Stanford releases a list of no-no words as an ‘initiative’ against ‘harmful language’

Once upon a time, intellectual atheists were actually respectable, but now, not so much. Believe it or not, the left can actually descend to lower lows of “wokeness.” Stanford University’s IT community recently embarked on a new crusade against thoughtcrimes — rather, the “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative”. See some of the most insane — excuse me, not insane, rather “surprising” or “wild” — examples below:

It is a “multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language” with ten categories listed, and a trigger warning — shoot, I mean a “content note” — which actually reads:

This website contains language that is offensive or harmful. Please engage with this website at your own pace.

Yes people, this is real.

The comments in the Twitter thread were quite amusing, with one user observing that the adoption of terms like “person who has immigrated” over the obsolete “immigrant” just made “hitting essay word count mins [minimums]” a “lot easier[.]”

Another said:

Now remembering how Stanford mistakenly offered prospective-undergrad me the finaid [financial aid] package due to an international student, bc [because] even then they couldn’t conceive of the fact that someone born abroad might be a domestic applicant.

There are well over one hundred forbidden words/phrases, all of which are emphatically benign, but several really expose the left’s collective mind as the harbor of insanity and control it really is:

Don’t use transsexual “unless used medically” because of course, reality is reality regardless of “identities” or feelings, and anatomy and biology are in fact settled sciences, and physicians dealing with aberrancies and gender identity disorder actually need to know what biological sex their patient is.

Don’t use abort because “this term can unintentionally raise religious/moral concerns over abortion” — instead, use “cancel” or “end”. Yet, “abortion” contains the word “abort” because the procedure “cancels” or “ends” a human life. Furthermore, these pro-abortion leftists have a whole campaign dedicated to using the word “abortion” called “Shout Your Abortion” because it’s “normal” and needs to be “destigmatized” — if there’s nothing wrong with abortion, then why try and manipulate language into avoiding words that might make people think about it?

Contradict much?

As two of my colleagues noted, moves towards absurd language control has been done all too often before, most notably with the French Revolution and then during Pol Pot’s reign of terror. From Wikipedia:

On 20 September, the French army won a stunning victory over the Prussians at Valmy. Emboldened by this, on 22 September the Convention replaced the monarchy with the French First Republic and introduced a new calendar, with 1792 becoming ‘Year One’.

On Pol’s Khmer Rouge:

The first day of ‘year Zero’ was declared by the Khmer Rouge…to signify a rebirth of Cambodian history. Adopting the term as an analogy to the ‘Year One’ of the French Revolutionary Calendar, Year Zero was effectually an attempt by the Khmer Rouge to erase history and reset Cambodian society to a zeroth year, removing any vestiges of the past.

Wokeness is a Trojan Horse, albeit an unconvincing one, to usher in Orwellian control; it ought to be resisted at every turn.

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