[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome, everyone. This is the last event
this academic year for the Citrin Center. And it's certainly a highlight. And really happy to
see all of you here. It's a pleasure
for me to introduce Professor John McWhorter, whose
writing I have long admired. And before I say little
detail introduce-- more detailed
introductions, I'll just tell you how
it's going to work. I'm going to introduce him. He's going to take over. He's going to speak for
as long as he wants. And then he's going
to take questions. And we'll end a little
bit before 5:30. And there'll be a nice
reception outdoors, OK? So John McWhorter is
a professor of English and Comparative Literature
at Columbia University after having an earlier teaching
stint right here at Berkeley. He earned his BA
from Rutgers, his MA from New York University,
and his PhD in Linguistics from Stanford. Professor McWhorter teaches
the study of American-- he's a scholar of American
Linguistic History. And his scholarship
encompasses consideration of Native American languages,
immigrant languages, Creole languages, American Sign
Language, Black English, and other speech varieties. He also teaches linguistics
and music humanities for Columbia's core
curriculum program. He's not just a distinguished
scholar, as we know, but also a leading
public intellectual. He's the author of
more than 20 books, including The Power of Babel,
A Natural History of Language, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage
in Black America, and Our Magnificent
Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. In 2016, he published Words
on the Move: Why English Won't and Can't Sit Still,
parenthesis, Like, comma, Literally, paren. And in 2021, he published both
Nine Nasty Words and the widely read Woke Racism. He writes a weekly column
on language and race for The New York Times, which
many of us read every week, and host the language
podcast Lexicon Valley. And so the audience
here today, John, testifies to the
widespread interest in your thinking and writing. Welcome. Thank you, Jack. And thank you for your patience,
and how long it's taken for us to actually do this. And what I want to talk
about, not for too long, is the issue of
language policing and where the
impulse comes from, and why I think that we
have fallen into engaging in too much of it these days. And it's a difficult
issue because the idea that we're supposed to pay
very special attention to what words and phrases we use in
describing the world around us comes from what begins as a
very constructive and reasonable impulse. And so, for example, to
say chairperson rather than chairman or
chairwoman, or to try to always say actor instead
of talking as if there's some separate
class of actresses, or heroines as
opposed to heroes, I think most people would agree
that our tendency to police, so to speak, that aspect
of things is a good thing. The idea that
there are different essences of being
male and female within the same
capacity, and we should use different words,
that was something that deserved to be battled against. It was something I was exposed
to myself in the early '90s. And I don't remember feeling
any kind of resistance. Language does have to change. But the problem is that
reasonable missions have a way of creeping. What begins as concrete often
ends up becoming abstract. And I think that's what we've
seen a lot of, especially over the past few years. It's not that all of this
starts in 1991 or even 1971, but I think that, especially
in light of the events of 2020, other than the pandemic, we have
seen a new impulse to portray it as a kind of enlightenment to
feel uncomfortable about saying just about every 10th
thing we might want to say. The idea is that
there's supposed to be a revolution in
how we express ourselves that, perhaps, no human
beings in the 300,000 year history of our species
have ever imagined forcing themselves to undergo. And the question is
whether it's reasonable. And by reasonable, what
I really mean is useful. Does it help anyone? Is there a purpose
for it other than ones that are, perhaps, more about
the self than the society? And What I mean is
extensions of the idea that we use language
in non-sexist ways into something different,
which is an impulse to see slurs in as many ways
of expression as we can. So it's one thing
if a woman doesn't want to be referred to as an
actress as opposed to an actor. I think a critical
mass of thinking people will agree that society
does advance, if slowly, and that this is a reasonable
change in language. But what we're being asked
to do is something different. And so I'm just going to
take one of many examples. It was just one example. It wouldn't be
worth talking about. But there is a general
tendency these days. We see lists. It tends to come from
well-intentioned progressive institutions. But we see these lists. And so for example, at Brandeis,
the Prevention Advocacy Resource Center, a little while
ago, proposed a list of terms that we shouldn't use. And so now we're supposed to go
beyond chairperson, and actor, and hero, and Miss, and
other things like this that I don't think occasioned
controversy, and I would hope wouldn't. It's got to be more than that. And so for example, this
Brandeis list suggested that it is against the imperatives of
social justice to use a term such as "Walk-in." You shouldn't talk
about walk-in service because a person who,
unfortunately, is not able to walk, for one reason
or another, might feel offended or singled out by
the use of that word. You should not use the word
"Survivor," if someone has had something bad happen to them. You don't want to use the word
"Survivor" because that implies that whatever this
person experienced is now over, when there
still may be repercussions that they're feeling. So you don't call
someone a survivor, you say that someone has
experienced something. Someone is not a
survivor of cancer, they've experienced something. Someone is not the
survivor of an earthquake, they are the experiencer
of an earthquake. I'm not picking the
more colorful ones. I'm actually picking rather
randomly from the list. And all of this was men. Quite seriously, these
are words that you're not supposed to say. The list suggested
that we reconsider saying African-American. And the reason is because if you
call someone African-American, you're implying that they're
hyphenated, and therefore, othering them. So the term "African-American"
is to be suspect. As you can imagine, this
list was quite copious. And it's not just Brandeis. There are many lists like this. And the people who are
proposing these lists are proposing them with
the best of intentions. But the question is, where
does this sort of thing actually take us? Is it worth it? Does it actually conform
to what linguistic science says about how people speak and
how people process language? And then more to the
point, does it help anyone? And these are questions
that have to be asked. And the point is not just to
laugh at people making lists, but to examine whether these
good faith efforts are worth, I hate to say it, but
paying attention to. And so for example, one thing
that a lot of these lists that urge us to revise our
terminology tend to neglect is what Steven Pinker, the
psychologist at Harvard, has called the
euphemism treadmill. The euphemism treadmill
refers to the fact that if there is a
term that has attracted negative associations, if
there's a term that now is used more as a slur or in dismissal
than as something neutral, then one might think
that the solution is to change people's
perspective on whether-- whatever that
thing or group of people is by using a different word. But the problem is that in
about a generation, whatever the associations were with
that original term end up settling upon
the new term anyway. Now that is not fun, it's
unfortunate, but it's true. It's really hard when
something is unpleasant but it's also true. And you can see this again,
and again, and again. And so you could see
crippled on buildings, not too terribly long ago,
that's unthinkable to us now. Crippled was changed
to handicapped because of unpleasant,
unfortunately, associations with people who
were handicapped. Except, I'm dating myself
and saying handicapped now because the term after this,
