You Can’t Say That at Stanford

By Judson Berger

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

 

As an American, I found Stanford University’s initiative to identify and eliminate “harmful language” from campus documents to be, frankly, dumb, crazy, insane, lame, tone deaf, and more than a little senile.

 

Any normal person would look at this list and feel gipped, with their ability to express ordinary sentiments crippled by DEI professionals who are on the warpath. That the gray beards of the Bay Area would have the balls to pull the trigger and blackball entire swaths of the English language from everyday usage has many of us going off the reservation.

 

I propose, instead, a blind study or a blind review — call it what you like — to gauge whether these terms truly offend students, be they shemale, transgendered, ladies, gentlemen, hermaphrodites, or Pocahontas. You guys, in my brief but well-traveled time on this earth I’ve never heard of someone committing suicide for being called OCD, a black sheep, a basket case, a freshman, or Karen. Certainly not my aunt, Karen.

 

Credit where due: Stanford’s CIO Council and People of Color in Technology affinity group killed it with this initiative given their mission, having submitted a roster of blacklisted terms that two days ago would not have merited so much as a trigger warning. Gangbusters job, really. For the rest of us, expressing ourselves will be no cakewalk under these terms.

 

Not to beat a dead horse, but it would appear that the wokes are in an abusive relationship with the speech policemen, given that some of their favored terms are being abruptly disallowed (like trigger warning or “preferred” pronouns). Maybe, I submit, it’s time for the purveyors of this cultural craze to bury the hatchet with the rest of us, have a powwow, and whitelist most of these words and phrases again. To the army of administrators at Stanford, we should all simply say: No can do.

 

Then let’s go balls to the wall on the Philippine Islands, and take our best shot at being users, not victims, of the English language.

 

Okay, I’ve got to wrap this up; I just realized I parked in a handicapped space. So in closing: prostitutes.