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You Don’t Say…
Words have meaning. In order to effectively communicate with others, it is important to know the meanings and nuances of the words you are using. To assist with that, the CIO at Stanford University put out a list of harmful words that should be avoided.
For instance, let’s say someone ignorantly spouts out a problematic sentence like:
He is an American.
Can you see the problems here? Would it not have been better to say:
They is a US Citizen.
First, saying American is wrong because the continents of North and South America have many countries, so using American to describe someone from the United States of America is sort of elitist. Makes it sound like the USA is more important than the other countries like say, Canada. Of course, another explanation could be that America is actually in the name of the United States of America. Perhaps that is why people in Canada are called Canadians and not Americans. That one is so silly that even Stanford had to rethink it after a few weeks of internet ridicule.
The other problem with our sentence is the use of the pronoun “he.” According to the guidelines, unless someone has specifically told you what pronouns to use, you should default to the plural “they.” So, since I never heard Joe Biden talk about his preferred pronouns, I should say, “They is the worst president ever,” that way, I won’t offend him them. Making a plural pronoun the default for singular individuals means you will be wrong 99.78% of the time. But I guess it is better to insult all normal people than one unstable person.
I suggest you go through the list for yourself, as I am sure there are words and phrases you would not expect. “Trigger warning” is a no-no. Seems that the same snowflakes that required trigger warnings get triggered by “trigger warnings.”
The word “black” is almost always wrong. Don’t say black hat, black mark, blackballed, black box, or blacklist. The only acceptable time to say black is when talking about race. Rather than “African-American,” you should say, “Black.” So, for those of us who never switched to African-American, we are the politically correct ones again.
It should be pointed out that this list of harmful words did not come from the Gender Study lab but from the CIO, the head of the IT department. Making verbal communication even more uncomfortable for your IT guys probably isn’t helpful. And the final bit of irony is that the list was put out by the Chief Information Officer, and it tells us not to use the word “chief” because it “trivializes both the hereditary and elected chiefs in Indigenous communities.” The thinking must be, “inclusive or not, I’m not leaving the C-Suite!”
Published in General
This list is another level of stupid.
First off, abort is much more specific for shutting down an ongoing process at an unscheduled time. It’s a hard stop, like pulling a cord from the wall or pulling a circuit breaker.
Second, an American is also a cultural identity. Someone can consider himself an American while lacking citizenship. I could legit see an immigrant taking offense to this.
Lastly, Black is a color based on the absence of light. African-Americans are far less black than a black hole or anything based on the concept of black, like black-body radiation or a black box. Also, African-Americans are culturally and social distinct from native Australians and South Asians, despite similar dark skin.
Justin Trudeau is Canadian. Is he nice?
Most Canadians apologize for being there.
I thought he was Cuban.
As I understand it, Stanford is a think tank for many social experiments and who knows what else. The book Conspirator’s Hierarchy by former spy John Coleman has quite a few pages devoted to Stanford and their institutes (boiler rooms).