Who's banning whom, though? If I decide to call a pregnant woman a "person with pregnancy" and someone jumps down my throat and screams, "she's a PREGNANT! WOMAN!!" who's doing the language policing here? If I've adopted some trendy equity lingo, that's on me. I'm not telling you what to call her, why are you insisting that I call her by the god-given American apple pie Christian traditional term? I mean, I can fairly guess why, because "person with pregancy" probably sounds icky, performative, and vaguely dehumanizing to you. But if you are a Defender of Free Speech, then you should be supporting my right to utter the terms I prefer from my own mouth, as long as I don't try to force those words into yours. And yes I know there are plenty of "progressive" types that will try to force people to use socially correct speech, but Packer's article is complaining about equity language guides being used by corporations, an entirely different phenomenon. Why is he bent out of shape about this? I don't have a problem with Sierra Club enforcing stylistic etiquette in their own writings, as long as I myself not being compelled to conform with their corporate judgment call. Polite language changes over time, and it's reasonable for companies to adapt to that. I'm old enough to have heard tales of when "pregnant" wasn't used in polite company at all, and people instead said, "she's with child."

Packer recognizes this on some level, stating, "The battle against euphemism and cliché is long-standing and, mostly, a losing one." But I think he's a bit off with his next assertion: "What’s new and perhaps more threatening about equity language is the special kind of pressure it brings to bear. The conformity it demands isn’t just bureaucratic; it’s moral." No, euphemism has always been moral. What's new now is that everyone's a publisher now thanks to social media. So it's not just Emily Post, The Hays Code, the US Congress, and other big gatekeepers determining by fiat what counts as offensive, and the rest of us passively falling into line. Now every loser gets to proclaim to the world how offended they are, and due to the nature of social media, the more controversial and theatrical their level of offense is, the more engagement they will receive. Couple that with modern tribalism where people have to prove their loyalty by completely accepting all tenets of their tribe and utterly rejecting all tenets of the opposing tribe.

Personal anecdote: I was raised to believe that "the n-word" was inherently offensive. It was never spoken in my house, and to this day I don't use it in casual conversation. But I also loved the work of John Lennon. He had an album which featured a song entitled "Woman is the N*** of the World." The word was spelled out on the album cover and sung in the lyrics. When I was young I would feel hot and embarrassed listening to that track, so I would generally skip it. But I understood and appreciated the sentiment behind it. Even at a young age I could separate his laudable intentions from the potential inappropriateness of his methods. Anyway, it would never have occurred to me to stop listening to Lennon entirely just because of one cringey song. Much less to call radio stations or whatever and try to get them to stop playing his music. It's not that I don't get highly offended over people saying the N-word. I do. I just believe that, although we should strive not to be needlessly offensive, in the hierarchy of things that are wrong with the world, "getting offended" is pretty far down. Thus I can't get behind hair trigger "social justice" warriors who want to destroy the lives of everyone who in their estimation holds shitty personal beliefs. But what's even worse are the "free speech" warriors who with no sense of irony will attempt to enact laws banning the speech and ideas of their opponents.