Even worse than a list of banned words, is a list of permitted words. Adoption of approved speech (policed speech) causes starvation of language and poverty of thought.
Take the simple but richly evocative word “field”, used in physics, consciousness studies, scholarship, professional accreditation, agriculture … as well as in casual speech. In French as well as English, we see the array of connotations: “le champ’, “la domaine”, “le terrain”, and in Spanish “arena” (seaside or sand). Will we never again be allowed to refer to these things because “field” is considered (at least at the University of Southern California) a “trigger” word? USC departments will no longer present subject areas as "fields" of study.
Will ornithologists no longer be allowed to mention that pheasants are found in fields – and we must look in grassy spaces of variegated photosynthesizing plants with seasonally changing green-brown blades?
What word isn’t a trigger, to somebody? Who can account for every association every person might make as a result of memory and emotion? If you fear the possibility of giving offence, simply keep your mouth shut (forever?). There will always be somebody somewhere who has an anxiety attack at the existence of vocabulary. This is tough on someone whose vocation (from “vox” – voice, sound, calling) is communication. Shall we then adopt mass self-imposed censorship?
The problem with “field”, according to politically correct academics, is that it can by a few associative steps call to mind places where slaves once worked. Slavery is of course horrendous, a blight on world history going back to primitive tribal times (and recent tribal times), but due to current media obsessions we ironically read and hear astronomically more often the word “slavery” than ever before. So why censor “field” when we throw “slavery” itself into every narrative?
And before anyone denounces use of the word “primitive”, please consider that it simply means “first” – from the word “prime”. If we create a list of only the words we are allowed to use it will naturally become an ever-dwindling one, until no one may speak or write at all. Perhaps then we should all take a vow of silence, or communicate only through pictorial symbols such as pre-literate tribes used.
(Speaking of ornithology, a related lunacy is taking place around changing genus and species labels throughout the life sciences – removing the names of the “colonial” collectors who first identified and described them for scientific classification.)
See also: some ideologues would no longer even permit the use of the word “the” when describing a group of people -- https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2023/02/will-we-be-allowed-to-say-ridiculous.html
