Part I
Principles for Speaking
1.
Be Conscientious with Language
THE OLD ADAGE WAS âWATCH YOUR LANGUAGE.â BECAUSE WORDS CAN sometimes do harm and we live among people of different views and backgrounds, we have long understood the wisdom of taking care with what we say and how we say it. In todayâs fraught debates, mindfulness about speech can help us avoid unwanted controversy. Conscientiousness involves considering the range of people who may hear or read your speech and how it may strike them. Some conscientiousness is just commonsense thoughtfulness and decency. If you are speaking to a familiar audienceâyour familyâyou may be able to state sketchy opinions without thinking twice. If you know that everyone in the room loves the Red Sox, celebrates Christmas, or reveres the current president of the United States, you can reflect these beliefs without risk. But maybe your nephew has brought a college friend to Thanksgiving and she has a different religion, nationality, or political slant. She might appreciate being asked, âDo you have any plans for the winter holidays?â rather than âWhere will you celebrate Christmas?â If you donât know her politics, you might think twice before launching into an attack on a candidate for office. Simply taking into account her presence shouldnât temper the humor or comfort level of the gathering, but it might influence how questions are asked or points are made.
Using language conscientiously avoids the assumption that your own interpretation of words is universal. When you discover that terms or turns of phrase that you thought innocuousâfor example, the use of âmankindâ to refer to the human raceâare heard as sexist, the conscientious speaker and writer will hear out the concern, rather than responding defensively (for example, by insisting that youâve used the phrase your whole life or just heard it on the news). Although not every protestation will be merited, conscientiousness abjures the default belief that just because youâve always spoken a certain way and meant no harm, your choice of words is appropriate or ideal. It reflects a measure of concern to ensure that your language does not denigrate others, reinforce stereotypes, or trample on sensitivities. It does not mean stifling provocative or even offensive opinions, but calls for rendering them knowingly and prudently. Conscientiousness with language can also help to rectify imbalances of power by lowering the barriers that certain individuals may face when joining in conversation. By avoiding stereotypes and jargon that are particular to a certain group and can reinforce feelings of inferiority or intimidation among outsiders, the conscientious use of language can enable everyone to speak more freely.
Conscientiousness also means being mindful that, online, we lack control over how our words are forwarded, shared, quoted, cited, or transmitted to remote audiences. In 2013, a sixteen-year-old in Australia was on his way to a concert by the pop artist Pink when he tweeted: â@Pink Iâm ready with my Bomb. Time to blow up #RodLaverArena.â On arrival at the show he was apprehended by security guards who trailed him from his Twitter profile and encouraged police to arrest him. The shaken teen was released after he explained that he was referring to Pinkâs hit song âTimebombâ and was simply looking forward to the music and special effects. Experienced travelers know never to joke about hijacking before boarding a plane, no matter how obvious it may be that you are kidding. In an era of school shootings, attacks in public places, and religiously motivated violence, this sort of verbal restraint is well advised.
Unpredictable responses to speech, even if unfair, have become all too predictable, especially online. Trying to reinsert missing context and nuance after a tweet has traveled the world can be impossible. In 2014, the comedian Stephen Colbert joked on-air about Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder establishing a foundation to benefit Native Americans, even while refusing to change a team name that many found retrograde and offensive. Colbert ironically assumed the persona of the obtuse ownerâwith a follow-up tweet saying, âI am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.â The satirical intent that was entirely obvious on-air was lost online where some who viewed the tweet in isolation didnât realize Colbert was mocking Snyder and not Asians. Suey Park, an online activist who launched a campaign to â#CancelColbert,â said she did not care about the intent or context of the remark, as she was sick of seeing Asian Americans be the butt of jokes. Colbert weathered the attack, but Parkâs avowed indifference to intent and context reflects a reality in the digital age: your words can land anywhere in ways you may not anticipate and may be powerless to correct. In turn, Park was targeted by a vicious call-out campaign for failing to get the joke.
