On Language

There's a new progressive lexicon. Does it make us talk past each other?

Few things will make you feel as old and cranky as bristling at new words. And as someone who is very progressive and Very Online and very tied up in various social justice spheres, I find myself increasingly irritated by hand-wringing over linguistic shifts and, on occasion, also irritated by those same shifts. The US is in an era of much-needed tumult over race, gender, class, and identity, and as part of this big frothing mix, some people have changed the way that they speak; some have demanded that others change the way that they speak. And very little of the analysis of these rapidly-changing linguistic demands captures the complexity of the issue — it’s either “this is terrible” or “this is fine.”

So I was pleased to read this piece in the Times, which I think quite artfully captured both the justifications for focusing on language and the more rational objections to the always-changing progressive lexicon.

Words shape how we understand the world around us, which is why we focus on them — why some people want to change the words we use, and why others find those changes so offensive. At their best, new words and linguistic changes do what any good piece of writing does: They add clarity and specificity; they make visible something that was not before. This is the category into which I would place “Ms.,” the honorific feminists pushed as a marriage-neutral term for a woman. Previous to Ms., women were defined by their marital status — you were either “Miss” or “Mrs,” while adult men were universally “Mr.” There was simply no way to politely refer to an adult woman without bringing her personal life into it, and without defining her by either her husband or her lack of one. I’m hard-pressed to come up with a reasonable justification for that, and there are also some clear pitfalls in not having a marriage-neutral term, chief among them what you say if you don’t know someone’s marital status. Adding “Ms.” to our collective vocabularies solved a clear and discriminatory problem, even as it was met with plentiful whines and objections from people who claimed language should simply never change, at least not forcibly, and definitely not for political ends. And it did so in a clear and accessible way: People who had heard of “Mrs. Jones” and “Miss Jones” were not going to find themselves excessively confused by “Ms. Jones,” either written or spoken aloud.

I think this is a useful lens through which to evaluate language shifts that make us uncomfortable or confused — and certainly language shifts that make us feel excited or powerful. Do the new terms add clarity and specificity? Do they solve a clear problem? Do they put a word on the previously unnamed? Are they accessible and understandable to average people?