Word Dictators?

Over the past week, up at the University of Michigan....folks in the IT Department sat there and made up a list of words and phrases that can't readily be used in company of others (meaning you could utter the chat terms with ghosts, imaginary people or border collies).

In this 'hint-paper'....they listed some words and said you needed to other ways of conveying the meaning.  I sat there for a while and thought over this process.

Basically, they want you to invent new terms of words, and once they reach some level of wokeness....then you gotta stop that and invent other terms.

'Brown-bag' got on the list.  You could utter work-bag, or a 'paper  bag of color' instead.

'Picnic' got on the list.  I imagine you could say grassy-dinner, or Earth-dinner instead.  

Who made up this list?  Well...the university had a group which devoted time to this....the Words Matter Task Force.  They seem to be a under-study group from the university Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. 

How much time did they spend on this?  Unknown.  Maybe forty hours of thinking time with each person....maybe six minutes.

After a while of pondering upon this....I reached a stage of asking myself...isn't there more productive things that we could ask of college-level folks (I am one of those myself....twice over)?  

Then it occurred to me....if you were of the college-crowd, but marginally educated...this might be all you can really do.  In that, I'm suggesting that they may hold a certificate as an electrical engineer, but the most they can do is read a wattage chart and tell you how much a 110-watt bulb burns in one hour.  Beyond that, their knowledge is non-existent.  

I worked with a guy, who bluffed his way through a interview for a contractor job.  He had a degree that related to computer science.  He was in his mid-30s, and was hired to provide IT support to our group.  After about three weeks of effort, I came to realize most of what he knew....amounted to a dozen 3x5 inch cards.  Sadly, I probably knew a hundred times more related info on IT stuff....than this guy.  (I'll readily admit....there might be two-dozen IT things which I can do without any help or reference material, but beyond that I'm useless). 

For almost a year, this guy bluffed his way through daily work, and when our contract ended....he walked away....to find another company.  He probably showed marginal competence with that company, and bluffed his knowledge level all over again.  

As for all this effort to dump words out of English....just to invent new words?  Yeah, more or less.  

Old words which went out before these idiots?  Well...dungarees is't used anymore. Groovy isn't used anymore.  Snowbrowth isn't used anymore.  Excogigate?  Well, it used to mean something to the effect that you were burning a vast amount of braincells on some thinking and acting a bit Einsteinish (that's not a word, but I've invented it). Excogigate also went away as time passed.