Britain continues its move toward soft totalitarianism — first by way of ludicrous mulitculturalist capitulation, then by way of the policing of its own benign vocabulary for hints of “hate” and any of a number of frowned-upon “-isms”:
The use of terms like “Old Masters” and “seminal” by students and academics have been banned, because of claims that they are sexist. The British Sociological Association, whose members include dozens of professors, lecturers and researchers, wrote the list of banned words.Words like immigrants, developing nations and black are a part of the list of allegedly racist words, while so-called “disablist” terms include patient, the elderly and special needs.
The move comes after one council outlawed the allegedly sexist phrase “man on the street”, and another banned staff from saying “brainstorm” in case it offended people with epilepsy.
However the list of “sensitive” language is said by critics to amount to unwarranted censorship and wrongly assume that people are offended by words that have been in use for years.
Prof Frank Furedi, a sociologist at the University of Kent, said he was shocked when he saw the extent of the list and how readily academics had accepted it.
“I was genuinely taken aback when I discovered that the term ‘Chinese Whisper’ was offensive because of its apparently racist connotations. I was moved to despair when I found out that one of my favourite words, ‘civilised’, ought not be used by a culturally sensitive author because of its alleged racist implications,” Telegraph quoted Frank, as saying.
Prof Furedi said that censorship is about the “policing of moral behaviour” by an army of campaign groups, teachers and media organisations who are on a “crusade” to ban certain words and promote their own politically correct alternatives.
He said people should see the efforts to ban certain words as the “coercive regulation” of everyday anguage and the “closing down of discussions” rather than positive attempts to protect vulnerable
groups from offence.
When your society has gotten to the point where word using is being decided upon and policed — in the academy, for Chrissakes — by “sociologists” steeped in multiculturalism and the PC mandates of communism, you are no longer living in an “intellectual” society.
In fact, such a move, backed by Brit professors, does nothing more than reinforce my assertion that universities are quickly becoming the single most consistent bastions of anti-intellectualism in the western world.
The Brits, of all people, should recognize that they’ve become what Orwell warned them against. But my suspicion is that certain of them in a position to take advantage of the multiculturalist / postmodernist ethos in fact have no trouble recognizing it — and have instead embraced it, realizing, as they must, that once they are given reign over language, they can control and manipulate thought and action.
It’s the Tower of Babel story as retold by the Devil.
(h/t geoff B; see here for more)
Comment by apotheosis on 9/24 @ 11:39 am #
That “Tower of Babel” bit seems awfully Christianist.
Comment by Squid on 9/24 @ 11:39 am #
Doubleplus ungood.
Comment by David on 9/24 @ 11:52 am #
Not to defend these wingnuts, but these idiots have to write about something and their readers love conspiracies. Wingnut’s love talking about “connections†and allowing their readers to “draw the right conclusion†from whatever bile it is they’ve managed to cough up during the night.
Once they’re out of office they’ll go back to being the mostly harmless but annoying cranks they’ve historically been.
Comment by happyfeet on 9/24 @ 12:07 pm #
They are sort of embarrassments as far as forebears go, these British people. They still have a fucking queen putting her senile bitch stamp on the beneficence of aristocracy. Maybe they could start there.
Comment by McGehee on 9/24 @ 12:08 pm #
Of what, precisely, is #3 apropos? It looks exactly like another comment I saw elsewhere.
Comment by Roland THTG on 9/24 @ 12:19 pm #
When they came for “niggardly”, I didn’t care because I hardly ever used it in a sentence.
Comment by psycho... on 9/24 @ 12:31 pm #
Link @ end is all “404″ — which, now that the article’s put me in a mind to notice, kinda looks like two dudes making off with a prize-sized watermelon…and it’s an area code in Alabama.
Comment by Hadlowe on 9/24 @ 12:31 pm #
When reached for comment, Orwell said, “Yeah, that really wasn’t meant as an instruction manual guys.”
