Happily, the word is available to everyone — and it’s free. It’s available at the Disney Corporation, where it should have been used to defend Gina Carano. It’s available at the New York Times, where it should have been used to defend Donald McNeil. It’s available at Teen Vogue, where it should have been used to defend Alexi McCammond. It’s available across corporate America, which seems not yet to have realized that its problems stem almost exclusively from its habitual inability to make a stand in the face of increasingly preposterous demands. And here’s the best part: The more often it is used, the less often it ends up being needed. Bit by bit, and use by use, the word diminishes the requests it is used to repel. One might think of its utilization as a lockdown strategy: Fifty Nos to stop the spread.

The dirty little secret about mobs is that they are as fickle as they are rambunctious. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the very worst thing that one can do when faced by a madding crowd is imply that one intends to give an inch. If one must respond at all, it should be with a firm “No,” followed by an affirmation of principled neutrality that leaves no room whatsoever for debate: “No, we are not firing James. No, this is not a consultation. Yes, academic freedom is the backbone of this school. Goodnight.” Better yet, one should seek to invert the regnant cultural presumption by making it clear that if anyone will be removed from a given institution, it will be those who have set out to destroy others’ lives. In a healthy culture, it would be the architects of intolerance who ended up as our pariahs, not their targets. “No,” a sensible dean of Georgetown Law might have said to the horde in front of him. “And as for you, you sniveling creeps. . . .”