Brandeis University Expands List of Words and Phrases to Avoid
“the elite Massachusetts institution’s Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center, which compiled the list”
Doesn’t it seem like maintaining a list like this is the opposite of what you would do if you really wanted to encourage people to think for themselves?
The New York Post reports:
Woke Brandeis University expands list of words, phrases to avoid using
A newly expanded list of language to avoid using at one ultra-woke college now warns against joking about obsessive-compulsive disorder — unless you’ve actually been diagnosed with it.
More than a dozen words and phrases have been added to Brandeis University’s widely mocked compendium of “violent” and “identity-based” terminology ahead of the start of its fall semester on Thursday.
But the elite Massachusetts institution’s Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center, which compiled the list, also notes that what “may be offensive for an outsider to say might be acceptably used by a member of that group.”
The additions include, “‘I’m so OCD’ (outside of actually having OCD).”
The PARC’s “suggested alternative” — for those who don’t “actually” have OCD — is “I’m very organized, detailed oriented.”
Meanwhile, the staffers and students who run the PARC even washed out their own mouths earlier this month, changing the name of the “Oppressive Language List” to the “Suggested Language List.”
A footnote on the introductory webpage says that “we retitled this list to center the suggested alternatives rather than the words and phrases that may cause harm.”
The new additions also include “whipped into shape,” which PARC says can evoke “imagery of enslavement and torture.”
Instead, students and staffers at the school in Waltham — which charges more than $76,000 a year for tuition, room and board, and a mandatory “activity fee” — are advised to say “organize,” “spruce up” or “put in order.”
A new collection of “violent idioms about animals” contains “more than one way to skin a cat,” “killing two birds with one stone” and “beating a dead horse.”
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Don’t forget to add “Brandeis grduate.” Don’t use that on your resume.
.
How about, “more than one way to skin a diversity counselor,” “killing two grievance studies professors with one stone” and “beating a dead victim”?
If it is merely a “suggestion” then such prescriptions can be avoided with no consequences.
If however these pantywaist absurdities are enforced by teachers, especially in writing courses or those with major writing components, by scoring papers with such usages lower than those that comply . . . well, it is just another instance of how language becomes bent to ideological ends from the top down, once again exposing the “language evolves” dodge for what it is–camouflage for this sort of authoritarian thought control.
Make no mistake–if you bend to such “suggestions” you invite authority to think for you. Read Orwell’s discussion of “prefabricated” usage in his great “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell did not imagine at the time he wrote it that prefabricated political writing would emanate from the university, a situation in which leftist intelligentsia would be in a position to infect the beliefs of millions and broadcast these millions into positions of bureaucratic authority everywhere.
It happened with “nonsexist usage” prescriptions and pronouns, the top-down classroom and office “suggestions” that become “standard,” with deviants who dare to ignore these idiotic prescriptions labelled “ignorant” or “illiterate.”
OCD = Felix Unger Syndrome…with the emphasis on the name initials…
Inch by inch, word by word they are stealing our liberties.