Amid a pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found what it considers the real crisis. Its big job, it thinks, is not to combat vaccine hesitancy or expedite the formal approval of more vaccines for adults. Lay the groundwork for the vaccination rollout for children under 12? Oh, there are bigger fish to fry.
No, the real crisis is the need to replace “mean” words with those that mean nothing at all.
In the taxpayer-funded document “Preferred Terms for Select Population Groups & Communities,” the CDC advises that we replace our lexicons referring to various demographics with newspeak. First and foremost, the CDC demands that we avoid legally precise language outside of “technical documents.” Instead of accurate terms such as “illegal alien” or even “the undocumented” or “the foreign-born,” the CDC would have us say “mixed-status households” or “non-U.S.-born persons.”
How the latter is any less offensive than “the foreign-born” remains unclear, but you can see how it just rolls off the tongue.
The same policy goes for the term “stakeholder,” which the CDC says ought to be “replaced as much as possible” because “it has a violent connotation for some tribes and tribal members.” Of course, “stakeholder” has a precise definition in business law with a widespread use in financial journalism and corporate communications. But never mind precision of meaning — someone is being paid thousands of dollars to encourage us all to use weird, fuzzy terms that are less likely to offend.
The CDC’s Great Awokening requires not only respect for preferred pronouns of transgender people, but in fact the erasure of all gendered pronouns. Rather than using “he” or “she,” we’re told to use “he” or “she” or “they,” but we aren’t supposed to use “his” or “her.” Instead, we are instructed to use the “singular they or their.”
Oddly enough, the acronym MSM, meaning “men who have sex with men,” which originated by epidemiologists to classify risk assessment quickly during the AIDS crisis, should not be used as shorthand for gay or bisexual men who indeed have sex with men. Instead, we are told, it should “mean people who report being male at birth and having had sex with a person who was male at birth, regardless of self-identified sexual orientation.” This, of course, would require that we qualify a transgender woman who identifies as such as a man. So wokeness comes full circle.
A running theme in the CDC’s guidance is its aversion to concise syntax and proper grammar. (Note, for example, the “singular they or their.”) When referring to a group as “Hispanics” or a person as “Native American,” the CDC instructs the use of “Hispanic persons” and “American Indian person,” even though my woke middle school teachers told me that was actually a racist term because it’s premised on the misapprehension that Christopher Columbus had arrived in India rather than the Americas.
Also bad: the elderly, high-risk population, and asylum. CDC approved: elders, people who live/work in settings that put them at increased/higher risk of becoming infected or exposed to hazards, and psychiatric hospital/facility.
The clearest illustration of the euphemism treadmill? The CDC has deemed démodé the terms “handicapped,” “disabled,” and “differently abled,” all terms adopted, respectively, to replace each other as they came in term to be deemed politically incorrect. Instead, we are to use the CDC’s beloved and rhetorically preposterous prepositional clauses: “people who are deaf or hard of hearing or who are blind or have low vision” and “people with an intellectual or developmental disability.”
Remember, it’s not all just a stupid, self-serving, and performative assault on language in the name of wokeness. It’s a a stupid, self-serving, and performative assault on language in the name of wokeness that we the people have been forced to pay for.
