My list of banned words

North America’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Language Project has released yet another list of Bad Say. Scientists are to swap ‘male’ and ‘female’ for ‘sperm-producing’ and ‘egg-producing’ – as presumably most biologists are stuck in remedial learning and haven’t yet got to the chapter explaining that humans come in only two sexes. But rather than opt for another chortle at these petty rhetorical tyrants’ expense, I’m regarding turnabout as fair play. Behold, a by no means complete list of the expressions I’m banning right back.

‘Black and brown bodies’ – a bizarrely dehumanising reduction of people to biomass, often disconcertingly employed by the very folks in possession of said black and brown bodies. If others control or injure your body, they control or injure you. A person is a sentient being; a body is a thing. A person, once dead, as far as we know, is gone; a body can be a corpse. How this expression is meant to dignify minorities is anyone’s guess.

‘People who look like me’ – a wordy, childish reference to others of one’s own race, although any white student who insisted on a syllabus full of books by ‘people who look like me’ would probably get arrested. This weird euphemism for, if you will, ‘black and brown bodies’ bespeaks a telling reluctance to insist outright, say, that you wish only to read books by authors of your own race, or that the mutual humanity of authors of other races is insufficient to conceivably find their work germane to your specially black or brown life. Doesn’t sound as innocent put like that, does it?

The ______ ‘community’ – one of the most misused words of recent decades. By inference, memberships of identity groups such as Asians, the disabled or an alphabet soup of disparate sexual minorities are so palsy and kindred that they effectively form neighbourhood associations, replete with treasurers, secretaries to take minutes at meetings and bake sales.