part of the work that cisgender allies are expected to perform’.1
From his perspective, dismantling language is the prerequisite for institutionalising a gender-neutral culture.
The ascendancy of the language of transgenderism exemplifies the creation of a new reality. Guidance issued by the British Ministry of Defence claims that ‘not all women are biologically female’ and instructs staff to be careful using the word ‘female’, in case it ‘erases gender non-conforming people and members of the trans community’. MoD personnel are advised to publicise their preferred pronouns on their email signatures, social media profiles and at the start of meetings and presentations. The project of displacing the male/female distinction with gender-neutral language is promoted through some of the most grotesque examples of the re-engineering of language. When ‘menstruating person’ replaces the word ‘woman’, ‘mother’ gives way to a ‘parent who gives birth’, ‘breastfeeding’ becomes ‘chestfeeding’, or ‘pregnant women’ is reframed as ‘pregnant people’, a new reality is well under construction. Something has seriously gone wrong when the leading medical journal, The Lancet, decided to call women ‘bodies with vaginas’.
The Lancet and other publications are not simply interested in forcing us to change the words we use; they want us to alter our thoughts about biological sex and what we think a man or a woman is. Under the guise of inclusion, they want us to forget the distinctions that matter to our lives and the constitution of our identity.
A society that allows its vocabulary to be sabotaged by these semantic disrupters will lose the ability to think for itself.
The words we use really matter, for they shape people’s views of themselves and their fellow citizens. In an open, tolerant society, people possess the freedom to choose how they define themselves and others. Unfortunately, today, powerful cultural forces believe they have the moral authority to decide the words we can use to describe ourselves, our loved ones and our relationships. Language is a far too important dimension of human life to leave to the administrators and experts. We need the courage of our convictions to use the words that best express what we are about.
We must protect our vocabulary and insist we have the right to decide what words we wish to use to express ourselves.
See Zimman, L., 2017. Transgender language reform: Some challenges and strategies for promoting trans-affirming, gender-inclusive language. Journal of Language and Discrimination, 1(1), pp.83-104.