Yes everything is fine. Norms around language change. 50 years ago you could lose your job for impugning most major religious, governmental or other "respectable" institutions in writing. You probably weren't going to jail for it but you just didn't talk that way about the Catholic church.
At the turn of the century, the same kind of uber-libs who are so jealous of their speech today were getting anyone who even tangentially endorsed labor organization kicked out of college econ departments and black-balled. One econ professor had some good things to say of The Knights of Labor which was the most ubiquitous and one of the most moderate labor organizations in the country, The Nation called into question his economics chair. Godkin himself tried to have the man fired from Johns Hopkins. Many economists who didn't tow the classically liberal line found themselves dealing with unhappy boards of trustees.
Two wrongs obviously don't make a right. But this is not new. The people claiming it is just have very little familiarity with history. And they take for granted that they have just never been on the wrong side of language norms.
Have the woke language grammar police gone too far? Probably. Does it warrant these interminable sanctimonious soap boxes from the Atlantic and their like? No.
A constutional amendment that had a snowball's chance in hell of passing which banned the use of the word "mother" would start to bother me. A handful of largely out of touch institutions believing that they are doing Rosa Parks type activism by banning the word "mother" from their meeting minutes shouldn't be mentioned in an article on any media site with a readership above 5,000.
That was addressed in the article, I think: Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above.
You reference slow, natural evolution of norms. Those happen everywhere, not just in language, but they happen organically. People change and then they change what they tolerate, how they speak etc. It's not that someone decides "people now have to speak like this, so that they then change to become like me". That's the "creating a new man" approach that lead to endless suffering under the socialists/communists, though I guess now it would be "creating a new person".
> Two wrongs obviously don't make a right. But this is not new.
"Everything is fine, because we've seen bad things happen before, so this isn't new, and only new things can be a problem"?
> You reference slow, natural evolution of norms. Those happen everywhere, not just in language, but they happen organically. People change and then they change what they tolerate, how they speak etc. It's not that someone decides "people now have to speak like this, so that they then change to become like me". That's the "creating a new man" approach that lead to endless suffering under the socialists/communists, though I guess now it would be "creating a new person".
That hasn't been true since the printing press and particularly the invention of the nation state.
> Everything is fine, because we've seen bad things happen before, so this isn't new, and only new things can be a problem"?
That's disingenuous. You know that if these authors were writing these articles in the spirit that these kinds of editorial limitations were a long standing problem that needed to be addressed, they wouldn't be on the front page and commented ad-nauseum. The entire selling point of this kind of article is that it is attacking some novel and dangerous schorge which menaces our very rights. They are broadly in the genre of panic-mongering.
What we consider "free speech" has existed since about the 70s. If you considered that paradigm to be free speech, in which there was virtually nothing you could say which would get you arrested but there were things you could say which could get your fired, then you must concede that what is happening now is a roughly equivalent level of free speech. If you find these new limits on your speech onerous but not the old ones, then your gripe is with the flavor of the speech which might get you fired not the fact that speech exists which might get you fired.
These articles are generally written by people who just happened to live lives and held values which were highly compatible with the rules of the institutions. So they are by and large, blissfully unaware of the previously extant limitation and how they biased the discourse.
> That hasn't been true since the printing press and particularly the invention of the nation state.
I disagree. There's not much success in the state forming its citizens, nor with the media. Take Germany for example. Germany's public broadcaster is deeply progressive on all social issues, and has a funding of €8bn per year. Most of Germany's private print media is similarly progressive. They've been pushing hard on genderized speech for years, yet the population rejects it continuously. If a primary objective isn't fulfilled with near-endless budgets, the tool seems to just not work for the task at hand.
> If you find these new limits on your speech onerous but not the old ones, then your gripe is with the flavor of the speech which might get you fired not the fact that speech exists which might get you fired.
These new speech rules are strongly being pushed, from state/quasi-state institutions (e.g. universities), are being pushed into legislation and aren't based on the population's norms (or there wouldn't be any opposition).
There's a difference between going into a room, behaving a certain way and the group rejecting your behavior, and going into a room, behaving a certain way and having one person pull a gun and forcing the group to reject you. The former is an organic group-response based on their shared values, it can change over time. The latter is what the speech-crusaders are trying to do.
At the turn of the century, the same kind of uber-libs who are so jealous of their speech today were getting anyone who even tangentially endorsed labor organization kicked out of college econ departments and black-balled. One econ professor had some good things to say of The Knights of Labor which was the most ubiquitous and one of the most moderate labor organizations in the country, The Nation called into question his economics chair. Godkin himself tried to have the man fired from Johns Hopkins. Many economists who didn't tow the classically liberal line found themselves dealing with unhappy boards of trustees.
Two wrongs obviously don't make a right. But this is not new. The people claiming it is just have very little familiarity with history. And they take for granted that they have just never been on the wrong side of language norms.
Have the woke language grammar police gone too far? Probably. Does it warrant these interminable sanctimonious soap boxes from the Atlantic and their like? No.