Language change and banned words

Which words should be thrown out of the English language?

By Ed West Politics Last updated: August 23rd, 2011

In the news this week – experts at Collins Dictionary have compiled a list of words that have fallen out of use in the past half-century.

Among them are “wittol” – a man who tolerates his wife's unfaithfulness; “drysalter”, a dealer in certain chemical products and foods; and “alienism”, the study and treatment of mental illness.

While I think the English language can do without "succedaneum" or "woolfell", and words always come and go, what has been tragic is the way that some other words have been zombified, changed to something altogether different to their real meaning. And while this happens naturally in language – artificial, awful and nice, for instance, all once had completely different meanings – what’s different is that these changes were deliberately made, by institutions and individuals, with the aim of distorting the political discourse. As the saying goes, 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a manual.


Last year I wrote about words that had evolved completely different (and often contradictory) meanings, and which should officially be on the banned list, among them:

Clients – to mean criminals (when described by members of the justice system).

Diversity – Lots of middle-class people of various ethnic backgrounds who all went to the same schools, the same universities, watch the same programmes, read the same books and vote the same way.

Fairness – Tax.

Human rights – The right to have almost no possible limit on one’s personal gratification, whatever the reasoning and despite all commonly-agreed standards of natural justice.

Justice – More tax. (See social justice, racial justice, climate justice, etc.)

Vibrant – Scary and foreign.

Vulnerable – Criminals, as in “society’s most vulnerable”.


I’d add to these the following:

Gendered (or even gender, to mean sex).

Chair, as in a person rather than something a person sits on.

BCE

Global north/global south – I prefer Moe Szyslak's more honest definition: "one of those loser countries".

Dog-whistle. Except when applied, literally, to a dog whistle. Otherwise it means “I can’t actually argue with what you’re saying, so I’m going to argue with what I choose to interpret as what you’re saying”.

Any other suggestions for a banned list of words are welcome.

Source: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100101913/which-words-should-be-thrown-out-of-the-english-language/