Are you offended by ‘hard-working families’?

Scarcely a day passes without a newspaper story about some absurd ‘language guide’ issued by a public body. This week the Daily Mail reported that Wokingham Borough Council had told its staff not to use the phrase ‘hard-working families’ in case it offended the unemployed. Other verboten words included ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitewash’, and staff were warned that ‘sustained eye contact could be considered aggressive’ in some cultures. I don’t think they meant supporters of Millwall football club, but you never know.

Not to be outdone, Cardiff University has told its students to avoid using ‘British-English’ phrases such as ‘kill two birds with one stone’, ‘break a leg’ and ‘a piece of cake’ because they won’t be understood by people who didn’t grow up speaking English. Couldn’t you make the same argument for removing all the Welsh road signs in Cardiff? After all, less than 30 per cent of Welsh people actually understand the language, so that’s a majority of the indigenous population who stare at them in bafflement.

The university’s guidance – which also cautions against using ‘sexist’ idioms such as ‘man up’ or ‘like a girl’ – is part of an ‘equality, diversity and inclusion awareness module’ that’s mandatory for all first-year students. Surely any self-respecting fresher handed this list of banned phrases would try to cram as many of them as possible into his first essay? That was my response when, arriving at Vanity Fair in the mid-1990s, I was given a list of words by the editor that he never wanted to see in the magazine. They included ‘bed-sitter’, ‘chuckled’, ‘honcho’ and ‘funky’. My first article was about an up-and-coming actor and I began it as follows: ‘“I couldn’t believe it,” chuckled the 6ft 2in honcho from his funky bed-sitter in West Hollywood…’

Then again, that didn’t work out too well for me and I don’t suppose it would for them, either. These language guides are always badged as ‘inclusive’, as if they’re well-intentioned, but their real purpose is to provide activist HR managers with an excuse to open investigations into heretics – or push them out altogether. At the Free Speech Union, we’ve come to the aid of more than 3,500 people in the past five years, 308 of whom found themselves in trouble for using ‘inappropriate’ language. One woman we helped was let go by an arts festival because she described some Chinese colleagues as ‘dragging their feet’. When she queried why this was gross misconduct, an HR officer explained that the phrase was originally a reference to foot binding, an ancient Chinese custom, and was therefore a ‘cultural stereotype’.

Often the people who fall foul of these rules are not only conservative with a small ‘c’, but approaching retirement age, which makes them doubly attractive targets. Purging the over-fifties seemed to be the real purpose of the ‘inclusive’ language guide published by the Northern Ireland civil service last year. Workers were advised not to use age-related language, including ‘young-at-heart’, ‘old-school’, ‘aged’, ‘the young’, ‘the elderly’ and ‘young man or young woman’, because it could ‘reinforce negative stereotypes’. Also on the banned list were phrases such as ‘love’, ‘dear’ and ‘darling’. You can easily imagine someone in their early sixties being hauled before a disciplinary committee for innocently breaching one of these rules.

Cardiff University has told its students to avoid phrases such as ‘break a leg’ and ‘a piece of cake’

The Northern Ireland guide seemed designed to catch out even those older employees who were doing their best to adjust their language to fit in with 21st-century workplace culture. On race, it advised against using acronyms such as BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) or BME (black and minority ethnic) on the grounds that ‘they exclude groups such as mixed ethnicity, Roma, Irish Traveller as well as other minority ethnic groups such as Polish or Lithuanian’.

The group that finds it hardest to keep abreast of these constantly changing linguistic norms is the neuro-diverse – spectrumy types like me who are constantly putting their foot in it no matter how hard they try. Needless to say, young men are more likely to find themselves in this category than young women, who tend to be more agreeable and well-adjusted and pick up these rules automatically – which adds to their discriminatory character. At the Free Speech Union, we’re hoping to challenge an ‘inclusive language guide’ under the Equality Act on the grounds that it’s easier for some protected groups to comply with than others. We’re already working on one case in collaboration with X, and it’s not out of the question that Elon Musk’s sympathies might be engaged by that one, too.