Many years ago, as a social psychologist specializing in gender equity, I was invited to attend a weekend workshop at the Air Force Academy. I was there to suggest ways to reduce prejudice against women, who were inching up to 10-percent of enlistees. 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 if he told them a joke, and they invariably said yes. Here was his joke:
Q: Why do doctors always spank a newborn baby?
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Many years ago, as a social psychologist specializing in gender equity, I was invited to attend a weekend workshop at the Air Force Academy. I was there to suggest ways to reduce prejudice against women, who were inching up to 10-percent of enlistees. 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 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 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humanity of prejudices and rudeness, along with bad jokes, the gentle-but-barbed approach of the secretary has been superseded by efforts to specify every action, joke, phrase, and word that might be offensive — not only to the recipient, but to any observer.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 at Irvine is among the latest to attempt to demonstrate their commitment to “equity, diversity, and inclusion” 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, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Northern Arizona University, and countless others, all in the name of following “best practices” for DEI.
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The kind interpretation of UCI’s Inclusive IT Language Guide, produced by the Office of Information Technology, is that 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 might refer 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. But for anyone who cares about language — 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.)
Efforts to replace words that might possibly offend rarely make communication clearer; they obfuscate and muddle. The Inclusive IT Language 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’s acclaimed 1986 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 the guide 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.
Sometimes the “people first” language that the guide advises 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.” 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?
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In a section advising us to “avoid violent language, as it will distract from your meaning,” we are admonished to delete something, not nuke it; halt or stop a process, not kill it. (Tell that to all newspaper editors who are busy killing stories right and left, or to Ronan Farrow for his book Catch and Kill.) Of this antiviolent 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. And how wrong: The two expressions are not equivalent. To kill two birds with one stone means to accomplish two actions with one intervention: one overtime project gets you 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 largess — a free-lunch coupon and a muttered greeting from your colleague.
To forbid the word blacklist and replace it with the clumsy, preposterous denylist or blocklist hardly promotes better race relations. Who thinks a blacklist refers in any way to Black people? There’s no need to whitewash the word. Or should we blacklist “whitewash” too?
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.
Carol Tavris is a social psychologist who has written widely on gender, culture, critical thinking, and other topics in psychological science. Her book with Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (but Not by ME), was published in a third edition in 2020.