But you still seem to be missing the key point here.
If I have no authority over you, all I can do to try to modify your language choices (or any other aspect of your behavior) is advocate my beliefs and try to persuade you to adopt those beliefs. And if my beliefs are silly (like telling people they shouldn’t drink a Negroni because it’s racially offensive) you, being an intelligent person, will ignore what I’m saying.
Absent authority, you can only get people to change their behavior if you are able to present a reasonable argument about why that change is good. So good ideas can spread through a culture.
But stupid ideas do not. People don’t choose to adopt changes they regard as stupid. So stupid ideas are limited by their own stupidity. People will keep drinking Negronis as long as people think the idea of not drinking Negronis is silly.
Look, I’m not dismissing McWhorter, because I’m not talking with him: I’m talking with you. Based on the excerpts of him you’re choosing, and the way you’re paraphrasing him, he’s coming across as a disingenuous crank.
Look at this latest pull-quote. He’s not talking about what the governor of a state is demanding all teachers say, or else they get fired. He’s not talking about language that an attorney general has told physicians can get them prosecuted under a new anti-abortion law. He’s talking about a document–which I can’t find anywhere on PARC’s website–that he paraphrases as telling people they “must retire” certain words.
I don’t trust his paraphrase. But even if I did, so the fuck what? What power does PARC have? Do they have hiring-and-firing power over anyone? Can they arrest anyone? Can they [spoiler alert] stick your head in a cage full of rats?
What they can do, at worst, is make their case. They can try to persuade people that certain language is inaccurate, or unclear, or insensitive, or offensive, or whatever. And that’s exactly what they should do.
Criticizing their case on its merits is fine. But you–and, according to you, McWhorter–are going far beyond that. You’re calling it “Orwellian” for them to make the case at all.
And to be clear, I ignore well-meaning advice, too. Last year, someone made the case to me that as a math teacher I should stop using the phrase “story problem”, because certain BIPOC children found the word “problem” to be traumatizing. I listened to their full case, nodded, and promptly ignored the advice–not because it shouldn’t have been given, but because it was ridiculous.
It would have been even more ridiculous for me to call the occasion “Orwellian,” though.
FWIW, he comes across better in the full article, which does not have nearly the apocalyptic tone wolfpup assigns to it. It’s basically just a, “Look at this dumb list,” space-filling article, that doesn’t really make any larger conclusions about the Brandeis list other than, “These people are well meaning but kind of clueless.”
You say you’re not dismissing McWhorter, and then proceed to do just that. And I’m not “paraphrasing” him, I’m quoting him. I’ve said before that I don’t always agree with McWhorter. I don’t always agree with Steven Pinker, either, but I’ve never stooped to calling either of them “a disingenuous crank”. And here I think he makes a compelling case.
There are some real horrors going on in America, especially in Florida under DeSantis. But what does that have to do with this conversation? We ought to have the cognitive skills to worry about more than one thing at a time. And the things you cite here are not fundamentally about language change at all, they’re about ugly repressive politics being perpetrated by evil regimes.
Organizations like PARC are de facto authorities who can bring considerable peer pressure to bear, at least within their spheres of influence, even if some people think it’s silly. McWhorter considers it a sufficient problem that he’s been on a mission for some time to call it out when it becomes downright ridiculous, while at the same time strongly supporting worthwhile initiatives like gender-neutral terminology and some of the other examples he cites of positive language change.
If the sole basis of your argument is objection to a particular adjective I used, you don’t have much of an argument. Suppose I withdraw “Orwellian” and substitute, courtesy of McWhorter, the description “an obsessive quest to curate words and expressions by people seeking to change reality through the performative policing of manners”.
The point is that “master bedroom” has a SHORT history when compared to racism.
That term originated in the 1926 Sears catalog, so it has NOTHING to do with slavery.
I’m all for not using terms that demean groups of people. The problem is when someone IMAGINES that a term might offend a group they don’t actually belong to.
I could have sworn that the explanation for why the name “monkeypox” was changed was already given, and that it didn’t have jack shit to do with insulting monkeys.
What is the actual problem with saying “main bedroom” or “primary bedroom”? If you’re a real estate agent and you really don’t want to offend people who may be turned off by “master”, isn’t it good business to use “main”? Or, do you think you’ll turn off all the slave owner wannabes or something?
To the OP, negroni is not going to be banned. But, even if the drink name was changed (because it turned out that negroni is the most terrible thing to say to someone in some language), who cares?
Everyone is free to hire real estate agents who use the terms they want. If you want to sell your house and it’s very important to you that it’s called the “master bedroom”, you can specify that demand.
If you’re looking to buy a house, you can tell an agent you only want houses that list “master bedrooms”.
No words have been banned. Continuing to say it has been banned is untruthful.
If they don’t have any influence, then everything they’re doing is a waste of time. Influencing change is the whole purpose of PARC’s existence. Read the article I linked about the “oppressive language list”. It sounds like PARC is driving a substantial campus movement. Peer pressure can be a powerful thing.
Call him whatever you like. But a linguist specializing in language change who has a particular advocacy position on the subject is not what the word “crank” means.
The university stressed that the list is meant to be a tool to share information and suggestions and that the use of suggested alternatives is not an expectation or requirement for students and staff.
How draconian.
Also, every news piece I can find is the same one from two years ago. Any follow-up on how the “peer pressure” is working? MY guess is not well since the list doesn’t exist on their website any more.
Yeah, probably, but it’s worth noting that you’ve moved the goalposts there, from “de facto authority” to “have any influence at all.”
I did read it, and didn’t find anything in it to suggest that PARC represents any sort of “substantial campus movement.”
You say that like these are mutually exclusive terms. One can, of course, be both a specialist in a subject and a crank, even on the same subject.
That said, I wouldn’t call McWhorter a crank based on the article he wrote. I’d call him a crank based off of your presentation of his arguments, but his actual arguments don’t seem to quite match up to what you think they are.
Oh, this is the Brandies list from two years ago! Yeah, a lot of those were silly. But it’s less silly when you look at the context, which was “here are some issues to think about” (not, “here are some words you should never use, because if you do you are a bad person”) And it’s not close to “Orwellian” to make suggestions and try to make a case for why something might be offensive. That’s, like, the opposite of Orwellian. It’s suggesting that everyone think and make decisions on their own. (which the article that included that list does.)
“The university stressed that the list is meant to be a tool to share information and suggestions and that the use of suggested alternatives is not an expectation or requirement for students and staff.”
It’s not even an expectation ON THE ONE COLLEGE CAMPUS that released the list. It’s hard to imagine a less oppressive way to suggest alternative phrases.
And as for their hidden coercive powers, did I mention that the exhibit I’m looking on my screen at work, RIGHT NOW at still says “ALAE” more than 25 years after my professional organization officially deprecated that term?
In contrast, my dance group changed the title of one of our volunteers from “webmaster” to “web manager” not because anyone forced us to, but because the volunteer requested we change the title.
"these sanctions are based on no general agreement among even sensitive, sociologically concerned people. "
How on earth does McWhorter, or you, expect any such agreement to be arrived at except by discussion among people who may well not, at first, agree?
Again, do you think the changes in language, such as gender-neutral terminology, that you do agree with came out of nowhere? They didn’t; they were the result of long and vehement discussions, taking many years to reach any consensus, and were at first considered by most to be the province of isolated cranks who shouldn’t be taken seriously.
I don’t think the term was intended to do with slavery; but its having originated in 1926 certainly doesn’t disprove it on its own. Legal slavery was over, sure (except in the form of prison sentences); but Jim Crow, the Klan, and both legal and illegal racism were doing fine.
