“We know that changing terminology can be challenging, and a complete transition will take some time,” notes the University of Southern California’s Susan Dvorak-Peck School of Social Work in a memo announcing a “Department Name Change.” It is kind of them to be so understanding.

This memo comes from the “Practicum Education Department,” and it informs recipients that “we have decided to remove the term ‘field’ from our curriculum and practice and replace it with the term ‘practicum.’” The school’s reasoning for this important change is this: “This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language. Language can be powerful, and phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.” As with so many recent attempts to replace a short and comprehensible term with a longer and weirder one, the reason is a strange notion of justice that sees phantom offenses everywhere without taking a moment to ask whether the offense-taking is in any way reasonable or would even occur to someone who does not get paid to find connections between ordinary human speech and the history of oppression on a group basis. (In an ugly and imprecise shift of usage, this is now, regrettably, often termed, simply, “hate.”)