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This is an archive article published on May 31, 2003

Language cops bar ‘old’, ‘blind’ in US textbooks

Oh Heck: Hell hath no place in American primary and high school textbooks.But then again, you can’t find anyone, ‘‘sailing a ...

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Oh Heck: Hell hath no place in American primary and high school textbooks.

But then again, you can’t find anyone, ‘‘sailing a yacht’’ or ‘‘playing polo’’ in the pages of an American textbook either. The texts also can’t say someone has a ‘‘boyish figure,’’ or is a ‘‘busboy,’’ or is ‘‘blind,’’ or ‘‘suffers from a birth defect,’’ or is a ‘‘biddy,’’ or ‘‘the best man for the job,’’ a ‘‘babe,’’ a ‘‘bookworm,’’ or even a ‘‘barbarian.’’

All these words have been banned from US textbooks on the grounds that they are either elitist (polo, yacht), sexist (babe, boyish figure), offensive (blind, bookworm), ageist (biddy) or just too strong (hell, which has been replaced with darn or heck). ‘‘God’’ is also a banned word because he or she is too religious.

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To get the full 500-word list of what is banned and why, consult the Language Police, a new book by New York University Professor of Education, Dianne Ravitch, a former education official in George Bush senior’s administration and a consultant to the Clinton administration.

She says she stumbled on her discovery of what’s allowed and what’s not by accident because publishers insist that they do not impose censorship on their History and English textbook authors but merely apply rules of sensitivity — which have expanded mightily since they were first introduced in the 1970s to weed out gender and racial bias.

Ravitch, whose book has taken everyone by surprise says a lot of people are having fun finding new titles for Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which presents problems with every word except ‘‘and’’ and ‘‘the.’’ Ravitch says ‘‘old’’ is ageist, ‘‘man’’ is sexist and ‘‘sea’’ can’t be used in case a student lives inland and doesn’t grasp the concept of a large body of water.

But some people say the phenomenon of sanitising words and thought is not isolated to textbook publishers seeking not to offend anyone so that sales can be as wide as possible.

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The New York Times recently reported that National Institute of Health researchers on AIDS are not only avoiding using words like gay and homosexuals in e-mails so as not to offend conservatives in the Bush administration, they are also inventing code words.

Times journalist Erica Goode reported that one researcher was told to ‘‘cleanse’’ the abstract of his grant proposal of words like gay, homosexual and transgender even though his research was on HIV in gay men. (Reuters)

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