No doubt prompted by Stanford University’s ‘Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative’, under which the famous American university issued a list of words that people should avoid using because they are ‘ableist’, ‘ageist’, or show ‘gender bias’, a reader sent me a new Inclusive Language Guide issued by the British charitable agency Oxfam.
A glance at the guide suggests that the urge to get people to bite their tongues rather than use language which some may find ‘politically incorrect’ has now crossed all reasonable limits. Oxfam has urged its employees to avoid the terms ‘mother’ and ‘father’ and instead use ‘parent’. It warns its staff to ‘avoid assuming the adoption of gendered roles by transgender parents’. According to the guide: ‘If trans parents have a preferred specified gender role, such as “mother” or “father”, this should be respected. If unsure, it is more inclusive to use “parent”.’
Including ‘mother’ and ‘father’ among its list of potentially offensive terms, however, defies simple common sense. These are among the most basic terms employed by the human race; there is no language on the planet that does not have words for ‘mother’ and ‘father’, depicting the primordial relationships a child encounters upon entering the world. Hilariously, Oxfam prefers the very words ‘male’ and ‘female’ to be replaced with AFAB and AMAB (‘assigned female at birth’ and ‘assigned male at birth’). Isn’t this taking political correctness too far?
Oxfam argues that ‘the important principle here is to be inclusive in the broader sense by describing people as ‘parents’. Of course, it also concedes that ‘if individual parents have a preference for a role name, [staff may] respect their choice.’ But it goes on to urge people to replace the term ‘expectant mothers’ with ‘people who become pregnant’. How many such ‘people’ in the world would actually protest being called ‘expectant mothers’?
I am not objecting to every point in the ninety-two-page Oxfam document, which is available online. It makes sense for a philanthropic body working around the world to guide staff to be sensitive to issues of race, gender justice, sexual diversity, and women’s rights, disability, physical and mental health, migration, and the linguistic legacy of colonization, which left behind a number of terms whose unconscious use might indeed hurt people. Oxfam also warns employees to be conscious of words and phrases that might be considered ‘discriminatory’ or ‘that have been used historically to oppress certain people or groups’. Thus it makes sense to say ‘sex worker’ instead of ‘prostitute’, or ‘humankind’ in place of ‘mankind’.
But even innocent, commonplace everyday words are proscribed for reasons that seem absurd. For instance, Oxfam encourages its staff not to say ‘attitudes’ or ‘behaviours’ but to replace them with ‘social norms, social beliefs, or collective beliefs’. Excuse me? Equally ridiculous is the exhortation not to use the word ‘headquarters’ because it ‘implies a power dynamic that prioritizes one office over another. In the context in which we work the implication is very colonial, reinforcing hierarchical power issues.’
Oxfam’s hyper-sensitivity to anything that might cause offence extends preferring the use of the terms ‘menstrual products’ in place of ‘sanitary products’ or ‘feminine hygiene products’ because such seemingly neutral terms imply ‘that periods are in themselves unclean’. You can’t say ‘ethnic minority’ because it ‘places the emphasis on that ethnicity being a minority or having less power in a particular context’; instead, you must say ‘minority ethnic person’. The guidebook also states that one should not speak of a ‘migration crisis’, only of ‘migration as a complex phenomenon’. (Both these are examples of ‘splitting hairs’, except that perhaps that term itself would be outlawed as being offensive to bald people!)
Don’t get me wrong: I agree with Oxfam that inclusive language is important. I accept Oxfam’s justification that the guide intends to help employees ‘communicate in a way that is respectful to the diverse range of people with whom we work. We…won’t succeed in tackling poverty by excluding marginalized groups’. But the inclusion of silly prohibitions that can easily be caricatured risks undermining the more worthwhile ideas. It’s important to know when you’ve gone too far. Stop!
Also read: India needs to challenge colonialism in its own language. But solution isn’t Hindu worldview
Language of equity
After my chapters about Stanford’s and Oxfam’s language guides, one more entrant in the fray is the environmentalist group Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide. This goes even farther, discouraging the use of the words ‘stand’ (since not everyone can stand), blind (insulting to those unable to see), and crazy (offensive to mentally challenged people). This is what’s known as ‘people-first language’, under which ‘everyone is first and foremost a person, not their disability or other identity’.
The guide is one more document that seeks to cleanse people’s use of the English language, in order to eliminate suggestions of bias, racism, or exclusion. But the Sierra Club goes too far in dismissing ‘urban’, ‘vibrant’, and even ‘hardworking’ as reflecting subtle racism, and banning even ‘empower’ as condescending! Speaking of ‘the poor’ is classist (you have to say, apparently, ‘people with limited financial resources’.) And what’s wrong with ‘migrant’? The club doesn’t say, but it disapproves.
Equity-language guides are all the rage these days, and every university, non-profit institution, and civil society organization seems to be sprouting one. They all seem to be based on the same activist template but vary in their degrees of intolerance, each group seemingly striving to find something offensive that the others didn’t think of. It seems to me unlikely that such hyper-sensitivity actually exists amongst ordinary people, even in ‘woke’ American society. How many people would follow the dictum of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to replace ‘felon’ or ‘accused criminal’ with ‘justice-involved person’? It is making a mockery of the language, and of common sense.
Interestingly enough, a backlash has begun. The general public reacted just as badly as we did in this space to Stanford’s Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, and the criticism of the university was so severe that it has scrapped the initiative altogether—not for being absurd and unnecessary, but, according to the university’s announcement, for being ‘broadly viewed as counter to inclusivity’.
But the truth is that the language of equity has already crept into the conversation and writing of most of us who pride ourselves on our linguistic common sense. In my childhood I was comfortable with the gender distinction between ‘actor’ and ‘actress’; today applying the word ‘actor’ to a woman still jars my sexagenarian sensibilities, but I use it nonetheless, for fear of giving offence otherwise. Similarly, ‘chairman’ was seen as a gender-neutral term, but the clunky and non-sexist ‘chairperson’ now rules the roost.
Perhaps nothing is really lost in these changes, especially if something is gained in the self-respect felt by the beneficiaries— female actors and chairpersons, in these instances. But it worries me that over-sensitive experts have established a new orthodoxy in language without anyone really noticing. In America, some changes were politically needed: ‘Negroes’ became ‘Blacks’ and now is being overtaken by the more generic ‘people of colour’. Of course, one must address people as they wish to be addressed, but the desire to avoid giving offence sometimes deprives language of the exactitude and colour that communicates most effectively. Would you prefer to learn that X was imprisoned, or that he was ‘a person experiencing the criminal-justice system’? What on earth does that even mean?
The truth is that the path to ‘equity language’ is paved with good intentions but takes people to a place of euphemism, fuzziness, and disconnection from reality. Sometimes blunt and direct is better than inoffensive and circumlocutious. Vivid writing can sometimes hurt—to say ‘that leader is blind to the problems of us ordinary people’ or that ‘he was crippled by indecision’ or ‘paralysed by fear’ evokes a specific impact on the reader that more ‘acceptable’ alternatives to blind, crippled and paralysed would not. Intent matters: when it’s obvious an expression is a figure of speech rather than a deliberate slur, it cannot be equated to someone deriding an entire community with a nasty term (like the ‘n’ word in America for black people or the ‘P’ word in Britain for brown ones).
Avoiding insults, taking care not to inadvertently slur whole communities, and treating others with dignity in your speech are all valuable practices in any decent society. But you don’t have to destroy the power and beauty of your language to ensure that.
This excerpt from Shashi Tharoor’s ‘A Wonderland of Words’ has been published with permission from Aleph Book Company.
Very well articulated.