Make the Protection of Our Language a New Year's Resolution

Words matter because they are the foundation for forming ideas, understanding concepts, and expressing thoughts.

Photo by Andreas Fickl on Unsplash

A new year is right around the corner, and it is time to list new year's resolutions. Besides getting healthy, how about defending the English language as part of your new year's resolution? The woke culture leaves no stone unturned, and it has been relentlessly eliminating words from our vocabulary and restricting what we can or cannot say. 

The Wall Street Journal reported that Stanford University published a list of "Harmful Words" that should be eliminated from the school's website, printed materials, and students and faculty's vocabulary. Here is a sample of some of the words that made it to the "Harmful Words" list and their suggested replacement, according to the WSJ,

"Call yourself an 'American'? Please don’t. Better to say “U.S. citizen,” per the bias hunters, lest you slight the rest of the Americas. 'Immigrant' is also out, with “person who has immigrated” as the approved alternative. It’s the iron law of academic writing: Why use one word when four will do?

You can’t 'master' your subject at Stanford any longer; in case you hadn’t heard, the school instructs that “historically, masters enslaved people.” And don’t dare design a 'blind study,' which 'unintentionally perpetuates that disability is somehow abnormal or negative, furthering an ableist culture.' Blind studies are good and useful, but never mind; 'masked study' is to be preferred. Follow the science."

According to Stanford's website, this list is the product of the University's The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) -- a multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language in IT at Stanford.

As you could imagine, this list didn't sit well with me. So I sent a letter to the editor at the WSJ, and it was published on December 22, 2022. Here's what I wrote,