Comment by fnord on 9/24 @ 12:36 pm #
I have long maintained that Higher Education is the single most corrupt institution in this country. And that includes Congress and the Mafia. It seems the problem is even more widespread.
Perhaps someone should mention to these pocket Nazis that George Orwell did not intend 1984 to be a GODDAMNED INSTRUCTION MANUAL!
Comment by Anna on 9/24 @ 12:37 pm #
I volunteer once a week helping out at the local public library. Yesterday was particularly busy because several of the staff were out. When the person taking over from me arrived, I commented that we didn’t get everything done as we usually do because we are undermanned. She said, “You mean underpersonned.”
Me: Huh?
Her: You mean underpersonned.
Me: Are we being politically correct?
Her: Well, it’s just that neither one of us is a man. So we’re not undermanned, we’re underpersonned.
I thought about debating with her, especially since a couple of the missing personnel are men, but what’s the point? She’s an idiot, and I have better things to do than try to reform her.
Of course, I have to add that I do live in California, the closest thing to Britain that we have in the United States.
Comment by DarthRove on 9/24 @ 12:38 pm #
Wasn’t “Chinese Whisper” a Geolge Michaer song?
Comment by Hadlowe on 9/24 @ 12:43 pm #
Jinx on #9. I get a coke.
Comment by geoffb (JARAIP) on 9/24 @ 1:00 pm #
It still exists. I get the 404 to now but by going to the main,eliminate everything after com, it is lower down on the page and clicking on the link there does open the page under that url. Strange.
I grabbed the screenshot just in case.
Comment by MC on 9/24 @ 1:14 pm #
But can they still do down to the pub and get pissed?
Comment by BJTexs on 9/24 @ 1:17 pm #
Anna #10:
Shades of the Ministry of Re-Education in California attempting to change textbook language to eliminate “sexist and ageist” language from history books. One of the proposals was to replace the term “Founding Fathers” with the shortened “Founders.” How did that work out?
Intellectual elites who live in the world of theory and idealism wish to change factually based descriptive terms with theoretically non invasive fluff phrases, rendering them less factual but more acceptable to a mandated androgyny. This is the result of steeping yourself in ideology, believing your education imbues you with revealed truth and denying real world language.
I’m asking my buddy to forward this to his son in law, a commander in the British Navy, with the simple subject line “What the F***?”
Comment by geoffb (JARAIP) on 9/24 @ 1:18 pm #
There is also this article in the Telegraph.
Comment by BJTexs on 9/24 @ 1:18 pm #
MC: Watch the national outcry that erupts if they attempt to ban the word “pint” because it’s offensive to the vertically challenged.
Comment by PCachu on 9/24 @ 1:44 pm #
#7/#13: Or, you know. Add the “l” at the end of “.html”. It’d be nice if we could get some agreement on what these filename suffixes are supposed to be.
Comment by Lyndsey on 9/24 @ 1:50 pm #
Okay, we’ve officially become the most bored species on the planet. Someone actually has the TIME to pick out words to ban? This blows the whole “sticks and stones” theory all to hell now… (I apologize in advance for any offense the phrase “sticks and stones” may cause.) LR
Comment by mcgruder on 9/24 @ 1:53 pm #
this is a country that held on when it was beyond dark in 1940, that had their backs to the wall in march 1918 when, quite literally, all was lost, but did not quit.
there should be quite an obituary for this island the size of nebraska.
Comment by Cave Bear on 9/24 @ 1:54 pm #
That magnitude 8.5 earthquake just felt in Britain was Eric Blair turning over in his grave.
(This post courtesy of Briggs & Stratton)
Comment by Kevin B on 9/24 @ 2:06 pm #
Personally, I don’t get too upset by this nonsense. Humans are pretty good at getting round all this crap. Think of the way schoolchildren can imbue the word special with a huge amount of scorn.
