The language police(men?) need to smoke a peace pipe
Quin Hillyer
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“Aloha,” “Hola,” and “Shalom” to all you readers, from whatever field where you toil or during whatever picnics you enjoy.
And if you are a handicapped (!) American (!) who sometimes feels like you’re on the low end of the totem pole (!) any time your department has a powwow (!), even if you put in more man-hours (!) at work than anyone else while suffering doubts and even heckling from the peanut gallery (!), I want you to know you are on my master list (!) of survivors (!) I admire. You’ve figured out there is more than one way to skin a cat (!), and now everything in your purview is whipped into shape (!). Good job.
‘LATINX’ NOT WELCOME IN OUR ‘MASTER BEDROOMS’
With the Jan. 13 publication of a USA Today column warning about misuse of “culturally sensitive words,” linguistic scolds now have told us to stop using every word above that is either marked by a link or followed by an exclamation point. It matters not if the actual derivation of the word has no remotely offensive origin, much less whether the word’s user means absolutely no offense.
Well, please forgive all of us normal people (!) who refuse to prostitute (!) ourselves to the language police. Yes, of course language is important and of course we all should avoid rudeness. Still, it’s also long past time that people stop running around looking for a reason to claim offense, much less for third-party observers to insist everyone should take vicarious offense at language in other people’s conversations.
Some of us remain privately offended by the spelling out in print of profanities and vulgarities, which we are told shouldn’t bother us — at the exact same time we’re told we should be punished if we “misgender” and use the wrong ethnic reference for a “Latinx” biological male. Well, bleep that. What’s really offensive is people like USA Today guest essayist David Oliver ruining a beautiful language by using nonsensical jargon about the dangers of “othering” or of committing a “microaggression.”
If you are “triggered” (another moronic word use) by someone saying “Aloha,” the problem is not the speaker but you.
The late, great columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote an essay explaining what’s really happening here. It was in response to intellectual Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), who had written a brilliant essay called “Defining Deviancy Down” that argued that as cultural pathologies grow, people keep their equilibrium by no longer treating them as pathologies at all. In effect, they choose to be like the monkey who “sees no evil.”
Krauthammer, a licensed psychiatrist, wrote in his answering essay called “Defining Deviancy Up” that Moynihan was correct but that the “see no evil” pose causes yet another psychological reaction in further reply. “As part of the vast social project of moral leveling, it is not enough for the deviant to be normalized,” Krauthammer wrote. “The normal must be found to be deviant.”
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In sum, we subconsciously feel guilty about no longer condemning what we know to be wrong, so we then find other things to condemn even though they are barely wrong at all. That’s what happens when the same woke hordes who demand that we barely punish even violent criminals are the ones, broadly speaking, who want teachers fired for using the wrong pronouns for their students.
Here’s a better idea: Let’s bury the hatchets (!). Yes, be polite, but abide by this ancient wisdom: No offense intended, no offense taken.