when that term wore out, was disabled. Disabled is now wearing out. And there are other
ways that we refer to the same kinds of people. It will go on, and on, and on. That's the way language
works in a society. Another example, one that
we might not think about as consciously. When I was young, which
is now no longer the case, but when I was young, I had
a mother, as most people do. And I think it would
surprise many people to know that my mother
was a social worker, hard left social worker who did
not like white people very much, frankly. That was my mother. And that person-- even
that person in the '70s and into the '80s, if we ran
into someone on the street who was asking for money, that
person was called a bum. That's what my mother
called that person. All of her peers called
that person a bum. We would never call
that person a bum now. We call that a homeless person. However, to take
you back, homeless is on that Brandeis list. Homeless is now
a word that we're being told we should revise,
not only by Brandeis. The idea is that we
might say a person who lacks housing or the like. Now it's one thing to live
in our own time and to think, OK, we need to
revise that one term. But the broader picture
is that there were tramps, then there were bums, then
there were homeless people. And now we're going to
have a new term, which if we use a little imagination,
go forward about 25 years, if we start saying
person without housing, that we're going to start saying
very quickly, without housing person, without housing person. And that's going to take
on the same associations. And then we're going to
have to change it again. That's how these things work. The euphemism treadmill
is just there. And so it's one thing-- we
all live within the present. But it's one thing
to say we're going to change the term
in order to encourage a new kind of thought. But in many cases like this,
the negative associations are going to settle
down upon the new term. Now that's not the
case in something like saying chairperson
instead of chairwoman. Whatever the
negative associations were with chairwomen
are not going to settle on to chairperson. Chairperson is a true,
clean, neutral term. But when it comes to
these 1 to 1 replacements, there's always the
fact that the Nats that settled on the first
term are just going to follow to the next one. And so whenever you hear these
impulses to change terminology in this way, that's
something that must be kept in mind that
things aren't always going to be the way they are now. And the sad truth is
that constructively, one might be more interested
in trying to change thought rather than changing words. There's a certain relationship. However, it is small,
it's thin, it's slippery, and it's temporary. In terms of changing
how people perceive, one must argue, one
must learn rhetoric, one must get out there. Changing the names of things in
comparison is not only trivial, but it almost never
really serves any purpose. That's one thing. Another problem with
this idea that we must look for things
that might offend people is that a lot of the
offense is predicated upon a sense of language
that neglects something very basic about how we use this
big collection of words in our heads. Linguists call it polysemy,
that's P-O-L-Y-S-E-M-Y, polysemy. That's many meanings. It is not just unusual. It's not just a one
off, but it is the norm that a word that we use doesn't
only have that number one definition that we have in-- as in the dictionary. And so for example, back. If I say, what's back? The first thing you think
of is the body part, OK? But if I give
something back to you, it has nothing to do with your
back, if you think about it, and you probably use that back
more often than talking about your own back or anyone else's. You're going to give it back. Let's go back. Now you can see, with
go back, if you put it in between the body
part and giving it back, that back has come
to have something to do with returning things. And so there's this
gradual process where the original word, which
refers to that part in back of you, is abstractified
into meaning a whole bunch of different things. OK. That's how words work. But that means that
imagine someone saying, I don't wish to be reminded
of my back for some reason. And so don't talk about
giving a present back or going back to the 7-Eleven. That wouldn't quite work because
we think "back" is many things. Another example is the head. We all know what the head is. This is my head. Now here's something
that we probably say more than we say when
we're talking about the head. We headed up the coast. That's something people say a
lot in this state, for example. We headed up the coast. What does that have
to do with your head? Nothing really. It's a different word. It did come from head. If you say you're going
to head out from a party, it's not your head. When we say head,
even if we have a vague sense of there
being a core meaning, we mean a great many things. That's just the way language is. We make the most of a little. And so that brings
us to, for example, at the University of
Southern California. A lot happens at that
school, I'm noticing. A lot of the stories
come from USC. University of
Southern California in the School of
Social Work, there has been a suggestion
that social workers don't talk about the field. You don't go out into the field. You don't do field work. I had a mother. She was a social worker. I grew up listening
to that Black woman, talking about field
work all the time. If anything, it was
a rather warm word. It had to do with
her professionalism. It had to do with her thinking
that being out in the field was doing well in the world. At USC, the idea is
that the word field shouldn't be used in that way. And by extension, in
general, with areas of study, that it's not a good idea
because some Black people might be reminded of
plantation fields. That's the rationale. Now if that were
the case, then we would be talking
about something that makes civic and civil
sense, just like not saying actress or heroine. But the question
is, is that true? When somebody uses the word
field to refer to social work and being out in the field, does
that really mean the same thing as a field with poppies in
it or a field where people were forced to
work without wages in a tragedy that happened in
what is blissfully the past? Is that what anybody's thinking? Well, no, or at least,
it hasn't been proven. And I doubt if
anybody would feel that it would be useful to do
an experiment to see if it was. There's too much polysemy. A field can be many things. Field is used in physics to
mean something quite different. The idea that a word
only means one thing is based on a rather
hasty conception of how we handle our words
and the energy devoted to looking for a source
of offense like that. Thinking that it's
maybe considerate not to use that word might be better
spent doing the sorts of things that one does out in
the field to try to make the world a better place. Polysemy is important. And a lot of our language
policing tends to ignore it. Any linguist thinks of it. Whenever one of
these prescriptions comes down, what we
often murmur among one another is, what
about the polysemy? Well, what about it? So that is a major issue here. Another thing is that frankly,
a lot of the prescriptions are not especially logical. And so for example, slave. The new idea-- I think it's enforced actually
by The New York Times, it is, yeah. It is that you don't say slave,
you should say enslaved person. Now I completely understand
the impulse there. Slave, a person might
suppose that slaves were inherently
slaves, that it was inherent to their condition. Many people would mention that
thinkers such as Aristotle very casually thought that. Aristotle was a while ago,
but still, it's something that one might consider. So instead, you
say enslaved person because that makes it clearer
that the slavery was something imposed upon that person,
rather than an inherent quality of theirs. OK. Now pull the camera out. Bum. OK, that won't do. Homeless person,
because that implies that the condition is
something imposed upon them, it comes from the outside. It's not that they
are a bum, it's that they are a
person who is burdened with the condition
of homelessness. So I'm not doing a
PowerPoint because I think that gets overdone these days. But if I had one, I