Although I do sometimes grieve for the butchering of English literature, (both past and future), I am content that language changes and the combined efforts of an army of Mrs Grundys will fail to nail it down or crush the inventiveness of people.
No, the image all this pettiness brings to mind is that of angels dancing on the head of a pin, and the counting of such, as the barbarians waltz through the wide open gates and hack down the demoralised guards while the population apologises profusely to them.
Comment by Eric on 9/24 @ 2:14 pm #
…while so-called “disablist†terms include patient, the elderly and special needs.
This is pretty rich, as “elderly” and “special needs” are obsequious euphemisms for perfectly useful words.
Comment by Bob Reed on 9/24 @ 2:15 pm #
Multi-culturalists:
Turning Universities into institutes of Higher Indoctrination since 1984 !
Comment by JimK on 9/24 @ 2:19 pm #
Well, it’s all part and parcel of their multi-cult ethic. Just like the Shari’a courts going mainstream and all the toilets for the Olympics facing away from Mecca.
Comment by happyfeet on 9/24 @ 2:23 pm #
The U.K. is dumb.
Comment by ducktrapper on 9/24 @ 2:29 pm #
Whereas in cosmic prank that is the tower of Babel (good one God!) people could still communicate afterward, albeit with confusion and difficulty, this is about people while still speaking the same language, being prevented from any actual communication when using it.
Comment by geoffb on 9/24 @ 2:32 pm #
#18
PCachu
Thank you.
Comment by Lost My Cookies on 9/24 @ 2:41 pm #
Wanna make some money? Buy big-ass canvas, a couple cases of cheap beer and some rubber gloves.
1) Drink the cheap beer.
2) Sleep it off
3) Use the bucket for your morning constitutional
4) Put on the rubber gloves
6) Fingerpaint that list of banned words onto your canvas with the shit in the bucket
7) Ship it to London
8) Sell it to one of those professors, lecturers and researchers
9) Repeat.
Comment by mojo on 9/24 @ 3:02 pm #
But how do they feel about the phrase “Oh, kiss my ass you pathetic twats”?
Comment by McGehee on 9/24 @ 3:07 pm #
Mojo, I’m partial to “Sod off, swampy!”
Comment by BJTexs on 9/24 @ 3:19 pm #
Won’t they have to ban all of the “Black Adder” episodes? That would suck, big time!
“You haven’t got a clue…”
Comment by steveaz on 9/24 @ 3:28 pm #
Let’s take this British Sociological Association crowd across the Channel to France where they speak a romance language that applies an oppressive gender to every noun. Next stop for the sociologists: Spain, then Germany.
Why is every noun ending in “-ation” feminine. Are they calling women fat? And what’s up with the masculinized noun “Chat” for cat. Are the French saying that kitties are testosterone-fueled Republicans? And while were on a roll, what’s up with those German neutral nouns, like Hund, for dog. Are dogs androgenous transvestites or something? (If I was a Trannie, I’d be offended!)
If the British Sociological Institutes can get those continentals to rid themselves of those nasty, genderized nouns, then they can really reshape Continental society. That is, if that’s what their goal really is.
Jeff wrote: “…[U]niversities are quickly becoming the single most consistent bastions of anti-intellectualism in the western world.”
Any enclosed, controlled theater where entrants apply for admission, wait eagerly for approval of their applications, then sit to receive the product they applied for are subject to manipulation by groups like this. The Left purposefully targets group patronages like these for three reasons: first the applicants have pre-signaled a desire to receive a product without prior diligence. Second, the quality of the product, be it a credential or a movie or a Madonna concert, is subjectively received and its quality is unquantifiable by any empirical measure. Third, multiple people are manipulated at one time in the same theater, which makes the effort to manipulate them efficient: if these were individual, single-point undertakings, the Left’s efforts would face the “Law of Diminishing Returns” and their per-unit costs would be too high.
