Rosalie Maggio, in her essay “Bias-Free Language” has one thing right, and that is that language is a powerful thing. There can be little doubt that in the history of humankind, language has been used for freedom and for the purposes of those seeking power over others. Yet neutering language in order to weaken its ability to ‘offend’ minorities has other implicit consequences that need to be explored. Language is a powerful tool for liberation when it is culturally charged and socially relevant. Yet language can also be disempowered, words attacked and warped, so that the concepts necessary for a people to frame their problems (individual or collective) in such a way as they can be solved are missing.

Maggio insists that groups should be referred to in the way they chose to identify themselves. Yet here we can instantly run into problems. Shall we call treasonous elements in various governments ‘patriots’ when they insist on calling themselves democratic freedom-fighters (or pro-American for example) when they are anything but? Shall we call the NAZIs ’social renovators’ instead of fascists? We can even point out a more disturbing instance of neutralized language when we see the growing number of people, uncomfortable with the charged word rape,  now institutionally referring to this clear violation of human dignity simply as “sexual assault”, when in fact it is necessary that word rape incite strong reaction. And rightly so.

What are the arguments against Maggio’s viewpoint and beliefs about the language she seeks to ‘renovate’, herself? Maggio chastises those who do not use “concrete examples and anecdotes instead of one-word-fits-all descriptions” and insists that “using a particular to condemn a universal is a fault in logic” even that ridicule “is the first and last argument of fools”. Yet each example she uses in order to refute those who disagree with her is based on the very inspecific generalizations about ‘these people’ or ’some people’ or ‘others’, without any shame at all of how hypocritical and ironic her methods of discourse afterwards seem. She spends a lot of time criticizing anonymous sources to juxtapose herself against the ‘uncouth’ masses, who left to their own devises would destroy their own language and culture.

Tyrants use force and violence primarily, not language. Violence simplifies the whole affair, language is used to justify their oppressive actions. The silencing of expression is much more prevalent than word-specific control. Silencing of dissent, the eradication of cultural modes of expression, the targeting of the arts, the limiting of communication and the weakening of communities – these are the truly relevant issues when it comes to our freedom as a people. Her emphasis on political correctness and gender-neutral language takes a back seat to the reality of oppression as an underlying constant in society and all its forms of expression, and it is perhaps myopic to regard the two as equally important foci.

Much of the language used politically in our age is propaganda, though that term too has been antiquated and given a more ‘politically correct’ spin. The huge industry of propaganda, more relevant today than it ever has been, is now called ‘public relations’. Here we have an example of a word being disempowered because of its culturally charged significance and implications. How much less able are people to think critically, and most importantly, think for themselves, in a culture where the very language is being subverted by political and corporate agenda? Surely this reality holds a great deal more significance than the seemingly petty issues Maggio is concerned with, and yet she fails to mention such instances. She is choosing to align herself with a socially and politically trendy cause,  while skirting a deeper analysis of language as an expression of social reality.

Action does speak louder than words. Maggio is a part of a cultural paradigm whose members might also see video games and violent movies as responsible for the lack of peace in the world. Rather than address fundamental sociological phenomena, they skirt the truly profound and attention-worthy topics altogether. This is not because there is a lack of words for such issues, but because of a kind of collective apathy, an apathy which is reinforced by the neutralizing of words. We are unwilling to imagine that there may be something genuinely wrong with the world in which we live.  Maggio is in fact revealing that we are unwilling to admit to our collective apathy and instead label it as the highest of contemporary virtues: political correctness.

Centralizing authority over language ends up reinforcing and obscuring larger social establishments and vilifies the natural evolution of ‘new’ words by a culture. Dictionaries don’t add new words, they only acquiesce to inevitable cultural change, and reluctantly at that. It is one social institution amongst many that attempts to reign in ‘chaotic’ elements of culture and impose order upon them. This effort to control the language presents itself as a polarity when in fact it is only another influence on the actual totality of language being used.

The online phenomenon UrbanDictionary.com boasts slang words from all over the world, democratically contributed by groups of people who care to attempt to define them. What we find here is that there is an extremely active, living culture of word-creation, ‘made up’ by youth and various sub-cultures. These words are culturally charged and new. The contrast is stark, especially since we have been schooled to believe that slang, or words not found in an established and authoritative dictionary, are inherently base and unworthy. Yet is this truly so?

Maggio claims that language reinforces the norms of a culture, and that certain words perpetuate values and behaviours that are unacceptable to social movements such as feminism. We must work as best we can within our linguistic framework to discuss and to overcome the limitations of English itself. It is highly likely that in our complex society, with all our conflicts and our tremendous challenges, we have deeply uninvestigated problems, and that we are yet to have any words or concepts that might help us in solving them.  How would we know, if we cannot describe it?

Perhaps in focusing on the limitations of the English language, and criticising its vast, subjective representational nature, we undermine the importance of honesty in communication. Is this not our yet unnamed struggle for freedom?