would give you one slide. So bum, homeless person. Slave, enslaved person. Why is this wrong
and this is OK? So enslaved person
is now considered the height of
progressive wisdom when you're correcting somebody. But homeless person has to go
because it's kind of a slur. The larger lesson is
that if homeless person got old that
quickly, what's going to happen to enslaved person? In 20 years, enslaved
person is going to have the same associations. And so maybe the
more important job is teaching that slavery
was imposed upon people. And let's face it, that's not
the hardest lesson to teach. It's rather obvious,
and to the extent that there are people
who are going to miss it, we could explain it. Instead, having this
business of telling people that they have committed some
sort of linguistic felony to say slave, especially
around young people, just doesn't serve any purpose
because enslaved person isn't going to last. And by that, I don't mean that I
don't think it's going to last, I know it won't. In a generation,
enslaved person will be just the same thing that
happened to homeless person during my lifetime. These things need
to be thought about. There's an illogic to a
lot of the sorts of things that we're being told
we're supposed to do. There's more. I'm reading a book. I read them. And it's about
political science. And the reason I'm pausing
here is because I'm trying to get the title. And I don't ever say "um." And the title is-- the author is Timothy
Shenk, the Realigners. It's this wonderful book. It's about how people
create coalitions and change history gradually. So what do you do to
actually create change? There are people
who hate each other and have completely
incommensurate aims. But if you're going to
win elections, and get bills passed, and
get things done, then you have to be a realigner. And there have been various
people in our history who have been this
kind of realigner, bringing people together
and doing the hard work. Believe it or not,
one of those people was Martin Van Buren, this
non-entity of a president. Actually, he was more
interesting than I thought. And part of it is
that he drew together the slavocracy of the
South with a certain kind of flinty Northern,
what was, at the time, called a Republican--
a Democrat Republican, now it would be the
Democrats that are genealogy. And he brought them
together and one-- about 1 and 1/2 elections. The idea being, to
create an America better than the presumably monarchical
Federalist division. He brought people together. There are various people
who have done it or tried. Barack Obama was
trying to do that. But politics is hard. Creating change is
difficult. It's work. We read about the work. We read about how hard
civil rights workers worked. It's one thing to
watch Martin Luther King give a stirring speech. That was 100th of
what that man did. He worked. He was out on the ground. He was talking to
recalcitrant, legislators. He was out, working. And I don't mean being in jail
and getting physically hurt. That's horrible. But even if that
doesn't happen, creating change, civil rights,
progressivism, fighting for the
poor, it's work. And it's easier to
believe that change never happens than to allow
that it happens slowly. It's slow. It's not fun. You know what's fun? Making lists of words
and jumping on people for using them. It's a little easy. It's easy, partly,
because of our technology. We have social media. If you made a list 30 years ago,
you would hang it on a door. And there you go,
maybe it would get published in a newspaper letter
column or something like that. Now you can put it
right out there. And so it ends up
being, frankly, a kind of politics that is
suspiciously easy to do. Real change involves
getting out on the ground, and engaging in grassroots
activism, and making a case, and knowing that
everything isn't going to happen instantly. That's what our forebears knew. And we're beginning
to lose that. And talk about pulling
the camera back. This is crucial. Pull the camera back,
and go back in time. It's always a useful exercise. And you have to remember--
it's one of the hardest things about going back
in time, as if I have, is that the pictures of these
people are in black and white, and so it looks like
they aren't real. So make it in color. Go back. And you're at a party
with Martin Luther King, and Lorraine
Hansberry, and Bayard Rustin, and Roy Wilkins. You're at a party
with all those people. And they're not in black
and white pictures. And they're moving. You can smell the room. These are real people. Imagine telling them, you all
are doing important stuff, but you would be doing better if
you also policed language more. You should be more concerned
with what things are called. You should be more concerned
with phraseologies. And you should be reading
the Riot Act to people who use the wrong word. All of you would be better
off if you did that. Imagine saying that
to A. Philip Randolph. Imagine having a conversation
like that with Pauli Murray. Imagine talking to
W. E. B. Du Bois. And you're at dinner with him. You're at Chez Panisse with him. And he's in color. And he's moving. And you say, well,
Dr. Du Bois, have you thought about
policing terminology? Because you would be
doing a better job. Notice how absurd that is? What would they have gained from
what is now becoming so popular and seen as some form
of social justice? Because make no mistake, the
people who are doing this are not ridiculous. I'm not saying that
they're ridiculous. They think that they're
doing a kind of good. They think that this is
part of social justice to forge different ways of
thinking through teaching people not to say things. You can get where
they're coming from. But the question
is, does it work? Is it plausible? And one way of examining that
question is, should people have been doing it in the past? And to the extent that you can
imagine Lorraine Hansberry, she was a person
of words, she was very concerned with forging
change, even forging change in the abstract
way of writing plays and writing articles as opposed
to marching in the street, although, she did that too. Imagine her, not
in black and white, but in color, smoking
her cigarette. And you say, Lorraine,
OK, yeah, congratulations on Raisin in the Sun. I want to bring
something up with you. You can imagine the
look on her face. If you've seen more than
a few photos of her, you can imagine
what she would say. She was right. What we're doing now is an
unfortunate detour from what creating real change is. And we need to think about it. It's like in Alice in
Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat. The Cheshire Cat fades
and just leaves the smile. The Cheshire Cat is activism. The idea that you
tell people not to say walk-in or homeless
person in that social justice, that's just leaving the
smile, including that it feels suspiciously good
to police language for something that's actually
supposed to be hard work. Hard work almost
never feels that good. So that's another problem
with this whole way of looking at things. And I'm going to go
somewhere because I think it's partly my responsibility. Yes, the N-word. We've got a problem with that. And so for example, we're
being told in many quarters. And if this room is those
quarters, to any extent, I'm sorry about the word
that I'm about to say. It's not that word, it's Negro. We're being told that the
word "Negro" is a slur. Teachers all over the country
are being read the Riot Act, hauled up before judicial boards
for using the word "Negro." Now, of course. Almost never is anybody
calling someone Negro. It's an antique
term at this point. I don't know if it's an
insult. I know an older Black gentleman who always
calls me Negro, and he means it affectionately. But we won't go there. That's subtle. Negro is an ancient term. And OK, now African-American
is the term of art. Great. But if somebody is
reading from something that say Martin Luther King
wrote, and he used the word Negro all the time, is that
teacher really supposed to euphemize the word
"Negro" because it's a slur? Who said? What this is is
this idea that it is social justice
to seek something being classified as a slur. And the question is,
where does that get us? What is the purpose of
it having been decided about seven years
