Lionel Shriver writes in Harper’s (paywall or if you’re lucky the one read a month) of the linguistic minefield to be navigated these days in both the written word and in conversation. I suppose I use “lefty lingo” (but in moderation I think), as she calls it, but I too have found myself grating at the (over-) use of a certain vocabulary and terminology in the media. (Do we actually speak like that to each other in everyday discourse?)
I recognise very well Shriver’s irritation with words like “privilege” and “woke”; staples of the progressive vocabulary, and I too struggle with the appropriate formulation of terms relating to “colour” and “slave”, and I absolutely have been known to rant about the lack of precision and lazy use of “cultural appropriation“…
This leads (inadvertently!) to “inappropriate” I guess, and “problematic” and “troubling”; almost always relating to (mis-) behaviour – rather ordinary words that, extraordinarily, have become somehow tainted through excessive repetition.
There is something, in my opinion, to Lionel Shriver’s thesis that this conformist language identifies cohorts, and its prescriptive tone excludes others. Did I say “others”? A word I have identified as having been given a particular emphasis beyond that of a common determiner. Who defines “others”? These excluded “others” definitely do not fit within the accepted parameters of contemporary speech, in which an “other” is more likely to refer to a “minority”, and to be then further complicated by “marginalised communities” being a preferred term here.
I find myself thinking about the UK elections just won and lost in the northern counties and towns of England, and just wonder at how cranky some voters may very well be, there, where a night at the pub doesn’t revolve around “identity” at the mild end and the “cis-heteronormative patriarchy” at the extreme, and where people may well feel “marginalised” and any “privilege” well earned.
It’s complicated [sic].