How I, your friendly neighborhood logomaniac, managed to miss all this until now, I don’t know. All I did was go looking for the university that does the annual banned words list so I could plead for the inclusion of verse, so often misused instead of versus. And the first thing that came up was a website called Pen America.
Listed there are more than 350 words routinely banned, flagged, or scrubbed by the Trump administration. The story is a compilation of articles published this year by such sources as ProPublica, Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Gizmodo. Use one of these words or expressions in Washington and chances are they’ll be flagged and your proposal, speech, application, website, school curriculum, etc., banned or at least intensely scrutinized. Makes you wonder how anyone in DC manages to communicate with anyone else.
A few items pulled at random from the list: climate crisis, green, emissions, diverse groups, elderly, measles, definition, ethnicity, men, efforts, Mx, definition, obesity, people, geothermal, policies, status, soil pollution, women, and of course, Gulf of Mexico.
Call me gobsmacked.
Also “abortion” and “Covid-19”? Really? Orwellian. It seems that dictators can’t resist the urge to try to control thought. “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”. – Humpty Dumpty.
Both words are on the list, of course. “Abortion” is the first one. I’d not noticed, but yes, Trump does indeed resemble Humpty Dumpty — with a tan. Now if he’d just go ahead and “have a great fall.”
just nuts
demented for sure
This is active suppression of information in an effort to support an alternative reality. You know… climate change is a hoax. Measles is not a serious illness. Let’s not even mention DEI even through it is the policy that that allowed people of my gender to get a good education, to buy my own house and car, and be the head of a high school department that was mostly male. This is against everything that I grew up understanding as “American”.
Same here. It’s a grotesque violation of everything I’ve known for 82 years, including my education and career in journalism. I get so angry and so frustrated and have no place to go with it.
You and Colorado and me the outlander make three – but that you, Marilyn, are a mere child whereas Colorado and I are … mature. [grin]
Which makes us all the furiouser, this insane crap about removing words … Still, I hereby grant you the right to be as angry as are we !