ago by certain people under 30, frankly,
that Negro is a slur? What's the point? Who does it feed? What housing does it build
on what side of the city? What's the point? There's an idleness about it. And I'm not going to say the
word, but that other word. This new idea that to
refer to the N-word is the same thing as
using it is absurd. It is utterly absurd. And the reason
that I'm putting it that way is because I'm old
enough now to remember when, within reason, you could use
the N-word because everybody knew that you weren't
actually using it. You were referring to it. And uncannily, I remember
that being the case in what was probably this room,
when this floor was laid out differently, at a
conference in what would have been the spring of 1996. It was an African-American
studies conference. It was a conference
that was kicking off the first year that
African-American studies was a graduate program. And I have a vivid
memory of that word being used, and not in a jolly
way, not in a colorful way. It wasn't being read
from Zora Neale Hurston. It wasn't only Black people. It wasn't Black men
calling each other Buddy. People needed to use the
word, many of them were white, and within reason, you could. I, frankly, think
it's ridiculous that I can't say it here. But I live in 2023. And so I, as a Black
man, cannot say it. OK. I have bigger fish to fry. But that was not
the case in 1996. In this city, Downtown,
somewhere on Shattuck, I remember doing one of my
first radio interviews, where somebody asked the new
young linguist what the history of that word was. I've still got it on cassette. It's one of my early interviews. And no, I don't sit
around listening to it. But I remember very well
that I and the white host and the other person who was on
the show, who was also white, probably said the word
about seven times. And nobody batted an eye. Because we weren't using
it, we were referring to it. Now we don't do that. And frankly, I don't
think it makes any sense. I don't think it
serves any purpose. And the reason I say
that so arrogantly is because life wasn't
that different in 1996. Everybody understood
the difference. There was the occasional person
who would push it too far. And they would be ostracized. They would be condemned. Sure. But that kind of
person was very rare. Evil is very rare. And yet, we have a
situation now where we're encouraged to
treat that word as if it were a magic word. The idea is that you
can't utter it at all. It's as if we're a very
different and frankly, less reflective culture, where now,
we can't read Huckleberry Finn. I don't know how many
times people have asked me, what do I do about this book? How do I read it to my child? A white person asks. And I can guarantee you
that Black parents are just reading the book. But if you're not
Black, then you have to have Jim saying slave,
which is not what he's saying, or you don't read
the book at all. And so Huck Finn
becomes contraband. The problem with this is this. Already, the illiberalism that
we're seeing from both sides, there is the right wing
book banning and an aspect of the right wing that
is basically saying, don't stir all of that stuff
up, and don't teach it to kids. Then on the left, you have
the prosecutorial wing of the woke, who are
basically throwing people out of windows for being offensive. All of that is primitive. All of it sounds
either medieval or it sounds like yellow
journalism in, say, 1895. It sounds like people in
Congress beating each other up. It's primitive. And notice, I'm saying,
this is from both sides. We're regressing. It's also regressive for us to
create a magic word in a way that a smart nine-year-old
can't even understand. And we've only created this
over the past 20 or 30 years. And to what end? To what purpose? No one was offended in 1995 when
somebody referred to the word. But now, we pretend to be. We're pretending. We're taught to pretend. And my way here is mostly
Black, but I think it also extends to fellow travelers. It's fake. It's a pretense. And we all know it. It's primitive. And some things are just going
to stay the way they are. But that policing of language
is another example of something that doesn't make any sense,
doesn't serve any purpose. And frankly, it builds
no lower middle class or upper working class housing
in previously suburban zone districts. It creates nothing
like social justice. It's just posturing. That's what language
policing can lead to. So what I'm referring to
overall is the simple fact that pursuing social
justice is very important. It ought to be a
central focus of anyone who is a concerned citizen. All these things are
extremely important. But there's a
mission creep where we call ourselves
forging social justice, where what we're really
doing is something that's focused on
making ourselves look good to other people. It's like showing faith
within a religious body. And there is such a slip
between the intention, i.e., social justice and
the actual result that I really do think
that we have a problem. Activism is going out and
actively doing something. Our new tax tacit idea is this. Activism is finding
ways of being offended, either for yourself or on
behalf of other people. Activism is finding
ways of being offended. I think many people would
say that that is activism. But the question is,
who does it help? Interesting historical
parallel, depending on what you call history. About 15 years ago,
a book got around. It was called Stuff
white People Like. It was hilarious. And it basically, it skewered-- I hate to say it, but
I remember at the time, thinking, it's a lot
of people in Berkeley, it's a lot of people in New
York and places like Park Slope and the Upper West Side. It's white people who I know. And it's me, to an extent. And it satirized the tastes
and food, the TV shows, what you like to wear. There were about 100 things. And one of the things that
it nailed right on the head, I think the book was 04,
05, was being offended, that this white person
likes to be offended. And that was right on because
that person did wear t-shirts, espousing certain causes. And there was a certain
theatrical quality to the being offended, but
it was better than nothing. It was a harmless little jibe. What's interesting
is that today, that joke wouldn't land because
the very same people are so committed to being
offended that they would find it insulting to
have it mocked in that way. It's not funny anymore. And I actually read an interview
with a guy who wrote it, and he said, yeah, that's that. The book is obsolete
based on that. That's a big social change. And frankly, what
was the joke then is a joke now, being
offended as sport. The reason that it's wrong is
not only because it's fake, fake is wrong but
it's not a moral tort, but because it doesn't
really help anybody. Being offended alone
is not activism. Activism is getting
out there and doing hard, slow, boring work. The language policing culture
that we're dealing with now is a symptom of our having
moved away from that. And what worries me
about it is not just that it doesn't look good
and it doesn't taste good, but that I feel that a
whole generation of people are losing a sense of what it
is to go out into the world and try to change
it, and are missing that going out into the
world and trying to change it is not going to be
about warmth, it's not going to be about
group fellowship. You're not going to feel
like a happy warrior. It's not going to be fun. It's not that kind of thing. I worry that we're going
to lose that at a time when we're losing so much else. And so our language policing
culture at this time worries me. And I would have to
say, it's not really about me being a linguist. I think that you whatever the
worth is of anything that I've said, anybody who's
half way awake could see things in
the exact same way. This isn't me being linguist. This is me being moonlighting
cultural commentator, editorialist. But I really do
worry that action has become empty gesture. And there's a whole
cadre of people who feel and are being taught by
people who ought to know better that they're on the
side of the angels and creating something called
social justice, when frankly, they're not. I'm going to stop here. Thank you. So this is the part where
I answer some questions. And so if anybody has any,
please raise your hand. And then I'm going
