The College Fix

Liberals want to tell you what you can and can’t say. Ignore them.

Every school year brings a new set of words that campus moderators have deemed unacceptable to say. If you are venturing anywhere near a college campus soon, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the latest updates to the Index Vocabularium Prohibitorum lest you utter a thing that “offends” someone, somewhere.

“Derpy” is the latest addition to this venerable list, evidently because it is an “ablist slur.” Also in the docket, apparently, are the words “ghetto,” “illegal alien,” “crazy” and “insane.” Such histrionic word-policing seems, to the average observer, to be rather craz—er, insa—er, well, just a wee bit unbalanced. But who are we to stand in the way of progress?

In truth, we should not be playing this game, not on the terms that academia has stipulated. On its face, from a purely clinical perspective, this seems like a noble endeavor: sympathetic activists wish to ban words like “crazy,” for instance, because they are worried about stigmatizing the mentally ill. But in all likelihood nobody—absolutely nobody—is worried about this. There is very likely not a single person anywhere who honestly believes that the vernacular use of the word “insane” represents some kind of slight against people suffering from mental illness. Anyone who tells you that they do believe this is, quite likely, lying through their teeth.

Word policing almost always represents not a desire to right certain lexical wrongs but a desire to control people’s words and thoughts. The people who insist you cannot say the word “crazy,” let alone perfectly reasonable political terms like “illegal alien,” are not interested in protecting aggrieved minorities from linguistic harm; they are interested in bossing you around, exerting a measure of dominance over you, and ultimately binding you to to the strictures their own silly and egotistical whims. This is control for control’s sake. Anyone who demands that you censor yourself of utterly common and inoffensive idioms is interested in something more than social niceties.

Here is a tip: when someone—a campus social justice warrior, say, or a diversity bureaucrat, or someone who is quite obviously interested only in obsessively regulating your behavior—tells you that you “can’t say” a word like “crazy” or “illegal alien:” go ahead and say the word. There’s nothing wrong with those words and many others like them. There are, to be sure, certain words and phrases that are genuinely hurtful or inflammatory and should be avoided. But it is quite easy to tell such words apart from the everyday lexicon that makes the English language rich, varied, useful and practical. Don’t allow yourself to be shut up by people who are neurotically convinced that a word like “derpy” is shockingly offensive. Today it’s “derpy;” tomorrow it will be another word, and the day after that one more. Put your foot down before it gets any worse. (And yes, we are aware that the phrase “put your foot down” will likely be forbidden one day as well, for whatever silly reason. We’ll keep saying it nonetheless, thank you very much.)

MORE: University distributes seven-page speech guide

MORE: You can’t say ‘crazy’ at Smith College: Student paper replaces with ‘ableist slur

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