The other day, I was walking out of Penn Station in New York and had to step over some homeless bums just to get to my taxi.
Pardon me. I’m so very sorry. I simply can’t believe that I wrote that. It’s so offensive.
Of course, most of these people are poor. Rats: I did it again. I mean to say most of these people who aren’t securely housed have self-reported income in the lowest income bracket. One of these people was clearly nuts—I mean, he was a person with a pre-existing behavioral health disorder.
This is pretty complicated and pretty much requires that we all have to rewire the way we speak to stay in the good graces of the bureaucracy in charge of our lives. So of course you might wonder: Are insane people running this bureaucracy?
Oh goodness, pardon me again. What I mean to say is, are people with a diagnosis of a mental illness/mental health disorder/behavioral health disorder running this bureaucracy?
Maybe they just want control. After all, this is the agency that foisted plexiglass on all our businesses, forced kids and adults into masks and is still litigating to achieve that despite a court judgment against it, and pushed for schools to be closed for upward of two years in some areas. They had people spraying down their groceries with sanitizer and eating outdoors in freezing weather, all in the name of virus control.
Having massively flopped in that area and now facing the worst public health crisis in modern history with massive obesity and rampant substance abuse, the agency has now turned to policing our language, as if to fulfill every last prophecy of George Orwell. It has turned its attention to pure compliance symbolism of changing all our normal colloquialisms into some rigid formula born of a tax-paid committee.
Truly, you can’t make this stuff up.
Thus, we only recently got used to replacing the term disabled with differently abled but that’s now out. Now we must refer only to people with a disability. Why does this matter? Presumably, the idea is always to put the term people in front of any description, as if to remind ourselves that these are people and not categories. But this gets really weird. It means that I can’t describe myself as an American, for example, but rather must say that I’m a person who was born and currently lives in central North America and carries U.S. citizenship.
It’s all outrageously cumbersome, but that’s the point. The purpose is to keep people always on the back foot, afraid to mess up, fearing the possibility of letting on to their failure to identify with the right tribe, which is a tribe that loathes history and tradition in favor of politically imposed newspeak.
Nor is this new CDC usage dictionary stable. It will change again next year and the next. The moment when you get used to using all this gibberish, new instructions will come down again. It’s all about politics and not really accuracy, much less humanitarian concern.
After all, I seriously doubt that the CDC interviewed actual homeless people to find out what they want to be called. Just imagine the following. Someone shows up at their Atlanta offices and says, “Help me, I’m sick and homeless.”
The bureaucrat answers, “I’m sorry, but that language is offensive. You are a person temporarily in an unstable living environment who is also experiencing symptomatic illness.”
“Look, OK, whatever. My question is can you help me?”
“Not until you can describe your plight in a less offensive way.”
All of this strange language dance that they’re imposing upon us stands in huge contrast to certain particulars of the American experience of language. American English has always been marked by its experiential malleability. It adapts according to region and practical usage. This is why the descriptivist school of linguistics has never really caught on here, unlike in Commonwealth countries.
“American,” Mencken wrote, “shows its character in a constant experimentation, a wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid forms. No other tongue of modern times admits foreign words and phrases more readily; none is more careless of precedents; none shows a greater fecundity and originality of fancy. It is producing new words every day, by trope, by agglutination, by the shedding of inflections, by the merging of parts of speech, and by sheer brilliance of imagination.”
Mencken was fond of quoting Oxford grammar historian Archibald Henry Sayce: “Language is no artificial product, contained in books and dictionaries and governed by the strict rules of impersonal grammarians. It is the living expression of the mind and spirit of a people, ever changing and shifting, whose sole standard of correctness is custom and the common usage of the community.”
The crucial observation here is that the American language is organic to the American experience, which is why English pedantry has never really taken hold in the culture except among the highly educated elite whom everyone else ignores. The “prescriptivists” have never really had much of a go of it in the United States. To be sure, the old-style prescriptivists were all about etymology, sentence structure, and distinguishing between what’s proper and what’s colloquial. Such people can be annoying, but at least in the past, the prescriptivists had a decent theory: They wanted to attach usage to some embedded meaning rooted in history.
The prescriptivists of the CDC care nothing at all about history, linguistic roots, sentence structure, or proper grammar. Instead, they’re just making it all up as they go along based on the political fashion of the day. But their pose is no less severe than the Victorian-era school marm who demanded that everyone aspire to speak as much like the royal family as possible.
So of course, in the United States, there’s zero chance that the CDC’s new dictionary is going to take hold among regular people. Their campaign for zero offensive language will flop just as did their campaign for zero COVID. But the true point isn’t to succeed but to intimidate, dictate, divide, and disorient. From the point of view of the CDC as presently constituted, the real disease they’re trying to cure is you.
