Vinay Menon: Stanford University’s list of problematic words shows why our institutions of higher learning are failing our young folks

Eventually, talking will be considered brave.

Uh-oh. Six words into this dispatch and I’ve used a word Stanford University now deems problematic. It seems “brave” should be banished from the lexicon as it “perpetuates the stereotype of the ‘noble courageous savage,’ equating the Indigenous male as being less than a man.”

I’m surprised they used “man,” since it is also on the forbidden list. As is “grandfather,” “prisoner,” “immigrant,” “blackballed,” “straight,” “survivor,” “manpower,” “seminal” “abort” and “balls to the wall,” a phrase that allegedly “attributes personality traits to anatomy,” even though I’m pretty sure the actual etymology is rooted in military aviation.

But, whatever. Testicles or cockpit joysticks, Stanford is done with balls.

Months in the making, the university’s “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative Website” — somewhere, Orwell is hitting a bong — made headlines this week as observers were gobsmacked by the insanity, another word to be avoided.

At suppertime, I often holler up to my teenage daughters with, “Guys, dinner is ready!” At Stanford, this makes me a sexist monster. What I should be saying, in a non-threatening and calm voice is, “Young folks, sustenance is prepared.”

How the ivory tower became a black hole of crazy is not clear. But I apologize for any racial insensitivity around either “ivory tower” or “black hole.” I will also try to avoid using “trigger warning,” since Stanford says those two words are triggering.

Ladies and gentlemen — whoops, can’t use those words either — if you ever want to understand why our institutions of higher learning are failing our young folks by lowering the boom on common sense, look no further than this list.

Language is always evolving with us.

Do these language cops truly believe “beat(ing) a dead horse” or “kill(ing) two birds with one stone” will “normalize violence against animals”? Holy cow. Hold your horses. I smell a rat. When it’s raining cats and dogs, I don’t expect to see tabbies and chihuahuas plunging from the clouds to their gruesome deaths.

How is the colloquial “war room” an “unnecessary use of violent language”? How is “take your best shot” an “unnecessary use of the imagery of hurting someone or something”? Does anyone really associate “webmaster” with … slavery?

I just associate it with someone who doesn’t give my column home page love.

Some of the words on the list are legit offensive. But that’s why they were retired from polite society a long time ago. You’re unlikely to hear someone use “Jewed” as a pejorative verb, not unless you’re having a mochaccino with Kanye. And by “mochaccino,” I am not referring to a half-breed hot beverage.

Stanford wants internal comms to ditch “American.” It should be replaced with “U.S. citizen.” Why? Apparently, “American” often refers to “people from the United States only, thereby insinuating that the U.S. is the most important country in the Americas (which is actually made up of 42 countries).”

Someone got paid to write that. No wonder tuition is sky high, no offence to the height-challenged. And now people in all 42 countries are sighing.

As a Canadian citizen who was born in Ohio — I guess that makes me a North American Homo Sapiens Person of Colour — I’m reminded of a George Carlin quote: “Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.”

As always, the man — sorry, the person — was right.

A university used to be a drawbridge between adolescence and adulthood. A university used to embrace Enlightenment values and promote independent thinking. A university used to challenge orthodoxy and cherish facts.

But now, all too often, universities are incubators of squishy groupthink and intellectual dishonesty. What a student knows matters far less than how that student feels. Then these youngsters are released into the workforce like wild salmon and quickly find it impossible to swim upstream.

It’s astonishing that so many new hires are far more likely to organize a boycott than contribute to the bottom line. But I don’t blame them. They’ve been mollycoddled and led to believe the system is rotten to its core and every –ism needs to be burned to the ground, no offence to any pyros.

The wackadoodle postmodernists started in the fringe humanities and have since infiltrated the hard sciences. There are professors who insist math is racist. Math! How can an impressionable mind ever blossom and go gangbusters — another word to be shunned — if they think integers are bigots?

OK. I’m making myself dizzy. Time to dismount this high horse.

And I don’t mean an equine under the influence of contraband.

Does any reasonable member of personkind really believe an airplane “black box” assigns “negative connotations to the colour black,” thereby “racializing the term”? A black box is where all the flight data is stored. A black box contains info crucial to solving a disaster. Negative? If anything, a black box is superpositive.

I am dreading my daughters one day going to university. Honestly, I can already see certain horrors creeping into view in some of their high school assignments, where highly specious claims about systemic racism or the patriarchy seem less like education and more like indoctrination.

Indulge me as I get on my high horse again: There are no safe spaces in the real world. Time and circumstance are immune to feelings. These are the eternal truths young people should absorb in university instead of frantically redacting dictionaries just in case “normal person” is a potentially harmful term.

I just made my own list of words to describe Stanford’s list.

There is only one entry: Shame.

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