Why isn’t there a good name for opposing political correctness, wokeness, policing speech, and so on? In a recent article, the usually solid wordsmith Jesse Singal had to do what I just did, which is to write clunkily around the issue with an ironic list, referring to the group as “those skeptical of ‘grievance studies’ or ‘postmodernism’ or ‘SJWs’ or whatever else.”
There is, by contrast, a rich lexicon for the opponents of “problematic” and “othering” discourse to draw on in order to “stay woke” and “check their privilege.” It’s stilted, academic, jargony, and absurd, but at least it exists.
For the un-PC and anti-woke, those people who make up the majority of the population that is exhausted and irritated by constant identity outrages are more complicated to name. Why is that?
The reason is fashion. I wouldn’t suggest calling someone a “snowflake” these days. Why? I believe there are too many people who claim to be unique and who melt down when handled roughly, which are the characteristics that gave birth to the insult. But I know that by saying “snowflake” I associate myself in the minds of others with the sort of people who say “snowflake,” which has become a marker for “own the libs” condescension. Thus “snowflake” left my lexicon, and the analytically useful concept of “virtue signaling” drifted out of it, too.
But less loaded terms also got the axe: “identity politics,” “tribalism,” “classical liberalism.” One by one, every good, unitary, crisp term I could use to refer to something I know is real and critically useful slips away. Soon, I will be tapped on the shoulder and informed that using “woke” pejoratively makes me unacceptable. Just kidding, that happened last year. “Woke” was included on New Yorker writer Osita Nwanevu’s “bad column bingo” cards, which was meant to show that using these terms made critics of his own worldview predictable, unfashionable, “sententious” goons.
It’s like the phenomenon of “concept creep” in reverse. Instead of definitions of words expanding to refer to more and more, things in the world lose more and more words for them until we have nothing to call them at all.
This is the problem with the Left being so imperious about culture, as Nwanevu is. Culture controls fashion, and increasingly fashion controls word definitions and connotations. We should be careful with this, and when a good enough term comes along for “those skeptical of ‘grievance studies’ or ‘postmodernism’ or ‘SJWs’ or whatever else,” we should plant a flag on it that won’t blow away in the winds of linguistic fashion.
