The Woke Left Controlling Language Will Not Put Itself on the Right Side of History

I don't know if you have noticed or not, but the English language has been undergoing a lot of changes in the past five or so years. These changes are due to the puritans of our time: the woke Left. Mothers have become "birthing people." Affirmative action is now "diversity." Disinformation has become wokespeak for "speech I disagree with," which has a similar vibe to the phrase "threat to democracy." Infrastructure went from "roads and buildings" to "anything the Left deems essential for the government to spend tax dollars on." There are more examples that I will provide below, but it begs the question of what is happening and why. To quote the American Institute for Economic Research:

Wokesters quickly grab the moral high ground and ruthlessly denounce any deviation from the neo-orthodoxy du jour. Social media provides a conduit for quickly detecting tough and lifestyle infractions, shaming deviants into compliance or having them 'cancelled.'

This shift to gain the moral high ground is seen in a number of instances. We went from a fight for equality (i.e., equal treatment under the law) to one of equity (i.e., attempting to correct past discrimination with present discrimination, often to the point of "equality of results"). While inclusion has meant "everyone is welcome," it has an additional woke meaning of "a space that restricts speech to cater to those who are offended." Then there is anti-racism. Forget that almost no one is pro-racist. We used to fight for a colorblind society, but that is now deemed racist. And if you disagree, that is considered racist. Don't pay any heed to the fact that the obsession over race in the anti-racist world is its own form of racism. 

I want to point out a couple of notable examples from recent months to accentuate the woke Left's attempt to control language. Let's start with a list from Stanford University's Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) created this May. The Wall Street Journal discovered the list in December and had a field day with it. Here are a few good suggestions from the list:

• Calling it a "blind review" insinuates that blindness is abnormal and negative, furthering an ableist culture. Similarly, calling it obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is insulting, which is why EHLI suggests calling it detail-oriented. Way to minimize OCD!
• "Burying the hatchet" is considered cultural appropriation, as is the word guru. 
• Calling someone brave is an insult to the Indigenous people.
• Using such words as freshman, congressman, gentlemen, or chairman perpetuates gender binary language. 
• Instead of using Hispanic, EHLI suggests using the condescending, linguistically inaccurate, and exclusive term Latinx. 
• Calling it a white paper denotes that "white = good," which is why you should call it a position paper.
• "Beat a dead horse" perpetuates violence against animals. 
• Survivor is a good substitute for "victim" because it gives agency, but it's not good enough for Stanford. 
• It is bad enough that woke institutions try to thrust the usage of preferred gender pronouns onto the rest of us. In an attempt to out-woke everyone else, EHLI now says that calling the pronouns "preferred" is bad because it suggests that being gender nonbinary is a choice and a preference.

This list reads like a parody from the satirical site Babylon Bee. Yet these examples are coming from a well-known university being serious about linguistic shifts. A person with normal sensibilities would look at the list and dismiss most, if not all of it, as ridiculous. It is not only Stanford University making these sorts of modifications to the English language. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has put itself in charge of administering woke language in the health sector by releasing Preferred Terms for Select Population Groups and Communities. 

Calling someone a smoker is considered offensive, so the CDC thinks you should use the term "person who smokes." Forget the fact that the CDC has trademarked the phrase "Tips From Former Smokers®." The CDC being incapable of taking its own advice is another reason I cannot take the CDC seriously. Calling someone an addict is deemed incorrect by the CDC. The CDC thinks "criminal" should be replaced by "person who is incarcerated or detained." Out of all the things a criminal in jail is going to worry about, do you think being called a criminal is at the top of that person's list? 

Yes, there are some truly offensive words out there. There needs to be a balance between being a society of sociopaths and being a bunch of snowflakes who have not developed the basic emotional resilience to handle words that are not considered offensive by the vast majority of people. The woke Left is incapable of striking such a balance. 

The woke Left's obsession over language is less about offensiveness because they do not care about offending anyone who disagrees with the woke in-group. Odds are that changing language is not going to address real issues because the legitimate problems facing us (and not micro-aggressions) entail solutions that go much deeper than making words less offensive for the least stoic and emotionally resilient in society, i.e., the woke. One of the main functions of language is to clearly communicate ideas, but all wokeness has done is muddy up and bastardize language for political purposes. Wokeness, or what was formerly referred to as political correctness, is thought and speech control in the guise of brotherhood (sorry, I mean all humans getting along in a harmonious fashion). To quote the Right-leaning The Federalist:

The obsession with over-complicating language is not incidental and has in fact been a consistent and identifiable strategy to muddy theaters of political discourse and frame discussions in a way that benefits the Left from the outset of the conversation.  

The woke Left's strategy is "control the language, control the conversation and how stories are told." Confucius once said that "when words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom." The ability to express oneself is an essential part of freedom. It is no accident that freedom of speech is in the First Amendment. It is also no accident that the woke Left is trying to control speech: because they want us to conform to their way of thinking. The only way to deal with the woke Left's Orwellian doublespeak is to speak up and fight back. As I brought up in October 2021, we should not be encouraging fragility or victimhood. We need emotional resilience and anti-fragility in our society. We also have to call out the woke B.S. and create institutions that counter the wokeness. 

As British magazine Spiked pointed out, "Society tends to oscillate between periods of liberalism and puritanism or conservatism. We are currently living through a puritan age. Soon will come a reaction, a swing once more towards liberalism....The people of the future will probably damn the generation of 2023 for its suffocating, moralizing, Philistine culture of censorship and its desire to wipe out the past." That shift cannot come soon enough. Much like with the ridiculous barrage of ineffective and harmful COVID restrictions, I anticipate that future generations will look at the woke attempts to mess with language with the same disdain and ridicule that it rightly deserves.