For example, there are people who earnestly believe that the phrase I see what you mean is ableist—that is, disrespectful and oppressive toward people with disabilities—because some people can’t see. This is—and I choose the word carefully—nuts.

It’s nuts in several different dimensions all at once. This prohibition insults blind people, pretends to misunderstand the way language works, and is fundamentally unserious. It insults blind people and those with reduced vision because it assumes that they are incredibly sensitive and fragile, that if they come into contact with a perfectly common turn of phrase they’ve encountered all of their lives, they will be broken by it. As is true of so many contemporary progressive norms, this prohibition belittles and condescends to the very people it ostensibly honors. I have a disability myself, a mental illness. I am not hurt or offended by people using the word crazy, because I’m not so fragile as that and because I know how language works.

As I write this, a minor controversy has erupted of just the kind that I’m talking about here: the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work has recently banned the use of the word field to refer to an academic discipline, as in the field of history. This is ostensibly because the word field might make black students and staff think of slavery. What black person could ever avoid hearing talk about fields, real or metaphorical?

[This is an interesting criticism from the hard Left. deBoer describes himself as a true Marxist, one still wishing for a proletarian revolution worldwide. He claims that the social-justice warriors are ruining its prospects; he apparently doesn’t get that this kind of elite seizure of language is a direct outcome of the Marxist project, a point that George Orwell made plain in “1984.” — Ed]