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.”