NO FFENSE

Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative

The EHLI a multi-year project to address harmful language in Information Tech at Stanford. Among hundreds of entries, here are the first four samples from them and their suggested replacements.

Ableist

Language that is offensive to people with disabilities and or devalues people with disabilities.

Addict: Use "person with substance abuse disorder."

Basket case: Use "nervous."

Blind review: Use "anonymous review"

Blind study: Use "masked study"

Culturally appropriative

Language that misuses terms that hold meaning to a particular culture.

Brave: "Do not use."

Bury the hatchet: Use "call for peace/truce."

Chief: Use "the person's name."

Geronimo: Use "only when discussing figure."

Institutionalized racism

Language that is embedded in the laws and regulations of a society or an organization.

Barrio: Use "specific name of neighborhood."

Black hat: Use "unethical hacker."

Black sheep: Use "outcast."

Brown bag: Use "lunch talk/tech talk."

Source: Stanford's Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, via Stanford Daily

BITE-SIZED OPINIONS

Minor problems, minor solutions

An English assignment showed that cancel culture is demonizing harmless words

ALAN SCHAEFFER

Sports Editor

Cancel culture has been a major topic of discussion in recent years, as celebrities or businesses have often come under scrutiny for making comments that are deemed offensive or insensitive. One of the most prominent examples is Kanye West, who lost major deals with Adidas after posting a number of antisemitic tweets.

When my AP Language class first discussed Stanford’s Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, I was concerned but far from surprised to find out that someone had made an expansive list of words that are no longer politically correct.

Controversy over the list forced it to be taken down, just a day after a critical article from the Wall Street Journal shed light on it.

At Branham, posters made by the Ethnic Literature class caused schoolwide controversy last year, another example of some people taking offense to something that was not made to offend.

According to the Stanford IT Community’s website, the goal of the initiative was “to eliminate many forms of harmful language, including racist, violent, and biased (e.g., disability bias, ethnic bias, ethnic slurs, gender bias, implicit bias, sexual bias) language in Stanford websites and code.”

The list is broken down into 10 categories;

Problem: This spring change has really messed me up. I’m waking up every day with either my nose, ears, mouth or all of the above clogged because of my allergies, plus I lost an hour of sleep!

Solution: I don’t think the time change should affect me and I demand financial compensation for spring reinvigorating my allergies.

— Ryan Walters

“Ableist,” “Ageism,” “Colonialism,” “Culturally Appropriative,” “Gender-Based,” “Imprecise Language,” “Institutionalized Racism,” “Person-First,” “Violent” and “Additional Considerations.”

Some phrases that it highlights as offensive are reasonable and are widely considered to be slurs or not politically correct. For instance, the r-word is described as a “slur against those who are neurodivergent or have a cognitive disability.”

At a school like Branham, with a high population of special education students, words like this are insensitive to members of the community. Other words on the list aren’t as well known to be offensive, but are brought to attention in the initiative. The phrase “Long time no see” was originally a mockery of Chinese immigrants who didn’t speak English very well. The list suggests avoiding phrases such as this one due to their racist or offensive backgrounds.

Although many words and phrases are well within reason and deserving of their place, there are others that make me struggle to take the list seriously. It suggests that, instead of referring to things as a “walk-in” appointment, one should refer to them as “drop-in” or “open-office” appointments because the phrase walk-in is “ableist language that trivializes people living with disabilities.”

In December, The Wall Street Journal called out the EHLI in an editorial, ridiculing inclusions to the list such as “American” and “blind study.” Reporters from multiple other news sources have spoken on the matter too, including Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro and USA Today’s Ingrid Jacques.

Despite being taken down, an uploaded PDF of the initiative can still be found on the WSJ website. As many journalists have already pointed out, the EHLI is a reflection of the new wave of hyper-sensitivity amongst society. While it is a good thing that we are starting to acknowledge the harm that some words can cause, it is being taken too far.

Cancel culture in itself has stepped far beyond its bounds. Initially, cancel culture was responsible for deplatforming prominent people with harmful and insensitive views, but now it almost seems that it is erasing parts of history. Take the recent issues with Roald Dahl for example. Publishers want to edit parts of his books due to concerns over fat shamingin their writing, but is this all that necessary?

Censoring literature and judging the correctness of it by modern standards ignores the lessons that it teaches. Books like Roald Dahl’s and Dr. Seuss’ serve as examples of how far we have come in terms of understanding and inclusivity. While of course, “Birth of a Nation” is certainly not the right film to choose for family movie nights, reading “What I Saw on Mulberry Street” to children before bed can’t do any harm when it is being used to teach about racial stereotyping.

Problem: I run out of coffee around noon every day and always want more coffee in order to get through my classes.

Solution: We should have a coffee shop or starbucks of some kind on campus like colleges do. then we can always get caffeine.

— Reese Gardner

Problem: My power has gone out twice in the last two weeks because of all this rain, making it difficult to do homework and go about my life.

Solution: Resurrect Nikola Tesla and pay him to build a "theoretically impossible" infinite energy source.

— Alan Schaeffer

Problem: Learning how to drive. There's always a bunch of idiots on the road that will make your life miserable.

Solution: Have people take a driver's test every five years and laser beam their car to smithereens if they fail. Maybe the person will be inside the car when that happens, maybe they won't.

—Nolan Zils

Problem: When borrowing supplies such as markers and pens from teachers, two out of three of them are dead and then I have to go around the whole room asking my classmates for working markers.

Solution: Invent a machine that discards the dead markers and replaces it with a new, working marker.

— SaiSahasra Makamchenna