Comment by haberman

No, my position is: stop policing the well-intentioned language of others based on a treadmill of acceptable terminology.

The principle is that language should be judged based on its intention, rather than on how it conforms the arbitrary fashion imposed by the most priggish among us (to use pg’s word).

Few of the treadmills we see are actually an organic expression of group preference. Nobody was asking for Latinx or Native American. Nobody was asking for “person experiencing houselessness.” Nobody was asking for the master branch to be renamed to main. These are activist-driven efforts masquerading as authentic priorities of the groups in question. So it goes with most of the causes generally described as woke.

In all cases we should judge speech based on its intention rather than how it conforms to shifting standards. But the fact that this language policing frequently is based on externally-invented treadmills just adds insult to injury, and exposes the vacuousness of the whole enterprise.