Language manipulation

A few weeks ago we learned the news that Stanford University had published a brochure specifying a list of words that should not be used because they are harmful. The news caused a huge uproar, as one of the forbidden words is American, which should be replaced by US citizen. Also on the list, of course, is abortion, as well as many other commonly used terms. A word whose exclusion caused a lot of rejection was victim, which according to the authors of this monstrosity should be replaced by a person who has experienced or a person who has been impacted. Among those who reacted to this absurdity, some media highlighted Elon Musk’s contribution, who published the following tweet:

This has gone too far, to say the least! @Stanford, what’s your explanation for this madness?

where, by the way, one of the forbidden words appears: madness.

That the dominant ideology goes to these extremes is not surprising. It had been foreseen. Hannah Arendt explained it in 1951 in her work The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Wherever a dominant ideology arises, those who do not think in that way are excluded, coexistence breaks down and totalitarianism emerges.

The distortion of language is one of the most usual procedures to manipulate the people. This is how Stalin put it:

Of all the monopolies enjoyed by the state, none will be as crucial as its monopoly on the definition of words. The essential weapon for political control will be the dictionary.

In his introduction to a course on Man Manipulation through Language, Alfonso López Quintás wrote:

Living in a democratic regime is not enough to to be truly free. Freedom must be conquered day by day against those who artfully try to dominate us with the resources of that form of mental illusionism called manipulation... The manipulator ideologist tries to shape the spirit of people, to gain dominance over them in a quickly, forceful, massive and easy way.

Let's also see how Vladimir Volkoff put it, in a 2009 interview with Marc Vitellio:

Political correctness as we know it today represents the entropy of political thought. As such, it is impossible to define, for it lacks a true content... The highest good consists in seeking tolerance towards others, unless the other’s options are politically incorrect... It consists fundamentally in confusing good and evil, under the pretext that everything is debatable matter.

How to remedy this threat? Volkoff offers this recipe:

Renounce all politically correct terminology and the ideologies on which it rests. For example, say “abortion” instead of “termination of pregnancy”, “deaf” instead of “hearing impaired”, “old age” instead of “senior age”, “scoundrel” instead of “misfit”. A "docent" will never be a "teacher."

Here’s an incomplete list of words and phrases we must use, even though we’ll be accused of being politically incorrect, along with the manipulated alternatives suggested to replace them, which should be avoided always:

Politically incorrect terms	Manipulated alternatives
Abortion (murder of an unborn human being)	Termination of pregnancy
Black sheep	Outcast
Black box	Hidden, mystery box, opaque box
Blacklist	Deny list, disallowed
Blind	Not sighted
Blind study	Masked study
Civilian casualties	Collateral damage
Complicity in suicide or murder	Euthanasia (a good death)
Cracy, insane	Surprising
Deaf	Person with different hearing
Disabled	Person with different capabilities
Drogadiction	Substance use disorder
Halfbreed	Person of multiple ethnicities
Hispanic	Latinx
Indian summer	Late summer
Old age	Senior age
Oriental	Person of Asian descent
Picnic	Outdoor eating
Poverty	Vulnerability, risk of social exclusion
Sack	Staff reduction
Sex	Gender (a grammatical term)
Slave labor	Unfair work practices
Strengthen	Empower
War	Armed conflict
Webmaster	Web product owner
White paper	Position paper

So you know: to defend ourselves from the tyranny of the sex ideology (rather than gender) that tries to stifle our freedom, we must refrain from using any of the terms in the second column, employing instead those in the first, which are those we have always used. Of course, the table is incomplete, but the reader will be able to enlarge it without difficulty.

In this post we have spoken about the manipulation of language in general. In the next we’ll tackle the manipulation of scientific language.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca