Rolling euphemisms, wokery, & the glories of the English language

Keeping up with whatever is the approved euphemism has always been a great lark.  We read that “obesity” now needs to be replaced – and not with “too fat“, either.  The Beeb hasn’t caught up with this one yet – you do really need to be on your toes.  Fortunately, the English language is replete with a wide range of colourful alternatives.

It was ever thus: whole histories could be written on the rolling evolution of the approved terms for, e.g. death, various disabilities, and descriptions of ethnicity.  Up to a point, this is to do with kindness: when a particular conventional usage becomes a term of abuse or mockery, it’s time to coin something new.  Which is fair enough, albeit we sometimes get empty phrases like “learning difficulties” which covers so broad a spectrum of phenomena as to be rendered meaningless.  I have learning difficulties when I keep being interrupted, but I doubt I qualify for charitable largesse.

There’s a nastier dynamic at work, though.  When anything is being politicised by the identitarian left, terminology becomes paramount, the left being beset by over-intellectualisation, theorising – and  faddery, one-upmanship and ideological purity.  And nothing is more enjoyable than witch-hunting.  So nothing is neater than to keep changing the rules by making some term in common usage a shibboleth: utter it, or say it wrong – and you’re damned.  Hurrah! - another heretic exposed and harried to the point of despair!

And this need to “be on your toes” guarantees that only the elite of lefties at radical academic institutions can ever be up to date in these matters.  Everyone else is guaranteed to be behind the curve, beyond the pale, and in need of re-education and groveling self-flagellation, at the very least.  But maybe total cancelation and ruination.  Oh, the horrors of feeling oneself in thrall to such vicious little shits – who increasingly call the shot, not only in colleges, but in HR departments across the English-speaking world, depressing though it is to acknowledge.

If there is hope, it lies with the proles, as Orwell famously wrote.  They’ll have some ideas on the subject of obesity, and one or two other things besides.  Who ate all the pies, eh?

ND