Copyright standard
Up until about five years ago, there was no such thing as your truth or my truth, only THE truth. The whole concept of “My Truth” is a real-world Orwellian redrafting of history before our very eyes. MyTruthers believe what actually happened is irrelevant as long as they felt like it did in their “lived experience”. To this day Meghan Markle has failed to produce a scrap of evidence for her racism smear on the royal family but it doesn’t matter. Her feelings don’t care about your facts. It doesn’t stop there. Well-known phrases are now under attack. The term “black sheep” has been used for centuries to describe a member of a group who doesn’t quite fit in or is otherwise scapegoated. But according to the woke dictionary, black sheep is now a racial slur. Fields are problematic now too. That’s right — fields. Reporters on assignments are described as working in the field. Scientists, students and researchers have a field of study. But the University of Southern California banned the word as “anti-Black” on the basis that slaves and migrants also worked in fields. Identity obsession is at the heart of most of this language-mangling. Everything is about the all-important “me” and how my personal choices are affected by everybody else. How my truth is most important. The corruption of language provides endless new opportunities to indulge in the favourite woke pastime — being offended. And at the same time it insidiously imposes a very specific world view on a whole load of people who might have a different one altogether. That is why it is worth resisting — no matter how trivial it appears on the surface. Pronouns briefly took over the world. It became impossible to read an email or look at a social media bio without seeing “he/him”, “she/her” or “they/them”. At first it was a voluntary act of politeness, made contagious by the desire to showcase moral superiority. Then came mandates. Civil servants were urged to add pronouns to official emails and big employers like the BBC told workers it was a “small, proactive step that we can all take to help create a more inclusive workplace”. If you ask someone for their pronouns, you can only be doing one of two things. Either you are saying that you can’t work out what their sex is, which most people would find quite rude. Or you are deliberately declaring that you believe in gender identity politics and expect everyone else to do the same. Announcing your own pronouns has no practical purpose whatsoever because we only use them to talk about other people — not to them. It’s nothing more than a declaration of your virtue and a test of theirs. That is why my preferred pronouns are Hot/Hotter/Hottest. You might not like it or understand it, but it is my truth. The onslaught of gender-neutral phrases is essential to the woke ideology, which needs to overturn centuries of innate wisdom to convince the human race that biology and identity are equal. Universities have taken up this challenge with vim. No student has yet been thrown out of class for saying the wrong thing, as far as I’m aware. But that’s not really the point. It’s about a whole movement of activists and bureaucrats trying to normalise the fundamentally abnormal by stealth. If you have to hesitate before using perfectly ordinary words then somebody else’s niche worldview has already been stamped on your brain. Liberals downplay it, of course. They say it’s no big deal. To which I say — OK, fine — why waste public money on indulging it? This corruption of language has even seeped into our classic literature. Hundreds of changes have been made to Roald Dahl’s joyful books, and whole passages never written by Dahl were added in their place. It is wanton cultural vandalism. The logical endpoint is a lot of empty pages or a very boring world. Salman Rushdie called it “absurd censorship”. He survived a multi-decade fatwa and a stabbing attack over his novel The Satanic Verses but never gave up writing and speaking his mind. How outrageously insulting that the industry and art form he sacrificed everything for has succumbed to censorship. Thankfully, the end is nigh for the language police. Like most authoritarians through history they overreached and got tangled up in their own traps. Dahl’s original words, in all their double-chinned glory, are now back on sale. Puffin caved and released the unedited books as a “classic collection”. Cate Blanchett, an avowed feminist who has bemoaned her “white privilege”, disavowed the MyTruthers by saying, “I mean, the truth is the truth, isn’t it?” And Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn got to the nub of the matter when he told the Oxford Union: “I don’t know how you talk about pronouns when babies are getting f***ing vaporised on the front line in Ukraine.” Exactly. If you have looked at social media at all in the last couple of years, you will know the extent to which the language-mangling era is over. Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter into X has triggered an explosion of free speech fundamentalism and the other platforms have followed his lead. Not all of it is great for the standard of public discourse. A university study found that use of the word “retard” has suddenly tripled on X. But for every reaction, there is an overreaction. There are actual laws to safeguard against genuine harassment and abuse without needing to make thought crimes out of fields.