My dear old Dad always told me to avoid large crowds. The longer I live the more I’m convinced he is right.
-Steve
Comment by Thomass on 9/24 @ 4:30 pm #
sociologists doing stupid stuff? I’m SHOCKED! hahhahah
Comment by David McKinnis on 9/24 @ 4:35 pm #
“Hello!”
“Yes, we do have a room 101 here at the Tower of Babel.”
“No, I’m afraid Mister O’Brien has left our establishment.”
“Yes, he’s been replaced by Mister B. L. Zeebub”
“I would be happy to book your stay with us”
Comment by Mikey NTH on 9/24 @ 5:03 pm #
#22 Kevin Bacon:
I did substitute teaching in the late eighties - early nineties, and I noted that.
Truly, they have become as mad about not mentioning things in proper company and using euphemisms as the most caricatured Victorian matron. Mrs. Grundys, the lot of them.
Comment by Mikey NTH on 9/24 @ 5:17 pm #
Inspector Kemp: A riot is an ungly thing… . undt, I tink, that it is chust about time ve had vun.
Sorry - had to say it. Dystopia - next station!
Comment by happyfeet on 9/24 @ 5:27 pm #
a fucking queen putting her senile bitch stamp on the beneficence of aristocracy
jeez. somebody had a mouth on him this morning.
Comment by Spies, Brigands, and Pirates on 9/24 @ 5:33 pm #
Look at it this way, happyfeet: even the French got that bit right.
Comment by Mikey NTH on 9/24 @ 5:34 pm #
#38 haps:
Yeah, I agree. And she has understood her role and done her duty as well as her father and grandfather. Her real opinions would be interesting to hear, but I doubt we will hear that.
Imagine being on duty 24/7 until you die. All the money and honors isn’t worth that.
Comment by Mikey NTH on 9/24 @ 5:36 pm #
#39 SBP:
And they got Napoleon Bonaparte for their efforts. Not a good trade, I think.
Comment by dicentra on 9/24 @ 5:36 pm #
Oh, Spanish is filled to overflowing with sexism, to wit:
If you have a crowd of women, you can use feminine pronouns and adjectives. If one man joins them, you have to switch to masculine, which is used both for groups of all males and mixed-gender groups.
The word esposa means “wife,” but the plural, esposas, means “handcuffs.”
I saw a sticker inside a bus (the drivers decorate their little space) that said, “Yo soy soltero; la casada es mi mujer.” (I’m single; the married one is my wife.)
See, besides the promotion of informal bigamy, the saying also reveals that you can use mujer to mean either “woman” or “wife,” but you can’t use hombre for “husband.”
The mind boggles! And besides, Chinese has no gender, even for pronouns, making it a prime example of how a gender-free society creates a non-sexist society.
Or the other way around. Nobody really knows these things.
Comment by Spies, Brigands, and Pirates on 9/24 @ 5:54 pm #
I actually think that Lizzie Saxe-Coburg-Gotha has done a pretty good job, as monarchs go, but monarchs have a rather…wide range in that respect.
Comment by Mikey NTH on 9/24 @ 6:02 pm #
I think, as others have noted, that these people are using 1984 as an instruction manual.
It would make an interesting skit to have one of these profs take his car to a garage and try to explain the problem to the mechanic.
“My car is making a noise.”
“What kind of noise?”
“A not what a car should make noise.”
“What does this ‘not what a car should make noise’ sound like?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because its an offensive word used to describe people from an eastern nation.”
“The noise it isn’t supposed to make sounds like ‘Indonesia’?”
Comment by steveaz on 9/24 @ 6:07 pm #
Di, RE Spanish,
“If you have a crowd of women, you can use feminine pronouns and adjectives. If one man joins them, you have to switch to masculine, which is used both for groups of all males and mixed-gender groups.â€Â
French is the same - it’s enough to tie a British Feminist in knots (or, it ought to be).
