(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) The woke University of Washington’s Information Technology Department released an “inclusive language guide,” outlining problematic terms and providing alternative terminology, TownHall reported.
“The University of Washington works to foster an inclusive and welcoming culture for everyone in our campus community, and we wish to work with suppliers who share this desire,” said the school’s website. “Unfortunately, in working with your product/service we have identified language that can be considered offensive due to its racist, ableist and/or sexist origins.”
It follows other schools that have similarly declared innocuous English words to be verboten. But alarmingly the new UW list shows that the semantic cancel-culture effort is rapidly expanding into new territory.
According to the report, “dozens of people” throughout the department use nefarious words such as “grandfather,” “housekeeping,” “lame” and “cakewalk” among the “problematic words” that require replacement.
The IT committee deemed the term “grandfather” to be problematic because it was used “as a way to exempt some people from a change because of conditions that existed before the change,” and also because the idea originated in the American South.
The IT experts, exercising historical expertise, claimed that the term was contrived “as a way to defy the 15th Amendment and prevent black Americans from voting.” The guide asks that “legacy” or “exempt” be used in place.
“Housekeeping,” the guide claims, must be replaced because people “can feel gendered” because it “carries a fraught history and connotation of women’s traditional domestic role as housekeepers.”
In place of the wildly offensive views, department recommended that “maintenance” or “cleanup” be used instead.
According to the IT specialists, even terms recently created by the Left are not even far enough left.
They listed “preferred pronouns” as a problematic term in the language guide because the word “preferred” suggests that “a person’s pronoun is optional.”
Further, the term “lame” is considered offensive, “even when it’s used in slang for uncool because it’s using a disability in a negative way to imply that the opposite, which would be not lame, to be superior. This use is considered ableist,” the guide said.
It comes after Microsoft recently announced a new “inclusiveness checker” added to its Word software that will screen documents for insensitive language, as well as checking for grammar and spelling.
