Can Diction Make People Sensitive?

Quick reflections on George Packer's "The Moral Case Against Euphemism"

This morning I took a few minutes off to read George Packer’s brief opening editorial “The Moral Case Against Euphemism: Banning words won’t make the world more just” from the April 2023 issue of the Atlantic (pages 9-12; available here). As a historian, I have a running interest in how we use language to describe the past, both for methodological reasons but also because I’m curious about how present-day historians seek to secure and wield moral authority. Packer is not writing in the same context, instead being more concerned, to put it in terms that capture the spirit of his piece, with how a mysterious and insular group of self-professed experts have attempted to wield authority over public discourse.

He focuses on the rise of equity language guides over the past decade or so, including one from the Sierra Club. These documents form, in Packer’s analysis, part of a common project of guiding people how to avoid offensive and demeaning language. Packer concedes the importance of the motives behind these guides. He admits, “The rationale for equity-language guides is hard to fault. They seek a world without oppression and injustice.” In the same paragraph, he adds: “Avoiding slurs, calling attention to inadvertent insults, and speaking to people with dignity are essential things in any decent society. It’s polite to address people as they request” (p. 12). But such guides form, Packer suggests, a fatuous and even harmful exercise by a self-referential group of elites with little or no connection to the groups they claim to serve. He points to the neologism Latinx, a gender-neutral term applied to people who, to go by the article, have expressed a lack of connection to it.

Packer’s criticisms of equity guides, and the broader project they embody, can be summarized as follows. 1) They do not solve or even mitigate the systems of oppression that do harm to people. Deciding not to call people “poor” does not make them any wealthier. 2) The language favored by the guides seems always to be prolix and bureaucratic in nature. For some reason, the new language of the sensitive elite is remarkably uninspired. 3) In fact, the equity guides promote sterilized language in ways that limit our ability to be direct and reveal the harshness of life. 4) The guides operate by fiat and have no built-in democratic or deliberative process. They come from on-high by people who are essentially self-appointed. 5) For all their claims to inclusion, the guides form part of a quintessentially American and protestant quest to purge the land of sin.

So there is a lot to think about in there. The piece by its nature lacks the length and format to make an empirically rigorous case, but there’s plenty to give pause. That said, to this reader at least the essay feels unsatisfying. Packer concedes the general cause to which the guides contribute, but then does not seek a middle ground. If we shouldn’t be writing equity guides, what should we be doing? Moreover, some of the examples in the essay are guides for professional associations like the American Cancer Society. Likely their purpose is to provide recommendations to busy professionals who need a quick way to keep up with best practices. In some cases, the sponsoring organizations may in fact have had democratic safety rails in place, such as elections to staff committees that review the recommended language. Before fully judging the guides, I’d want to know more about their origin stories. Likewise, there is a potential wedge to drive between two aspects of Packer’s argument. One critique is that the language comes from above. The other is that the neologisms are stale and uninspired. But what would we do if the language came from on high but was clever and evocative? Perhaps overtime some of the more insipid terminology from the guides will fade from usage while more compelling but sensitive terms spring into existence. No doubt, in the longer history of human language, there have been other times when relatively privileged and socially-remote authors have played an instrumental role in changing language, if only because such people have greater resources with which to sit around and fiddle with words. Where Packer points to the lack of connection towards the term Latinx, one could point out that the same was true for nationalizing labels like American, Mexican, or Italian. The terms themselves were part of a set of cultural projects that aimed to remake, not merely reflect, peoples’ identities.

Still, I don’t think the piece is without merit or should be pushed aside too easily. Of late I’ve been pondering how historians have engaged in similar lexical reform projects and have wondered about whether they in fact accomplish what we think they accomplish. A few years ago I ear-read Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which contains a section pointing out that as long as stigma exists towards a group of people, changing the labels we use to refer to such groups merely causes the stigma to eventually attach itself to the new labels. I don’t have the expertise to evaluate whether that claim is true, at least not off the cuff, but I think it deserves attention. We could better take stock of how much we change when we change out some of our keywords. I’m skeptical that it makes no difference at all. Even if new terms make only a marginal difference, aren’t we obliged to embrace them? There has also been a host of editorials, columns, and on-air rants about the general subject of attempts to make our language more sensitive. Elsewhere, if I have the time, I’d like to catalog some of those by way of taking stock. At minimum, it’s important to explore how the trend within the historical profession to discontinue terms like “slave master” in favor of “enslaver” form part of a broader intellectual and cultural moment. I’m not sure the profession has really registered that yet—that some of our own standards and mores concerning language are changing as part of a broader development in the rest of society.

I do have concerns about this trend. Do we know whether the strategies historians are employing in fact work? Is Packer right that urging people to change their language is mostly an exercise in well-intentioned obscurantism? Does telling people to use prescribed language without prioritizing understanding their views first end up alienating them? Anecdotally, I would say a decent share of undergraduates are petrified by the idea that they use the wrong language, while another faction is annoyed by the fixation. I’m not sure what to do with that, but it does make me wonder whether we’re reading the room correctly. At any rate, how do we know the terms favored in the present won’t one day take on the old or a new stigma?