On a lingua-societal note - its interesting that English did away with gendered nouns despite the language’s Germanic and Romantic roots. Maybe this eqalitarian-ization of the language was a prerequisite for peaceful existence in an island-nation.
Not sure…just thinking aloud…
And, boy, that Happyfeet sure does have a pretty mouth. :-)
Comment by geoffb on 9/24 @ 6:36 pm #
I’m a mechanic and I get explanations that make less sense on a daily basis. Mysteries wrapped in enigmas. Sort of like life come to think of it.
Comment by Christopher Johnson on 9/24 @ 6:52 pm #
Stan Freberg was prescient:
http://www.themadmusicarchive.com/song_details.aspx?SongID=3473
Comment by Andrew the Noisy on 9/24 @ 7:25 pm #
They really need to just cut through to the Eleventh Edition and just start labelling everything “crimethought.” Save a lot of bother.
Comment by Jeff Y. on 9/24 @ 10:15 pm #
Jeff G., I’ve said it before: you kick a veritable cornucopia of ass. A veritable cornucopia.
Comment by The Monster on 9/24 @ 11:15 pm #
It’s actually par for the course. The Bride of Monster is personnel manager at a sheltered workshop. She occasionally schools me on the latest PC lingo for my amusement. The problem with euphemisms is that eventually people figure out what they mean:
We can’t say someone is “crippled”, so instead we say “handicapped”. Until people catch on to reality, and we have to say “disabled” instead. I think the latest is “differently-abled”.
None of which makes the dysfunctional body parts work any better.
Comment by The Monster on 9/24 @ 11:25 pm #
After crossing the Channel, having extended contact with the Celtic population that preceded the Angles and Saxons to Britannia, then the waves of Vikings, Normans, etc. that followed, a lot of the grammatical baggage got lost along the way.
As to the “undermanned” -> “underpersonned” bit, it’s still phallocentric. Gotta say “underperchildned” instead.
Comment by JD on 9/25 @ 6:43 am #
Fuckin’ racist gits.
Comment by Silver Whistle on 9/25 @ 6:50 am #
It’s enough to make me slit my wrists, but since we’re not allowed knives in Blighty, I guess I’ll have to allow global warming to cook me to a slow death.
Comment by Slartibartfast on 9/25 @ 7:06 am #
Speaking of sexist:
In German, a female person gets a neuter noun until she marries; only then does she get a feminine noun. Das Mädchen, Das Fräulein; Die Frau.
Of course, the language police have probably already cleaned that up. So, um, win?
Comment by Slartibartfast on 9/25 @ 7:07 am #
Crud. Madchen, Fraulein. No umlauts allowed, evidently.
ALL OUR UMLAUTS ARE BELONG TO JEFF.
Comment by Silver Whistle on 9/25 @ 7:22 am #
Slart,
Have you tried Xinha? It works great in Firefox.
ümlaüt away!
Comment by TheGeezer on 9/25 @ 7:30 am #
Hve we reached Clockwork Orange standards yet in the British Isles?
Comment by happyfeet on 9/25 @ 7:32 am #
Geezer, the one nice thing about that tawdry little island for real is at least they give us an alternative to our media. It’s not a hugely different slant but at least you can click on that stuff without feeling like you’re part of the problem here.
Comment by happyfeet on 9/25 @ 7:32 am #
I hate the effing BBC though except for it puts me to sleep at night.
Comment by Silver Whistle on 9/25 @ 7:37 am #
I hate the effing BBC though except for it puts me to sleep at night.
And it gives some of us nightmares.
Comment by steveaz on 9/25 @ 7:52 am #
BBC 7’s OK.
BBC 7 has some great comedies and radio-plays. And since they read from classic novels and plays, the language police can’t muck them up like they have modern literature.
BBC 4: useless trash-talk. Kinda like “The View” with large hairy nostrils and stale Earl Gray breath. Yuck.