to go like that. Sir, thank you
for your comments. Just a couple of questions. One-- yeah, so one
is, I'm curious why you think you can't say
the word that can't be spoken. Because it was my
understanding that there are a group of people of
which you're a part that are able to use and say that word-- With other Black men, if I may? Yes. Yes. Yes. OK. So that's one thing. So it's a little more-- If I-- It's a little more
complicated than just a taboo against anybody using it. But if I said it here, the
world would keep spinning. I've done it. But it just makes
people so uncomfortable that I figure I'll make them
uncomfortable in other ways. So-- And the second thing
is, you started off by saying, the move from actress
to actor is not a problem, even though the inequalities
that those words express still exist. So I'm wondering, what
is your principle? So that's OK, but other
things you say are not OK, like disable to, I don't
know, differentially abled. So do you have a principle for
distinguishing between changes that are-- that we should all
applaud and take, to distinguish those from things
that we should try to resist? Sure. Yeah. There are things that,
first of all, all of society agrees are important issues. Now there's a where do
you draw the line issue, but there isn't everything. But with walk-in,
how many people who are hindered from
walking are offended by that particular term? Would we expect
that they would be given the nature of polysemy? That's different from the
idea that 50% of humanity is of equal quality and equal
capability to the other 50%. That has been something denied
for most of human history. We're in a society where
that kind of thought was changing anyway
in the early '70s. And one can imagine that
if you don't say heroin, if you don't say
actress, new generations will be less encouraged
to think of there being these differences
anyway, which are fading. Obviously, sexism persists. Obviously, the
inequalities persist. But there, we're talking about
a very elementary distinction. And the substitute is not
something that can wind up being processed the same way. So it's one thing
to say, don't say actress, call
everybody an actor. Actor is not going
to start being seen the way actors will be. Don't say homeless person, say
person deprived of housing. That's different
because the Nats are going to come over here. That's because you're dealing
with a one on one substitution. Now gray zones, master. So I get that you might not
want to call the person who heads the dormitory a master. That's what happened at Yale. That might feel a little odd. On the other hand, me not
being able to call where I sleep a master bedroom,
when nobody was thinking about that master at
all, that's one where reasonable people might differ. So there are cases like that. But with sexism, I think
that it's a slam dunk. Whereas with things like, don't
say survivor, less of one. Yeah. My question is, is this new? And why is it new now? What is this? The idea of policing language. Why wouldn't foreign people
up in arms and printing lists at universities of words
you can't say in the '40s? Well, everything changed
in about May of 2020. So this happened in the wake
of the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning
that came afterward. And a lot of social
justice ideologies had the floor at that time,
and this language policing exploded then. And so George Floyd, that
was a horrible thing. But one of the weirdest times. I'm obsessed now
with two years, one is 1966, because I think
the whole country turned upside down. That-- it's not just me, it did. And then 2020,
because there's just this cocktail of what happened
to George Floyd, the pandemic, and realizing that
spring that we were never going to go outside again. It was spring. And that made that
especially hard. And there were these things
called Zoom and Slack that became universal. All of that together meant
that extremist ideologies could spread even
faster than Twitter had had them doing before. And so that is when,
it was that summer that these language
policing initiatives started getting around, or to
be more responsible about it, it was the winter after
that when they started popping up here and there. And it was-- the
idea being, there is going to be a reckoning in
not only how we process race, but how we process
people in general. And all of this is
well intentioned, but it crept into
unnecessary places. That's why now, I think. Omer. Thank you. Really enjoyed the talk. I want to push you,
though, on the timeline. So I mean, all of culture
is boundary-drawing. So in some ways, all of
language is policing. The French are
policing language. And so we do have examples
from the Civil Rights era of capitalizing Negro,
or is somebody-- do they get a Mr. or Mrs. In
their name in the newspaper. Those are part of the movement. And so there is that kind of
language activism happening in that era. And so I think-- so I wonder how we might think
about the longer timeline, and what then is special
about this category than not? So that's one thing. And then just as a
related provocation. I think the analogy
on enslaved person is car crash, not
homeless person. And the activism there is to
say, when we have car accident, it takes away an agent. That's like the car accident
doesn't just happen, somebody is driving. And so with enslaved person,
what we're trying to do is remind ourselves
that this is not just something that happens
but is an active process. And so I'll stop there. But so there's a longer history
of the language policing than maybe we're acknowledging. And in some of
these cases, there's a different kind
of intervention. It's not the
treadmill, but rather, let's think about agents and
not make something passive. No, those are important points. And I'm going to-- I'm going to go somewhere. On capitalizing Negro, on
Mr. And Mrs. To an extent, those are the sorts
of things where obvious kinds of disrespect
had been entrenched. And it was pretty
easy to make a case that this needs to
stop in the same way as there needed to be a
Miss as opposed to a Mrs. And so there, I don't
see that as unnecessary. I'm sure you and I would
agree that back then, there was still much, much less
of this sort of thing. So of course, language
has to change. But here's the place
I'm going to go. Negro. All of a sudden, in
1966, it has to be Black. That's all I've ever known. I'm comfortable with Black. But in the grand scheme
of things, what did it do? Where would you or I
not be if we were still being called Negroes? And more to the point,
and because, Omar, you and I were both at
Stanford at the time when it became
African-American overnight, so what's happened since then? Apparently, now Brandeis thinks
that we shouldn't say it. Really? I think we'd be fine
if we were still being called colored and Negro. There was a certain idleness. And I think it's partly
because Stokely Carmichael was the beginning of an awful
lot of this kind of theater. I don't walk around not liking
the term "Black" because I've only ever known it. But Negro would have been fine. And then in terms of
enslaved person, et cetera, I take your point about
there's an agency aspect to it, whereas homeless is
somewhat different. But my only question
is, to what end? How? Who are we helping? What would you--
what would you say? Like car accident, car crash? What-- who does it feed? I mean, a classic
headline in a newspaper is Car Hits Five Kids. And it's like, car
didn't hit five kids. A driver hit five kids. And that there's a kind
of absolution that's happening in the language,
and that we actually want to be more
precise about no, no, there's somebody
doing something. And that we don't want language
that actually is taking-- is absolving a particular
agent of their action. So-- I get it. Yeah. Now is where I have
to be the linguist. The reason that you-- that I can't see
that as important, and I'm not dismissing
what you're saying, but is because languages
differ in terms of how they convey agency. And an awful lot is context. If car hits five kids
nobody's thinking that it was this self-driven car. You imagine some drunken
idiot behind the wheel. The other day,
and I'm not trying to imply that my
Spanish is that good, but some people were
