Don’t say that, say this!

In 2000 when I left India and took up work with an American NGO in Kenya I attended my first ever lunchtime brownbag session The idea as explained to me was a lunchtime chat on a random topic over sandwiches or burgers served in individual brown bags and paid for by the NGO It was a social and stimulating hourToday nearly a quarter century later I have to be careful about calling for a lsquobrownbagrsquo session lest I unwittingly demean or offend some brownskinned person Bags of other colours could be equally treacherous White bags could be landmines of the colonial kind while lunches in yellow or black bags might just not look good on TikTokOver the last few decades we have been browbeaten into political correctness ending up politically pointless Voices tell us how to speak teaching us words to avoid and recommending others We are now mastersmdashoops thatrsquos malespecific make it competentmdashat toeing the line no questions askedIn the 1990s I was rapped on the knuckles for saying prostitute instead of the newly approved sex worker People infected with HIV had to be distinguished from those whose infection had progressed to AIDS and referred to as people living with HIV or people living with HIV and AIDSAlways we are now taught put the person first Thus itrsquos persons with disability persons with diabetes and of course persons of colour In this multiverse a white person naturally is not a person of white colourA new family of words has emerged spawned by the concept of challenged personsmdashvertically challenged short follically challenged bald behaviourally challenged idiot numerically challenged minorities and many othersThe unemployed are involuntarily leisured Clumsy people are simply uniquely coordinated People who make no sense are merely differently logicalWe are involuntary recipients of a watereddown anodyne language that no one is offended by and no one understands either Herersquos my question where is all this coming from When will it endItrsquos called equity language and itrsquos based on the premise that our words do make a difference No argument there Putin minimises his Ukraine invasion as a ldquospecial military operationrdquo Wedding parties killed in drone strikes are neutralised as ldquocollateral damagerdquoWe are well into the age of linguistic authoritarianismThe University of Southern Californiarsquos School of Social Work no longer says fieldwork lest it be linked with slavery or immigrant labour the new preference is practicum The Sierra Club prefers refuse to take action over the vivid paralysed by fear because you know donrsquot offend paralysed personsAlso read Battle ahead Hindutva vs Mandal 20Would you be richer as a person with limited financial resources than just plain piss poorHerersquos an excerpt on Mumbairsquos slumdwellers from Katherine Boorsquos Behind the Beautiful Forevers mdash ldquoThe One Legrsquos given name was Sita She had fair skin usually an asset but the runt leg had smacked down her bride price Her Hindu parents had taken the single offer they got poor unattractive hardworking Muslim oldmdashldquohalfdead but who else wanted herrdquo as her mother had once said with a frownrdquoGeorge Packer writing in The Atlantic shows us how this paragraph would shrivel up into nothingness if recast in todayrsquos equity language mdash ldquoSita was a person living with a disability Because she lived in a system that centred whiteness while producing inequities among racial and ethnic groups her physical appearance conferred an unearned set of privileges and benefits but her disability lowered her status to potential partners Her parents who were Hindu persons accepted a marriage proposal from a member of a community with limited financial resources a person whose physical appearance was defined as being different from the traits of the dominant group and resulted in his being set apart for unequal treatment a person who was considered in the dominant discourse to be ldquohardworkingrdquo a Muslim person an older person In referring to him Sitarsquos mother used language that is considered harmful by representatives of historically marginalised communitiesrdquoMany of the rules of equity language are created by just a handful of members of a global activist organisation SumOfUs Their Progressiversquos Style Guide described as ldquocompact intersectional and emergentrdquo is pretty much the birthing place of the new equity language and is extensively dipped into by most other guidesBut three decades of relabelling prostitutes as sex workers has not changed the tragedies of their daily lives nor peoplersquos attitudes towards them They still fight for their basic rights and struggle for equality Changing words has not changed mindsItrsquos difficult to argue that words donrsquot matter because they do But discrimination racism and contempt exist in every language Creating sterile alternatives in English alone is an act of linguistic colonialism by itselfConsider Hindi A person with a disability becomes woh vyakti jiske paas viklangta hai Far pithier and more tweetable is alas apang vyaktimdashwhich means ldquodisabled personrdquoDo we have a ldquopolitically correctrdquo in Hindi I checked and found rajnitik shuddhata Tsk tskOh dear Thatrsquos something wersquove not had for a long timeYou can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper