George Orwell popularised the word ‘thoughtcrime’, but he also wrote extensively about the destruction of language. This week, the United Nations has been playing that worrying game, of meddling with what people say.
‘What you say matters’, the UN wrote in a tweet. ‘Help create a more equal world by using gender-neutral language if you’re unsure about someone’s gender or are referring to a group,’ its Twitter account urged, telling people to substitute words like ‘mankind’ for ‘humankind’, ‘maiden name’ for ‘family name’ and ‘businessman’ for ‘representative’.
There is nothing bad, of course, about trying not to offend people. But there is something deeply troubling about adapting language in a way that dilutes meaning. And is it really the UN’s place to try and police what people say?
Like the compilers of the Newspeak dictionary, the UN seem to have expanded its mission to remove words from the lexicon, or at least until we are sure about someone’s gender.
It used to be simple. We observed someone’s sex and took it from there. Transgender people like me made our wishes clear, generally by presenting ourselves in the way that we wished to be seen. But sex is frowned on these days. The preferred word is now gender, and our gender is not self-evident. And if it’s not evident we might not use the right word.
To avoid upsetting the prickly and the precious, the UN took the blue pencil to words we used to take for granted: husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend are out; partner and spouse are in. But this is not how language works. Language mediates understanding; if we don’t have words to encapsulate an idea, we can’t share those ideas. As it was explained to Winston Smith in 1984,
‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
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