Presumption of Heterodoxy
In a diverse society, those speaking publicly should assume their audience includes a full spectrum in terms of age, gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, political affiliation, religion, and ideology. During the 2005 BET Comedy Awards, comedian Paul Mooney joked about singer Diana Ross being caught drunk driving and about her ex-husband, who had recently died in a mountain-climbing accident. Mooney didnât know that Rossâs daughter, Tracee Ellis Ross, was in the audience. Steve Harvey, the next act in the lineup, did, and he acknowledged Ellis Ross, leading a round of applause for her. But Mooney said afterward that knowing she was present would not have changed his routine. He said, âHer mama couldâve been in [the audience]; thatâs not the point. . . . When you are a celebrity and you do crazy stuff, thatâs the game.â Mooney concluded that celebrities, who prosper because of public exposure, are always fair game. Right or wrong, he made his remarks about Ross after having considered the risk of even an unlikely offense. Back in 2005, it was easy to imagine a joke reaching an unanticipated listener in a large theater. Now the same is true of anything transmitted digitally. Conscientiousness demands keeping this wide audience in the back of your mind as you decide what to say, even if your decision, ultimately, is to accept the risks of making a potentially offensive or hurtful remark.
A challenge of conscientiousness is that offense is in the eyes of the beholder. Certain well-known slurs and stereotypes are widely recognized as objectionable. But with other terms, it depends who you ask. In 2017, the New York Times asked its readers to identify the racially related terms they found most âcringe-worthy.â Answers were all over the map, including âracial toleranceâ (âwe donât wish to be tolerated like petulant childrenâ); Latinx (âI donât think the term Latino or Latina need to be revisedâ), and âNativeâ (âborders on the word âprimitiveââ). By 2020, undoubtedly, such a list would have evolved, with some once-rankling terms having become widely accepted and other expressions having moved decisively into unacceptable territory. The bounds of what is considered offensive are subjective and shifting; itâs impossible to avoid ever offending anyone. Taking some care to consider what might be sensitive and how to word it is the best that most of us can be expected to do.
Be Your Own Editor
Conscientiousness with language requires keeping abreast of changing social mores, subtleties involving particular groups, and the evolution of language. This may seem like a hefty burdenâthere can be so much to consider before speaking up that it may feel safer to remain silent. With the ability to reach people anywhere at the click of a button comes the responsibility to be aware of that sprawling audience and its sensitivities.
As the Internet and social media have dismantled old hurdles to reaching an audience, their immediacy requires us to internalize some of the traditional functions of editors and publishers. Years ago, the only way to get a book or article into the public domain was to write a proposal or manuscript, maybe secure an agent, and get an editor to review it and a publisher to print it. If you couldnât clear these hurdles, the public wouldnât read your work. The corollary was that before regular readers saw your prose, the draft would have undergone multiple rounds of scrutiny for language, tone, argument, legal pitfalls, and likely audience response.
Today the most influential media platforms like the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as book publishers, still operate as gatekeepers. But in many venues individuals can express themselves with little or no vetting, and their ideas may win a substantial following. While this is a great boon for free speech, it carries dangers. Writers canât rely on editors and publishers to flag things that could cause unwitting offense. Instead, they need to internalize the scrutiny and forethought of the old-fashioned editorial process. Responsibilities that editors and publishers shouldered alongside sharpening proseâfollowing trends, understanding societal hot buttons, considering alternative viewpoints and the potential for offenseânow fall to all who put their ideas out for consumption.
There is no equivalent of Strunk and Whiteâs The Elements of Style for the conscientious writer or speaker. No single source can tell us the nomenclature to use and avoid for various groups. On the plus side, though, the Internet puts at our fingertips pretty much everything we need to know to avoid blundering into inadvertent offense.
HOW TO BE YOUR OWN EDITOR
- Talk and listen to diverse groups of people
- Read widely
- Before describing them, consider how those with a given identity describe themselves
- If you think something might be offensive, find out if it is
- Use terminology tip sheets that spell out how to avoid stereotyping and offer more inclusive alternative language
- Reread before hitting âsendâ or âpostâ
SAMPLE ALTERNATIVE PHRASINGS TO AVOID OFFENSE
- Able-ist language (instead of âstand up for rights,â âdefend your rightsâ)
- Sexist language (instead of âearly man,â âprehistoric humansâ)
- Racist language (instead of âa black professor,â âa professorâ bringing up race only if relevant)
- Ageist language (instead of âfeistyâ or âspry,â âarticulateâ or âpassionateâ)
- LGBTQ-friendly language (instead of âsexual preference,â âsexual orientationâ)
The Euphemism Treadmill
When I was growing up, the term âOrientalâ was widely used to refer to people and products originating in East Asia. At a certain point, though, âAsianâ and âAsian Americanâ entered common parlance and âOrientalâ came to be understood as conveying an outdated Western conception of Asia as exotic. When we told my mother that âOrientalâ was no longer considered an acceptable term, she balked, demanding to know how a word that had been widely used as long as she could remember had suddenly become offensive. But she came around. Similarly, at PEN America, we sometimes used to refer to a series of programs aimed at fostering writing opportunities for the incarcerated, undocumented immigrants, and day laborers as amplifying âmarginalized voices.â Though the phrase originated with the academic left, one prospective funder faulted our terminology, saying that the term âmarginalizationâ failed to place the blame squarely enough on mainstream society for favoring the privileged. She urged us to talk about âexcluded voicesâ instead. Chastened, we thought harder about how we could more accurately describe the individuals these programs aimed to elevate.
