The pessimistic premise of the Word of the Week is that there is a giant posse of self-deputized language policers organizing themselves around the idea that by making moronic demands about how we should use language, they can fix the world. The optimistic premise is that these people can be ignored or told to get bent. Because, usually, language policing is really just some mediocrity’s power trip.

Certain weeks seem to emphasize the pessimistic premise over the optimistic one, though. This was one of them. In the New York Times, the screenwriter Walter Mosley recounts a crazy-making tale of being dressed down by human resources because he, a black guy, had told a true personal story in the writer’s room about being called the N-word. Somebody anonymously reported it. He was told he could write it in the future, but not say it, and that he couldn’t face his accuser to discuss the matter. Luckily, he was in a position to just throw up his hands and walk out on the job.