A woke tech company in California is on a mission to do away with what it considers to be ‘violent’ ‘offensive’ and ‘negative’ words in favour of more ‘inclusive’ language.
The Daily Mail reports that the company called Phenomenex has produced a ‘guide’ to change the way people speak titled Evolving from Violent Language.
The author of the thing, Anna Taylor who has the ludicrous title of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion champion’ as well as communications director, stated “The guide is for those who would like to replace mostly violently framed idioms with more positive and inclusive language.”
This equates to getting rid of phrases such as ‘jump the gun’ and ‘roll with the punches’ (because of the gun and punches bits) and even words like ‘deadline’ (dead = bad).
The guide suggests replacing the phrase ‘kill two birds with one stone’ with ‘feed two birds with one scone’.
Since when did anyone feed scones to birds?
Here is a sample of the rest of the language policing suggestions:
Of course, we’ve seen this exact mind numbing idiocy before.
Last year Stanford University tried to purge ‘harmful’ words from being used, before mass backlash forced officials to can the scheme, primarily because the word ‘American’ was on the chopping block.
In 2021, an arts college in Waltham, MA also banned the use of words and phrases it deemed to be ‘violent’ or ‘racist’, replacing them with bland alternatives in an effort to prevent anyone from being offended.
Among the banned phrases were, ironically, ‘trigger warning’ which had to go because of its association to guns, along with ‘take a shot at it’ for the same reason.
It also emerged recently that the Biden Administration is dishing out more than half a million dollars in grants to fund the development of artificial intelligence that will censor language on social media in order to eliminate ‘microaggressions’.
Tech leviathan Google has also developed a Newspeak ‘correction’ tool that corrects whatever you type if it deems it to be potentially ‘harmful’.
Commenting on the latest example, Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, warned “Some people might regard these ultra-woke suggestions as harmless and even amusing. But it’s not funny at all because the re-engineering of language subverts the way we think and our way of life. There’s a tendency now to inflate in an alarmist way the meaning of words.”
“They are attributing to these phrases the worst possible motives, rather than taking a step back and seeing these expressions have got nothing to do with violent intent,” Furedi added.
Language Emergency – they are cleansing our vocabulary!!, by @Furedibyte https://t.co/BuPZpomWdc
— Frank Furedi (@Furedibyte) February 14, 2023
The professor added “If they can make us feel ashamed about the words we’ve been using for a long time, it’s a way of making us feeling ashamed about ourselves and our culture.”
That was exactly the goal of the thought police and the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s dystopian warning Nineteen Eighty Four.
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
George Orwell – Nineteen Eighty Four
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