When people are confronted with an objection to language that others find offensive, they may defend themselves on the basis that no one complained before. With many slights, though, it is fair to assume that the groups most affected might have opposed strenuously years earlier had they believed they could effect change, and not feared reprisals from speaking up. Ignorance, prejudice, and subjugation have long protected certain norms and terms from scrutiny to the point where they are so firmly ingrained that people can find it hard to imagine that they are considered objectionable.
Social psychologist Steven Pinker is skeptical that retiring outmoded terms in favor of new ones that carry less baggage can reshape perceptions. He refers to the constant overhaul of problematic terms as the âeuphemism treadmill,â whereby new words are embraced but then succumb to the very taint of those they were anointed to replace. For individuals with cognitive challenges, the term âimbecileâ was once coined to be neutral sounding and not derisive. It eventually gave way to âretarded,â then to âmentally handicapped,â and later to âhaving intellectual disabilities.â Journalist Heather Kirn Lanier described the mother of a typically developing child admonishing her misbehaving son to âquit acting like youâre special needsâ to illustrate how even terms that are adopted in an effort to foster respect can become contaminated by the very same associations they were intended to help erase.
While Pinker is right that neologisms can acquire the very stigma of the words they are intended to replace, that doesnât mean language shouldnât evolve. When a group of people believe that a particular word describing them is a hindrance, society should listen. Lanier has researched the campaign to banish the term âmentally retardedâ (originally coined as a clinical-sounding, nonjudgmental label), recounting how it is sometimes referred to as the âr-wordâ to invoke the offensive punch of the n-word. The Special Olympics mounted a campaign captioned âSpread the Word to End the Wordâ and, in 2010, President Obama signed Rosaâs Law, a bill that excises the term âmentally retardedâ from many federal documents. Four years later, the U.S. Supreme Court followed suit, substituting the phrase âintellectual disability.â The hope, of course, is that progressively evolving social norms can help to ensure that new terms do not simply get trampled on Pinkerâs euphemism treadmill. For example, our aspiration should be to ensure that rising recognition of the dignity and worth of individuals with intellectual disabilities will mean that, decades hence, the Supreme Court doesnât need to once again retire an outmoded term that has taken on negative connotations.
Sending Words Out to Pasture
That said, we should be slow to entirely banish words and phrases from usage. In a 2018 opinion piece, University of Connecticut professor Michael M. Ego argued that the phrase âchink in the armorâ should be retired because âchinkâ is a derisive term for Chinese Americans. He asks, âWhy should American society continue to use phrases that are hurtful and demeaning to anyone?â Ego draws an analogy with the word âfaggot,â saying that it was used frequently by the New York Times only until 1981, replaced thereafter by the word âqueer.â But thereâs a difference between âchinkâ and âfaggot.â The latter has been used over the last century pretty much exclusively as an epithet (although it does have another rarely used meaning: a bundle of wood). Those who heard it were right to be offended because there was no plausible use that did not involve some insult. âChink,â on the other handâas Ego acknowledgesâhas another meaning that dates back centuries and has remained in usage: a narrow opening in a wall or a weakness or flaw. It is worth recognizing that the phrase âchink in the armorâ may bring to mind the slur and be jarring for people to hear; those reactions are genuine and shouldnât be dismissed. A similar problem has arisen with the word âniggardly,â which means parsimonious and has an Old English etymology unrelated to the racial slur. But because the words sound similar, individuals who have used the word âniggardlyââoften talking about budgets or economic growthâhave sparked uproar since the phonetic similarity is so close. (One Washington, D.C., governm...