Sorry, I opened my mouth and words came out of it. (It'll probably happen again.)
As a writer, you don’t have to tell me words matter. “I’m sorry” and “I’m pregnant” can make your day or destroy it. Envy and jealousy are not the same thing. Neither are refute and deny. And certainly there are words floating about out there that are inherently hurtful, racist, and derogatory and should be avoided. But can we all agree that we’ve gone bat **** crazy a tiny bit overboard in our excessive, obsessive, escalating need to be sensitive in our every syllable? It seems *some people* spend their days actively looking for ways any word might be demeaning to someone or something somewhere.
Take Oriental. As in, my friend Allison is Oriental. I know, you just cringed. I felt bad even writing it—but why? Allison is from Tokyo. There’s nothing innately racist about identifying a person as being from a certain part of the world, is there? Jane Tsuchiyama, a Doctor of Oriental Medicine unironically, doesn’t think so. Writing about the term in the LA Times in 2016, she said, “I see self-righteous, fragile egos eager to find offense where none is intended."
Where’s the lie though?
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As much as I agree with the good doctor, many do not. Because someone once declared, “Rugs are oriental; people are not” (and the dictionary repeated it), we believed them. Those of us living in the US are not even supposed to say we are “American” anymore, because when we do we are implying that it’s synonymous with North American, which is imperialistic and offensive to Mexico, Canada, and South and Central America. So I guess we’re United Statsians now.
This week, a North Carolina student was suspended from school after using the term “illegal alien” in a class assignment, a move (the suspension, not the using of the phrase) that “sparked Republican outrage.” (Democrats likely were thrilled.)
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That’s the story. The teacher gave students an assignment that used the word “alien,” and the kid asked if she meant “space aliens or illegal aliens without green cards.” Obviously, suspension.
"Ultimately, his words were deemed by administrative staff to be offensive and disrespectful to classmates who are Hispanic," the Carolina Journal wrote.
You read that correctly. Now read it again and tell me who—the student or the staff—is the disrespectful party here. (Also do kindly note that the student’s punishment for not being inclusive… was exclusion. Hahahahahaha we’re doomed as a species.)
Teacher: Anne Boleyn was executed on charges including adultery, incest, and conspiracy against the king.
Snowflakes everywhere: How dare you say that about a woman! I identify as a woman and I’m deeply offended. You’ll lose your job for this, you misogynistic boor!
Just so we’re all clear on this: It’s “disparaging and dehumanizing” to point out the fact that there are people living in a country—for example, this one—without the documentation required for legal residence. Never mind that it’s factual. The only kind thing to do is call them undocumented. Which, you know, means illegally here. And of course, punish anyone who uses any other word. Simple. Inclusion!
Remember when we used to wonder whether something was “politically correct?” How utterly intolerant of us. I mean, we were blatantly ignoring whether the thing was socially, morally, ethically, culturally, historically, tropically, and transdermally correct! Today, we aim to be diplomatic, thoughtful, and considerate in all our communication. That’s why we don’t, for example, say “homeless people” anymore. We say “people experiencing homelessness,” because the former puts undue emphasis on the individual’s living status and not their humanity. If you never had children, is it thus distasteful to call yourself childless, or are you a person experiencing childlessness? Is referring to the other individual assigned female at birth who was born to the same birthing person as I was “my sister” hurtful to those who only have siblings who were assigned male at birth? Do you see how exhausting this can get?
Have a brainstorming session at work this week? Well, then you’re a pejorative schmuck. That’s insensitive to “people with epilepsy as well as those with brain tumors or brain injuries” according to the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment in Belfast. (I would argue that the actual offense is in finding selective offense in a term that literally means “to spontaneously produce ideas and solve problems.” Plenty of non brain-injured people can’t do that either.)
Where do we draw the line? The scary movie was a heart-pumper. (Nope, that would be offensive to cardiac patients.) Okay, it was a spine-tingler. (Are you kidding? Have you no compassion for people with MS or spinal stenosis?) Fine, it was a nail-biter. (Sorry, that’s insulting to onychophagists.) If you think you could string together a random combination of letters that wouldn’t offend at least one person out there, please invite me to this utopia you inhabit.
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The Dictionary of Newly Rude Terms gets fatter thicker by the day. ‘Holding down the fort’ is “racially offensive” because it originally meant to watch and protect against Native American intruders. Hysterical is sexist (it derives from the Greek word for uterus, so obviously it can only apply to women people experiencing vaginas), lame is insulting to anyone with impaired mobility, guys is not, in fact, gender neutral—did you guys and gals know that?—and don’t you dare brown bag your lunch, even if you’re packing it in a bag that’s brown, because historically “brown-bag tests” were used to discriminate based on skin color. Call it a sack lunch. Or leftovers. Or a sandwich you brought from home. You know what? Just eat out. It’s safer.
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I’d like to thank y’all for reading this far!