Comment by Silver Whistle on 9/25 @ 8:01 am #
steveaz,
You don’t have to pay £135 ($270) per year for the privilege of switching on your TV. That’s what we pay the BBC, or we go to jail. Puts a different gloss on their output, no?
Comment by Patrick Carroll on 9/25 @ 8:15 am #
“So, on the first day of my vacation in the UK, there I was talking to a random man on the street, an elderly black patient from a developing nation, happy to be in a civilized country, when we both had a brainstorm: love of the seminal works of the Old Masters we’d just just seen in the National Gallery had, by way of a cultural Chinese Whisper, been transformed into love for daubs of fesces on canvas.”
There, that ought to get me 2 to 5, with time off for volunatry attendance at the Death Camp of Tolerance.
With all honor to Pat Conroy, famous for this:
Pingback by LeatherPenguin » This is England… on 9/25 @ 8:54 am #
[...] The Englishman Who Went Up a Mole Hill But Came Down a Mountain Bookmark to: var disqus_url = ‘http://leatherpenguin.com/wordpress/?p=3972 ‘; var disqus_title = ‘This is England…’; var disqus_message = ‘they’ve lost their Sheffield steel….%0AWhen your society has gotten to the point where word using is being decided upon and policed  in the academy, for Chrissakes  by “sociologists†steeped in multiculturalism and the PC mandates of communism, you are no longer living in an “intellectual†society.%0AThe Englishman Who Went Up a Mole Hill […]%0A%0ABookmark to:%0A’; View the entire comment thread. [...]
Comment by kelly k on 9/25 @ 10:11 am #
“I volunteer once a week helping out at the local public library….” Librarians and school teachers are among the worse, imo.
I write and edit children’s nonfiction. The list of verboten words and concepts is amazing. E.g., in a bio about a hip-hop artist, the managing editor made me take “black” out of all the direct quotes. That’s right–all the black people in the book talking about black artists, black audiences, black music, and black culture were being racist by using the word black. I had to bracket in “African American.” If I point out things such as Black History Month or the National Black Caucus, I’m just being argumentative.
Another book about a common mental disorder included a chapter about clinical trials. I could not use the word patient, even in the context of talking about specific clinical situations, because it “betrayed a bias.”
We’re also not allowed to use “American” as an adjective to describe someone or something from the US. That’s just not fair to all the other people who live in North and South America. You know, all those Canadians and Bolivians and Brazilians who want to call themselves American but can’t because we’ve selfishly and arrogantly stolen the word from them.
And where do my managing editors get many of these “rules”? At conferences with teachers and librarians. But I can’t just dismiss it as annoying. I think it demonstrates that the people responsible for educating children are handing down their own ignorance, liberal guilt, and complete inability to think logically.
Comment by Rob Crawford on 9/25 @ 10:25 am #
Huh?
Comment by McGehee on 9/25 @ 10:41 am #
@ #50: Monster, when I was in college about 25 years ago I tried to get a comic strip idea picked up in the college paper (unfortunately, even though that’s how Kevin Fagan of “Drabble” got his start, for some reason the fact I can’t draw prevented my strip from being picked up).
One of my favorite strips for that attempt was one in which the sarcastic guy wanted to call the dumb guy “stupid,” but the PC guy interrupted — so the sarcastic guy said (sarcastically) “preoccupied” instead.
It was funny when I thought of it.
Comment by MarkD on 9/25 @ 11:27 am #
66. Is “victim” ok?
Comment by Obersti on 9/25 @ 11:49 am #
Using the new list as a guide, the only simple declarative sentence still allowed is English is:
Well, Fuck me green.
Comment by Jeff G. on 9/25 @ 1:43 pm #
Heh. I snorted at that.
Pingback by Steynian 255 « Free Mark Steyn! on 9/25 @ 2:57 pm #
[...] BRITAIN continues its move toward soft totalitarianism  first by way of ludicrous mulitculturalist [...]