cleaning my house. They don't really speak English. And I left my keys. So I went back in. And I said, the
keys forgot to me. There's this weird expression. No, I forgot the keys. But the way Spanish does it is
that, it forgot on me the keys. That's just the way
you put it in Spanish. I don't think that
in English, I feel more responsible for
forgetting the keys than the women did,
that kind of thing. So I take your point, but I
think context is more powerful than we often, I suppose. Jack. I have to call on Jack. Two things. One is, I agree with you that
things have been ratcheted up. But of course, in university,
speech codes began in the '80s. And then they were
taken to court. And they were ruled
unconstitutional. But the beat has certainly
gone on in different ways. But I want to ask you
about particular words that are-- we hear, and
you at Columbia hear every single day,
which are "diversity," "equity," and "inclusion." And so speaking
about the treadmill, I wonder if you think that
equality has moved to equity as part of the treadmill. And what's going
to follow equity? What comes next? That's interesting, Jack. Equity hasn't replaced equality
because of the treadmill. Equity is a fig
leaf term for saying we're going to make it all
come out even through forcing the matter rather than
through traditional means. We're going to make everybody
equal by transforming standards. And if you think that
what I really mean is lowering standards,
you are correct. The jig-- never known
whether it was gig or jig, the jig is up on that. That's beginning to be clear. And I wouldn't be surprised
if equity in a generation is replaced with some other
artful, probably, Latinae term that means the
same thing, probably. Diversity is fascinating. Now my 11-year-old is
getting that diversity doesn't mean what it means. Words change. Words meanings change. And that's been an
interesting narrowing. And it was almost inevitable
that it was going to happen. These things happen. In New York-- did
I just write this? I want to make sure. No, it's not from that. OK. New fact, in New
York, back in the day, there would be truant officers
running around the city, trying to get kids
to go to school. And so they were from
the truancy office. Those people started
being called the truancy. The truancy is going
to come get you. As if truancy is supposed
to be the state of not going to school, but it was,
watch out for the truancy. Hide around the corner. That happens. And so diversity has
happened in that way. Inclusion. I first heard the term used
that way on this campus when Prop 209 happened. And people started
talking about the value of people being-- feeling
included in a community. I don't see that that
term is going to change, but that use of inclusion, I've
often found it very sneaky. Because once again, what
it tends to mean is, I will only feel included
if you don't evaluate me according to the standards
that you evaluate other people. And I don't like it. I wish that people would
be straighter about it and say, why is it that you
feel that the standards should be changed? What is the reason? I remember-- there's so much I'm
remembering just being in what used to be called Barrows Hall. In this building, I remember,
this is a nasty little story. But it's been so long
that it's tellable without me being nasty. I was in a meeting in the
wake of the eclipse of 209, when many faculty were
hoping that something could be done about it. I was very concerned about
all this, and very naive about the political
aspects of these things. I was just this linguist. I was doing a lot of theater. And people were so
upset about the ban. And I listened to
the conversation. And I know that now people
were using the magic words. And there were
certain assumptions. And I just said-- I imagine myself
talking in a high voice, although I had the same voice
then, but I was just child. I said, don't we want to
make it clear to everybody why standards need to be
changed, why people need to be included under new conditions? Because if we're not
going to say why, then we haven't made a case. And the room just sat there. Nobody was looking daggers. Nobody could imagine that
especially a Black professor would say that. And no one answered. And then they just kept
talking about their stuff. That's wasn't right. But I didn't know what the terms
actually meant at the time. Here we are. Ma'am. Hi. I'm Thea Deshpande. I had a question related to,
I think, something really interesting you're picking up
on regarding the fact that it's easier to police language
than do the hard, often, boring, often,
difficult work, yeah, of enacting social change. And in my mind
that I'm imagining a model where we have
this amount of capital we can spend on action. And you can use it
policing language. You can use it to march. You can use it to protest. And maybe something
you're tracing is that people are now
using more of that capital on language policing than they
are on more productive versions of social change. I think an assumption
that built-- an assumption that I want to question there
is whether more people now are involved in the
project of social change than they were in the past,
in part, because it might be easier to assuage
your own guilt, to assuage whatever
you're interested in, or to produce real social
change by beginning at the policing of
language, and then perhaps, becoming more involved
in those spaces and doing the actual
difficult work. Because I think of that
assumption doesn't hold, this limited constant version
of social capital, then maybe there are actually
good externalities to this language policing
that we're seeing today. So yeah. That is really important. And it's a little early
for me to say this, but where are the people
who are going to step two? So there's all of
this terminology. A lot of it is part of
what's called doing the work. It's been a while. Are we seeing a critical mass
of those people saying, OK, and now that maybe we've taught
people better ways to think, now I'm going to go out
and knock on some doors? OK, now I'm going to go lobby. I'm going to-- I'm going
to do some real work that involves contacting. We're all going to
contact 150 people. And we're going to try
to get them on that. I'm not seeing more of that. What I'm seeing is
people thinking, I'm doing the work
by sitting around, feeling offended at
something someone said to me or that someone
said about others. And that's what worries me. But let's say that all of this
really ratcheted up in 2020. This is early 2023. Maybe it's a little early to
say that nothing else happened. But I'm worried that it isn't. So I can go halfway
with you on that. Wow. The gentleman with
glasses and mustache. Yes. [LAUGHTER] You refer to-- you
refer to activism, and then you talk
about doing the work. And my sense is that there's an
awful lot of so-called activism that's not doing
the work, it's just getting out and making a
racket, and annoying people, and getting in
the way of things. And instead of trying to
sit down and figure out how to get something
done, isn't there a danger of the word "Activism"
being used a little loosely? So activism means just
that you go out of doors and raise your voice. Yes, there's a problem there. However, I think that
there are people who are protesting in big masses. And that, at least, at first,
can be a useful statement and show that there's
a massive sentiment. If you stop there,
then you're just having fun because you're just--
you're hanging out with people, and it's a nice day. But that is a nice way to begin. The person who
lays down in front of a bus because he doesn't
like the Vietnam War, that was taking that sort of thing
too far, because what did that do to really help the situation? But activism can, itself,
be done idly as well. And in the Black
community, it's known. Beyond a certain point, getting
out and doing another march is not creating change. Yes. I'm not aware of
that being something that threatens to take
over what activism is, among people who
are engaging in it. It's just we don't hear much
about the people engaging in activism because
it's not dramatic and it's not about not
saying the right words. But I take your
point, activism can become theatrical in
an idle sense too. One worries about that. Sir. I'd like to make a comment
based on your framework to a comment you made