We can no longer call a spade a spade. (Literally, but only in America the United States. Elsewhere this phrase is fine, but here it can carry racial connotations and is on the blacklist list of phrases currently experiencing nonuse.) The term “special needs” is stigmatizing (the preference is “people who require specific—not special—accommodations”); deaf has been replaced with hearing impaired, and not only should you not use the word blind for someone who is visually challenged, you should never say blind spot (because it’s insensitive to people you’re not allowed to call blind). Autistic is neurodiverse, neurodivergent, neuroatypical, or vaccine-injured. (Ahem.) You can’t create a master document at work; it’s a primary or source document, thankyouverymuch (otherwise all the other poor documents would be its slave and then in 100 years, someone will have to pay reparations). And don’t even get me started on the bedroom formerly known as the master. Today the preferred term is owner’s suite—that is until the legions of millennial renters who famously can’t afford home ownership rise up and revolt and shame us into renaming it again. (The slightly larger slumber chamber? The resting room of the person who pays the mortgage? The quarters where the inhabitants of the other bedrooms were conceived?)
This just in from the Irony Department: The folks who want to sexualize literally everything frown upon using “male and female” to describe connective fastenings. Never mind that one end has a pointy part and the other has a hole; they’re plugs and sockets or pins and receptacles (which probably are not acceptable terms for genitalia, incidentally, so be careful out there).
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For the record, I will never not call them the male and female ends and you can’t stop me.
Remember when we switched from man and woman to biological man and biological woman? Well, biology is so 2016. The more inclusive phrase is “sex assigned at birth.” The old way merely indicates whether you were born with a penis or a vagina; the new-and-improved way acknowledges the fact that someone else noticed your penis or vagina and christened you a lad or a lass willy-nilly, based on that single anatomical distinction. (I don’t get it either.)
Now that I think about it, pretty much all words are offensive if you ponder them long enough. In an effort to get ahead of the inevitably widening curve, I’ve gone ahead and created some newer, more sensitive terms for phrases bound for the politically incorrect Grounds for Suspension pile tomorrow:
The slur: Black Friday
The swap: Obsidian Shopping Day of Chaos Friday
The sentence: “Who wants to get up at 3AM on Obsidian Shopping Day of Chaos Friday and hit Nordstrom Rack with me?”
The slur: Dumbbell
The swap: Intellectually Neutral Strength Training Tool
The sentence: “Hey Claire, can you hand me that twenty-pound intellectually neutral strength training tool behind you? It’s biceps day and I’m going
beastsavage forest animal mode today.”
The slur: Blind Date
The swap: Introductory Meeting Between Two People Arranged by a Mutually Familiar Third Party
The sentence: “My introductory meeting with Josh arranged by a mutually familiar third party was an absolute disaster.”
The slur: Whiteout
The swap: Offense Eraser
The sentence: “Dammit, I just wrote Happy Mother’s Day on this Birthing Person’s Day card. Can you hand me the Offense Eraser?”
The slur: Old Maid
The swap: Senior Intentionally Child-free (and Happy About It) Spinster
The sentence: “Card night, kids! Do you
guysindividuals want to play Go Fish or Senior Intentionally Child-free (and Happy About It) Spinster?”
The slur: Dead Man Walking
The swap: Person Assigned Male Gender at Birth Experiencing Lifelessness while Also Being Ambulatory
The sentence: “That
guyperson assigned male gender at birth who stole my lunch out of the breakroom is a person assigned male gender at birth experiencing lifelessness while also being ambulatory.”
The slur: Shotgun Wedding
The swap: Expedited Nuptials Due to Persons Experiencing Child Expectancy
The sentence: “I’m so excited for Biff and Buffy’s expedited nuptials due to persons experiencing child expectancy this weekend! I hear they’re going to have a chocolate fountain and a Maroon 5 cover band.”
The slur: Crazy Cat Lady
The swap: Mentally Health-challenged Feline-Preferring Person Assigned Female Gender at Birth
The sentence: “Damn, that Jenna is a mentally health-challenged feline-preferring person assigned female gender at birth if I’ve ever met one.”
The slur: Indian Summer
The swap: Indigenous People’s Sweaty Season
The sentence: “There’s nothing more wonderful or welcome than a warm Indigenous People’s sweaty season evening in November.”
The slur: Man Cave
The swap: Assigned Male at Birth Cave
The sentence: “I’ll be down here drinking beer and watching sportsball in the assigned male at birth cave if you need me.”
The thing about this whole push toward inclusion is that by nature, it’s fundamentally exclusive. By saying “this is the single way to describe or approach this thing or this topic,” you’re marginalizing anyone who finds that dictate ridiculous. Has anyone asked a focus group of visually-impaired people if they find the term “blind spot” hurtful? Because I’m pretty sure they know they’re blind. The word itself is not an insult or an implication of inferiority; it’s a word that describes—impartially—an inability to see. When you ban the word blind from polite conversation, you’re actually stigmatizing an otherwise neutral word. In other words, I’m not the asshole here; you’re* the asshole here. #SorryNotSorry
you=the people tarnishing the term, not my lovely, rational readers
I grew up with a sticky jar of Aunt Jemima syrup on the breakfast table and I never gave it—or her—another thought. If you’d asked me who she was or what she represented, I would have said, “I dunno, she’s somebody’s aunt who makes great pancakes?” But apparently I’m a racist pig with secret slavery fantasies. (Sorry if that offended any pigs.)
I realize I’m starting to sound like the grumpy old guy who’s always yelling at the neighborhood kids to stay off his lawn, but I feel him. I, too, am easily irritated by nonsense. I have no tolerance for kerfluffery. Like the wise Oriental Dr. Tsuchiyama said, “I see self-righteous, fragile egos eager to find offense where none is intended."
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