Sometimes you let yourself think we have hit peak language policing. Whenever that happens, some headline comes along to remind you that there is no peak, there is nothing so extreme that activist types will realize that raising consciousness about problematic words accomplishes literally nothing. They’ll just keep vainly trying to edit the vocabulary of fellow upper-class abstraction addicts, lost in an unreality of lexical activism.
Take the recent bulletin from the San Francisco Chronicle, which let us know that “the word ‘chief’ will no longer be used in reference to job titles in the San Francisco Unified School District in an effort, school officials said, to avoid the word’s connotation with Native Americans. A replacement term has not been determined.”
Sure, that’s not how the word “connotation” works (a word can be redolent of some particular context or subject matter, but a connotation is the invocation of a general idea or feeling). And sure, the word “chief” comes from an old French word that evolved into the modern word “chef,” and before that from the Latin for head, “caput,” which is also the origin of words such as “decapitate.” But for whatever activist-bait reason, there is some impulse to play a word association game and find any term loosely associated with Native Americans and the Western frontier and to call for them to be excised from official usage. In 2020, the city of Duluth, Minnesota, did the same thing the San Francisco school board is doing now. “Duluth seeks removal of ‘chief’ from job titles,” went the headline in the Washington Post. As its mayor said back then, the totally made up and baseless banning of a Latinate word for leader that existed before contact with the New World was necessary “so that we have more inclusive leadership and less language that is rooted in hurt and offensive, intentional marginalization.”
Nothing in all the world is so powerful as an idea whose time has come, Victor Hugo said. And apparently, for liberal activists, the idea whose time has come is watching old episodes of Howdy Doody and banning random words from it, thinking this makes you sound empathetic and smart.
But for the latest in word policing that made me think we must have finally reached the end of all this, you must turn to New York Magazine’s real estate sub-brand, Curbed. Apparently, the term “landlord” has been ruled problematic. The piece notes “a Columbus Dispatch op-ed claiming the term landlord ‘helps paint housing providers as villains’” and “a company called FBS Property Management in San Diego,” which “devotes an entire section of its website to encouraging owners to use housing provider.” (“Provider,” by the way, is also the latest in politically correct terminology for prostitutes, many of whom have moved past “sex worker.”) “Landlord,” apparently, will get flagged by Google Docs’s “inclusivity warning” because the term is gendered. It’s similar to how the other real estate term, “master bedroom,” got ousted by realtors for its supposed, but actually nonexistent, historical connection to slavery.
Some of us have been pointing out for a long time that any term, more or less arbitrarily, can be snuffed out using this game of calling things problematic and focusing on how people speak rather than on the ideas that words express themselves. It’s just a way the powerful kneecap critique while claiming to be radical and left-wing as a way of branding themselves. I am hoping that despite being wrong a thousand times before, this one will really be a peak. If landlords crying problematic doesn’t convince the Left that it has a problem with exhausting and reactionary and pointless language policing, nothing will.