that caused a little nervous laughter in the room. Here at the University
of California, we cannot say Kroeber,
Leconte, or Barrows anymore, but our distinguished faculty
don't mind being called Berkeley, as if Bishop Berkeley
was any better than Professors Kroeber, Professor Le Conte,
and President Barrows. What do you think of that? I am ignorant about
Bishop Berkeley. What is the issue there? Well, he was-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] I just want to know what he-- He was a slave owner. OK. He viewed Native
people as savages. He actually willed to Yale
University his slaves. And they are now-- the university is now paying
reparations in response to that. And yet, here, we are-- we have a committee--
a commission that's looking to
understand what to call the University of
California, which we are, and whether it should
be Berkeley or Cal. You can't say Kroeber? Something is very motivating. You can say it. But he's not on the building. OK. Yeah, I heard about that today. Right. Yeah. I don't get it,
Yes, I do get it. Part of social justice under
this idea of being offended is that you prove that you're
a good person by sticking your middle finger up
at very dead people in order to show that you
disagree with their views. But it's willful
simplisticness, really. Everybody, essentially,
in the past was a bigot that they couldn't
help it, it's all they knew. And so the question is
whether their entire lives were devoted to bigotry. So a statue of Robert E. Lee,
I would say, yank that down. Sure. But if we're talking about that
almost anybody can be proven to have written
or said something that we would think of
as rather repulsive, I would dare anybody today to
get through dinner with W.E.B. Du Bois, who was a
naked classist, that's just the way people
were, and it didn't matter what color you were. I-- it's gesture over activism. I don't get it. I mean, it's interesting. I like all movies, but
that includes old ones. Back to The Silence,
I'm obsessive. I like them. Whenever I see a
movie, especially in the '30s, when you can hear
people talking, et cetera, I think every single
person in this would not have wanted me
to marry their daughter, every single person. And boy do I like those movies
because they are very dead. And the thing is,
everybody felt that way. And I'm enjoying like
the 99.9% else in it. I don't like that. I don't like the
idea that anybody would want to rename Berkeley
because of that man's actions, unless that's
basically all he did. I don't know anything
about this Berkeley person. But if that was the
main thrust of his life, I get Woodrow Wilson's
name being pulled off of Princeton buildings. He was racist even for a
Southerner at the time. I get that. But this business of
looking Kroeber, I mean, that's getting into my
stuff because that's Native American
language, et cetera. He wasn't an evil person. He was just somebody
who lived 400 years ago. That's more years ago. I don't get it. And as you can see, that makes
me almost emotionally upset. It's willful simplisticness. Miss on the back. So you mentioned lists. And now, like nowadays,
there's a long list on social media about AAV words. And I just want to know
your thoughts about it, because I know you
mentioned lists, and how you think some of
them are just unnecessary. I don't know what
you think about that. What is the list of
Black English words? It just-- Is this going to
make me angry again? No, it's not. OK. It's just like the
words of like, "ain't." You can't use
"ain't" because it's African-American vernacular. And I just want to--
yeah, I just want to-- and they're mostly made
by white people too. So I just want to know
what you think about that. That's the cultural
appropriation argument. So the idea is-- and
it's not that anybody thinks that there shouldn't be
spaghetti in the United States. Cultures, of course,
are going to blend. But the idea is that
you're not supposed to borrow from a culture
that's subordinated. Now originally, the
idea was you're not supposed to take something
from the subordinated culture, and make more money off
of it than they did. So that's the Elvis argument. That makes sense. But the idea that white people
can't say "ain't," I mean, not even getting into that
white people have always said "ain't," but let's say it's an
actual only Black English word, white people can't have it, is. Once again,
recreational offense. And so why is it that
white people can't have it? And some people would say,
well, you're stealing from us. But are we less ourselves
because a white person is using the word? No. We're our same selves. And if it means that
there's a little bit less of a difference between
Black and white, I thought that was what
we were looking for. Now it seems that the cultural
appropriation argument constitutes a tacit
idea that when it comes to the very particular
situation of the descendants of African slaves
in the United States in the early 21st century,
that there is not supposed to be any kind of
cultural coming together, that white people
and non-Black people are supposed to walk by
with a certain respect. Latinos are allowed
to visit, but-- they'll be good feelings,
but there's not supposed to be this appropriation. And the problem is, one, what
does the appropriation hurt? And no one. And two, how realistic is
it that Black English is not going to permeate modern
American English when rap music is America's
favorite music and we now have two
generations of non-Black kids who have grown up thinking
of it as just music? It's just not going to happen. So it's-- I don't know
which list you're referring to, but I'm sure
somebody put it together, who felt very good about it. And then they went beep,
and they put it out. And there's still Black
people who need help. And I don't think
any of them care if somebody says ratchet
or booty or whatever it is. It doesn't matter to them. It's also a rather
educated notion. So-- Sir. I'm sorry, I keep-- I'm trying-- yeah. [LAUGHTER] It's an exercise
program, I guess. Yeah. Just wanted to mention
the linguistic mechanism. If you drove for a
day's drive due North from Columbia, you find an
issues like actor and actress, the exact opposite
mechanism being used, where now to emphasize
the fact that we want to be inclusive
of both genders, there is a repetitive word. So instead of saying Canadians,
you would say the Canadiana. And you listen to
the discussions, everything has the
duplicative aspect in it. Exactly the opposite of
what you were talking about for actor and actress. Yeah. And those are harder because
it takes more energy, it makes a sentence longer. I don't imagine that those are
going to catch on as easily as when you're dealing with a
single word or a single ending. Latinae is probably not going to
expand beyond a certain rather elite set. But that sort of
thing is one thing where you have one
ending, Latinae or Latinx. But no, those doubles are tough. It's why he, she has
never truly caught on. You needed to go to
one thing, usually. It's more likely
to catch on then. At least, linguistic history
over the past 60 or 70 years suggests that. You. Sorry. Oh, wait. Are you-- which one? You one. You. OK. [LAUGHS] All right. Thank you. So I mean, this brings us-- so
what's happened to Latinx is interesting because
it's-- we've seen that-- I mean, there's
research that shows now that people who are actual
Latinx, they don't like it. They don't agree with it. And so I do sometimes think that
it's not so much that people are being offended, it's almost
like they're being offended on other people's behalf. And there's almost
like this condescension there where they're
trying to say that, oh, you're too
stupid to even know what to be offended about. So we will be offended
on your behalf. And I wonder if you agree. And if yes, where does that
come from, do you think? I agree. And what's going
on is that a lot of this professional
offense taking is concentrated among people
who are highly educated. It's not, frankly,
normal thought. It's rarefied thought. And that's something
to think about. There's nothing wrong
with people in that sector having a jargon
all to themselves. But if the idea is
that you are trying to make a better world
for Latinae people by using these
words, then I would say that, yeah, there is a
certain arrogance about it. So for example, the neighborhood
