BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
If you want to get drunk on a Tuesday night, tune into a Palo Alto school board meeting. Take a shot every time somebody uses the word “rigor.”
Rigor, at least when it comes to school board politics, is a compromise word.
On one hand, you have those who want strong academics and high standards. The other side wants to “dumb it down,” though they’d never use that term.
Rigor can mean anything you want it to mean. There’s no objective, measurable definition of academic rigor — which makes the word meaningless.
Yet there’s so many mentions of rigor at a school board meeting, you’d think you were watching an infomercial for male dysfunction pills.
America, circa 2025, is speaking a new language. Governments, businesses, activists, politicians and journalists are changing the language to suit their needs. The idea is to alter the meanings of words to make them more palatable to the public.
‘Invest’ rather than ‘spend’
Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced plans to spend $1 billion more on high-speed rail, despite the state’s $12 billion debt. He called his scheme “cap-and-invest.” The phrase is usually “cap-and-spend” but “invest” makes it sound like he’s wisely spending the money.
One change that may have slipped by is the shift from “equality” to “equity.” Equality means everybody has the same opportunity — for instance, no discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity, etc. Equity, on the other hand, means the government should ensure everyone’s outcome is the same. They’re using the word equity because too many people would catch on if they said something like, “from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.”
What happened to ‘churches’?
The establishment in government, academia and journalism doesn’t use the words “churches and synagogues.” They speak of “houses of faith.” And instead of pastors, priests or rabbis, it’s “faith leaders.”
Nobody knows what to call the homeless. When I was a kid, people called them “hobos” or “bums.” Then we called them “transients.” Today, activists are urging the media call them the “unhoused community.” Not sure how changing the name will solve the problem though.
A lot of phrases about food have changed. It’s now common to hear a restaurant say it serves food that’s “farm-to-table,” but what’s the alternative? Farm-to-your-car’s-front-seat?
If you’re poor, you’re not hungry, you’ve got “food insecurity.”
If you live in a poor community, your town is “underserved” and a “food desert.”
It isn’t just the government and social activists who are changing names. The Associated Press Stylebook says that instead of “women” or “mothers,” news writers can use “birthing person” and “inseminated person.” As if people give their mom a “birthing person” card for Mother’s Day.
No more mistresses
The AP no longer uses “mistress.” As an alternative, it advises writers to use “companion,” “friend” or “lover.” That change came 25 years too late for Bill Clinton.
I laugh at the phrase “my truth.” I guess there are multiple truths. Like when former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said there were “alternate facts.”
The AP has also blessed the term “gender-fluid.” I don’t want to know what that means.
AP is now using the term “sex worker” instead of prostitute.
Dictators toppled
People in jail are “incarcerated persons” or “people subject to involuntary confinement.”
AP has banned “anti-vaxxer” and “dictator.” Anti-vaxxer is a vivid reminder of how people lost their jobs because they refused to be injected with a controversial drug — no need to remind people about that. As for dictators, that’s a little harsh, isn’t it? Only a dictator would force you to use a drug that’s … uh, nevermind.
One word is becoming more popular — assets. Cars are assets, machinery are assets, intellectual property is an asset. Somebody told me that I was becoming an asset, and that I had already earned the first three letters.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays.
The Supreme Court uses the term illegal aliens, but if you say that out loud, you’ll get fired. You have to use some softer term, like undocumented migrant. Let’s go back to the way language used to be.
Another one: unfunded pension “obligation” in place of unfunded pension liability.
Thanks Dave, I laughed out loud several times.
Thank you for being our best, sensible, and local “humor leader”!
Yup. And who can forget Stanford’s list of banned words that made national news for its absurdity?
More recently I was reading about disinformation and censorship and learned a new word Logocracy: the rule of, or government by, words
This is pretty funny, and nearly all on target.
The only term missing is one for “immunocompromised people given Covid by proud anti-vaxxers exercising their right to infect others,” which somehow missed the list. Just saying.
it’s almost like language is a living breathing thing that changes over time… clearly we still speak the Queen’s English like they did back in 1776
The anonymous person above sounds like he or she didn’t learn a thing during the pandemic. We, the people, were deluged with lies (6-foot rule, heat kills the virus, the virus is communicated by touching, the vaccine would stop transmission of the virus, schoolkids were most at risk, that the virus came from a “wet market” in Wuhan, masks work or they don’t work, and so on). The pandemic brought out the authoritarian streak of many in Palo Alto. Today, you can still see people driving alone in their cars with a mask on.
We live in the world’s most religiously diverse country, which is a great thing. Many of our neighbors pray in mosques and temples. It is inclusive and kind to speak collectively of our nation’s “houses of faith”, whereas calling the term “churches and synagogues” implies that people who are not Christians and Jews are second-class citizens.