George Orwell once warned us about the power of language because it “structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing.” This is a concept that American liberals have embraced with great gusto in the current era. If you can control the language, you control the conversation and eventually the entire debate. Some liberal universities in California are now moving even further into their experiments in language control (and thereby thought control) by officially enacting a “purge” of “harmful” language and phrases. As the Free Beacon reports this week, Stanford University is leading the charge. They’ve published a new guide explaining their “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.” And even in this era of liberal insanity, some of the entries might surprise you.

If you’ve ever used the phrases “brown bag lunch” or “long time, no see,” congratulations: You’re a racist, according to Stanford University.

That’s the judgment of the university’s IT Department, which is rolling out its “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative,” an effort to purge “potentially harmful terms” from the university’s websites. The guide cautions that the phrase “blind study” is “ableist” and that saying “balls to the wall” inappropriately “attributes personality traits to anatomy.”

Stanford isn’t alone in its linguistic purge. Down the coast, California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo warns incoming students against saying “father and mother” or “boyfriend and girlfriend,” according to a set of instruction slides for student orientation leaders obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Seriously? “Brown bag lunch” is now considered racist? The concept of a “blind study” that has long been embraced in the scientific community has to go also. That’s apparently not racist, but it’s “ableist.”

I’m not sure who is using the phrase “balls to the wall” in any sort of professional or educational setting, but that phrase has made it onto the naughty list also. Presumably, any mention of a person who might have testicles is “harmful” to those who continue to inform us that nobody can definitively say if there’s any such thing as a man or a woman.

As noted in the excerpt above, Stanford isn’t alone in this effort. California Polytechnic is getting in on the act as well. They don’t want students to say “father and mother” or “boyfriend and girlfriend.” Once again, they appear to be banning the idea that anyone is of a particular gender or fulfills a traditional gender-based role. You are instead encouraged to say “supporter” instead of mother or father. Boyfriend and girlfriend are to be replaced with “partner, beloved or lover.”

All of this nonsense is rooted in the increasingly popular idea (in liberal circles) that words cause “harm.” The idea that hearing or reading particular words or phrases can be somehow dangerous is one that has taken root deeply in progressive groupthink. As a society, we still tend to maintain some limits, particularly in professional settings, on the crudest examples of profanity and sexually explicit descriptions. But we do this to promote a civil society, not to prevent someone from suffering “harm.”

To see this once again happening at colleges and universities is particularly disturbing. It’s not just the censorship itself, but the hive mind that underlies all of these new rules. There is now only one acceptable mindset or orthodoxy in the halls of higher education. What were once spaces famed for spirited debates and the exchange of ideas are now groupthink prisons. Get with the liberal program or pack your things and begone, racist. (Or sexist, or ableist, or homophobe, or transphobe, or take your pick.) We’re producing an entire generation of young people who will go out into the world without the ability to think for themselves, and that’s a dangerous tragedy.