Why Updating Language to Match Today’s Sensibilities Doesn’t Work
You helped a nervous coworker prepare for an oral presentation at work– so you were just as proud as she was when her speech went off without a hitch. The bosses, her colleagues– they were all slapping her on the back. Hell, people even congratulated you because you helped her prepare. When it was your turn to shake her hand, you told her, “You killed it.”
But someone overheard. And now you’ve been summoned by your supervisor. Though you have no idea why– you haven’t done anything wrong– right?
If your company happens to be using the Stanford IT Department’s Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative List of problematic words and phrases—or one like it—you might have run afoul of appropriate language guidelines.
According to the Stanford list, you shouldn’t use phrases like killing it to mean doing a great job because—and I’m not joking— “doing a good job should not be equated with death. The term could also be triggering if someone close to the recipient actually was killed.”
Language Policing Gone Too Far
The Stanford Initiative and others like it have the noble goal of eliminating hostile work environments. Historically, underrepresented groups have endured racist and sexually degrading jokes and worse. To foster diversity and inclusion, employers have had to implement policies that prevent these offenses.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s even laudable. Until employers, perhaps out of a genuine sense of social responsibility or maybe—and this is my cynical side speaking—in anticipation of the next lawsuit or social media-led boycott—until these employers take it too far. Then they undermine their own high-minded goals by taking language policing too far. Their attempt at diversity, equity, and inclusion? Nothing more than a joke.
The Ridicu-List
Here are some other examples from the Stanford list:
- Using phrases like killing two birds with one stone and beating a dead horse is verboten because expressions like these “normalize violence against animals.”
- The phrase war room allegedly constitutes “unnecessary use of violent language.”
- And the best one of all—you aren’t supposed to say trigger warning because—get this— “The phrase can cause stress about what’s to follow. Additionally, one can never know what may or may not trigger a particular person.”
So, trigger warning is itself a trigger! The phrase triggers me, too, but for different reasons. Look, I love horror movies, but I hate it when they kill the dog. That doesn’t mean the producers of the movie are obligated to add a disclaimer to the beginning of the movie to protect my delicate sensibilities. I choose to watch horror movies knowing that if there is a cute dog shown within the first five minutes of the movie, there’s a good chance that canine isn’t going to make it to the end. This is a risk I take by watching horror movies.
Same deal—if I choose to read a book or see a play or browse the Internet, I incur the risk that something I see might offend or trigger me. Caveat emptor.
A Linguistic Dystopia
I couldn’t come up with a better blacklist… er, banned words list if I were writing a dystopian novel about a future in which sinister corporations and educational institutions signaled their virtue by eliminating phrases that absolutely no one has any problem with.
Do we really want to live in a world where everyone is trying to out-do each other in controlling the words coming out of our mouths?
The Real Problem with Banning Speech
Beyond the free speech implications– and the fact that no one will take DEI efforts seriously when we prosecute them so damned ridiculously—and even beyond the fact that we are creating generation after generation of increasingly less resilient youth—beyond all of these things the real problem is that we—forgive the unnecessarily violent words I’m about to use– are killing language.
Language evolves naturally, and it isn’t always pretty. Hence, the enduring popularity of the phrase “rule of thumb,” which has a gruesome etymology. But that’s how language is. That’s how history is, and we can’t whitewash it by using sanitized substitutions and pretending it never happened.
A Happy Ending
But this tale has a happy ending. (Can we still say that?) In the wake of the entirely predictable outcry the release of this list had, Stanford retracted it. That was the right thing to do.
Let’s continue that trend and lighten up on speech control. Leave language policing to the grammar Nazis—and they already have enough to do with explaining the difference between your and you’re on Facebook.
Don’t make their jobs harder by banning words.