that I live in Queens, I'll bet, every two out of
three people speak Spanish. I've lived there
for seven years. They are working class and
lower, middle class people. I have never once heard Latinx
from any of their mouths. I only hear that when
I go to Colombia. And there's all
evidence that that's the way it's going to stay. And yeah, there is a certain
sense that we're educated. We know better than you what
you should be offended about. It's an aspect of
being cosmopolitan. No one says it, but it's there. And I often think to
myself, for example, with social work and field. How many social workers-- Black social
workers are actually thinking about that as
opposed to a very few who are sitting on
certain committees? So yeah, yeah, it's unfortunate. Sir. I want to defend Martin
Van Buren, the wizard. No, that's not it. I teach history, so it's
just in high school. And so I've seen what you've
talked about with Huck Finn got pulled out of our
English department a couple of years ago. And I was blindsided
by it because they didn't tell me about it. And I said, how many people
have read Huck Finn, when I'm teaching about the antebellum. And they said, oh,
no, we don't read it. And I was like, what? That-- It would have been
nice if I'd been told. --doesn't work, no. And there's no real
movie to watch. Yeah. And it wouldn't do
what I wanted to do. Anyways, the question I
wanted to ask for you, though, is you really look at 2020
as being something different. Would you see the
way American culture tried to tamp down on
leftist rhetoric and politics in the '50s, and trying
to get rid of communists the Red Scare? Wouldn't you see it as
simply as somewhat similar, whereas in the '50s, we were
more conservative culturally, politically, and in media
than we are today, where the-- where more liberal perspectives
have control of those places? Isn't it somewhat similar? It's just very puritanical. Very, very similar. The obsession with quote,
unquote, "Commies," which really
elevated in the '50s, but had really started
after the Palmer Raids, you can read the
same sense of people being more concerned
with their own goodliness than anything actually
going on, the same loss of charity and tolerance
of other people, a sense of obsession,
a sense of people who are afraid to go
against the new orthodoxy. This is a human tendency that
can come from many places. I recommend, by the way, and
the reason you get me thinking is because the book I read
before, this Realigners book, is the new biography of J. Edgar
Hoover, and it's called G-Man. And it's by Beverly Gage. And it's 700 pages long. And it is so good that I
spent four weeks rushing home because I wanted
to get in my chair and read about J. Edgar Hoover. And what a wicked man
he was because of this-- because of this sort of thing. So yeah, it's the same thing. These are human impulses. There's nothing
extraordinary going on. It's just where
those impulses are being channeled at this point. Mccarthyite, that's what
a lot of this feels like. Sir. Thank you very much. It seems to me that you're
saying policing language is not always necessarily bad,
but it is bad insofar as it distracts and
takes resources away from the real work. And I would agree with that. And I also think there's so
much that needs to be done, that we should devote
our resources to. I'm just wondering, if you
do see a role for language or linguistics that can
contribute to social justice beyond just policing,
is there something else that we can do
with language that can really help in a real way? In other words, do I
agree with George Lakoff, the linguist here, where you
say, membership dues instead of taxes? And I would have
to say no, not just because I want to go up against
George, but because all of that ignores the euphemism treadmill. And so I was graced by
work of George's like, don't think of an elephant,
et cetera, about 20 years ago. And the Democrats
took him up, the idea being that if we change
language we can create change. But after a while,
I started to realize all of those snazzy terms, and
he was very clever with it, wouldn't have worked
because people who didn't like the
taxes or the this or the that were not going
to like them more because you change the name. And I have never talked to
my former colleague, George, about that. I'm sure he has an
intelligent answer. Maybe there's
something I missed. But no, I don't think
it's about language. I think it's about
going out and doing. Of course, speaking
situationally, sure, but not jiggering
with terminology. The way people think is
the way people think. And if you're
going to change it, you have to make an
argument, not change a word. I know what you mean. Yeah. Jack, I can do one more. And then my legs. [LAUGHS] So-- oh,
I love Q&A. Sir. Well, all right. Sir, and then the
woman in the back. Yeah. Oh, just a quick question. Do you have advice about how
we could talk to our students about not being offended? How to be more
resilient and so on? Because I get a-- I try not to offend my students. It's not my intention. Sure. But people are offended. And I'm wondering how I could
help them be more resilient. Give me an example
of the offense that you've run up against. Well, I teach in the law school. So I teach things
like self-defense. And I don't need-- if
you teach them law, I know just what you mean. OK. [LAUGHS] To be
honest, an argument that I use a lot in situations
like that is, where are you going with this in terms of
a vision of changing society? What offends you? Why were you offended? Often, I say, AU offended
by this 15 years ago. What's different now? And the main thing,
and I'm sure this, is that when you confront
someone like that, even in a civil way,
they're not going to allow that you change
their mind while you're sitting there. You're just going to
get the same resistance. But you can look
in people's eyes. There's something that
happens in people's pupils or something, where you can
see that you did get through. They're not going
to admit it to you. But I consider myself
to have done a job to just present them with
other ways of looking at these things. That can be really hard in a law
school atmosphere these days, I know. But you plant a
seed, and then people go off and lick the wound. That's how arguments, in my
experience, are usually won. It takes time. Ma'am. Sorry, I don't want to end
this on a hot button issue. But it's the one language
change over the last couple of years that just really
makes me grind my teeth, and that's pregnant people. What the hell? I mean, I get that it's supposed
to be inclusive of transmen and non-binary, who still
have their female body parts and they can get
pregnant, but it feels like it diminishes women. I mean, what are the
linguistics on that? It's not the linguistics,
it's the common sense. I think so many enlightened,
well-intentioned hip women are offended by that that
I think society is going to make a case against it. And therefore, something
that's extremely biologically counterintuitive
already is not going to catch on beyond a certain
world where people say Latinx. I mean, there is
definitely emerging a kind of high academic
college town jargon. But the question
is, is that going to be what the
Washington Post writes? Is that going to be
what people are saying, drinking their chardonnay
in a yard party? No. That one pushes it
too far, luckily. [LAUGHS] So thank you very much, folks. Well, thank you so much, John. And before we move
on to the reception, I would like to
take a minute here to thank the people who
do the real work of making these events
happen, and who have been really central to the
success of any program we have. And so those are Eva Seto,
who's the associate director of Social Science
Matrix, where we sit now. Serena Groen, who's the
administrative director of the Poli Sci
department, which is our institutional home. And her assistants, Stacey
Owens and Kristine Nera. And also, our two
great undergraduate assistants, Rachel Lee,
who's been here with the mic, and Ishan. And last but not least, I want
to thank Professor Gabriel Lenz, who's sitting there, who's
been, for the last five years, the chair of the
faculty executive committee of this center
since its inception. And so Gabe, thank you so
much for all you've done too. Now food and wine. [MUSIC PLAYING]
