@BlackHippyChick Day: A Note on Derogatory Language

The Associated Press has a Facebook page for discussing the syntax and punctuation required of their writers. You might think the page would be as silent and dry as a library, but even writers have flame wars. In January last year, The AP was shouted down for using the term “The French.” The argument spilt all over the internet, and AP became the biggest catastrophe of the week.

Once the wreckage had been cleaned up, AP decided to ban “the” labels from their pages forever more. In their apology, they said, "the" terms (as in “the woke” or “the poor”) can sound “dehumanizing and imply a monolith rather than diverse individuals.”

 A similar ethic plays out in healthcare. Most people are still comfortable with the words diabetic and epileptic, but change is on the way. We should not characterise an individual according to a single trait, so they are epilepsy patients or people with diabetes. They are not diabetics and epileptics. We have autism. We are not “autistics.”

AP also puts all derogatory language into quotation marks, so one does not say woke. They say “woke.” Nor do you deadname. Says a member of the stylebook committee, “We found that the minute we put out a print version of the AP Stylebook we’re pretty much updating it sometimes the next day with something that has changed or evolved,”

Some of you will write this argument off as too much political correctness. If my mentor were still alive, he would have done the same. He wanted us to state things plainly without glossing over anything to make it sound more pleasant. He thought political correctness was a disease in its own right because it diluted the language and acted as an obstacle to the truth.

At the time, I agreed with him, but my years have softened me. I spend a lot of time learning about dehumanising language because I never want to create distance between myself and my readers. I want to treat them with the compassion they deserve. Compassion is more important than truth. Compassion is more important than anything.

Is wokeness destroying our language or turning us into more compassionate people? Let's talk about it.