The language police have some ideas for you

But according to counsel from Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center, or PARC, considerate people must go further: Apparently, we must retire victim, survivor, trigger warning, and African-American too. We must do so, that is, if we seek to ignore some linguistic fundamentals while also engaging in distinctly callow sociological calisthenics. When we are to even “consider” avoiding the word prisoner (try person who was incarcerated) or walk-in (because not all people can walk) and the phrase everything going on right now (I’ll leave you to find out what’s wrong with that one), we are being preached to by people on a quest to change reality through the performative policing of manners. Sure, parc’s “oppressive Language List” is technically just one statement from one violence-awareness organization at a school in Massachusetts. Not too long ago, it’d have been a mere pamphlet that got passed around a little. But the problem is that a pamphlet in, say, 1998 would have been much less likely to contain advice so counterintuitive to ordinary perception. The PARC list is a sign of our times, in which language policing has reached a near fever pitch, out of a sense that labeling common terms and expressions as “problematic”—that is, blasphemous—is essential to changing society. The Brandeis guidance could easily have come from innumerable other advocacy groups, university bureaucracies, or corporate human-resources offices, and it merits a closer look.