By banning words like "retard" you just create a void that will be filled with another word very quickly (the word itself used to be a medical term).
Imbecile, special needs, oligophrenic, whatever, something associated with intellectual disability will be used instead.
They are not trying to ban "harmful language" from being said or written, they are trying to have you suppress "harmful thoughts", or ideally render you incapable of harbouring them.
Do you want Stanford (or anyone else) to dictate what you can think?
> By banning words like "retard" you just create a void that will be filled with another word very quickly (the word itself used to be a medical term).
You can see this happening in the Stanford list itself - some of the terms listed, particularly in the "Ableist" section, are clearly second or third iteration through the euphemism treadmill.
In fact, some could be about to complete another one - for example, my self-preservation instinct on the Internet tells me I shouldn't use "disabled" as an adjective, despite it being listed as a proper alternative to "crippled". I fully expect "disabled" to land in the left column of this or similar list in a couple of years.
It's also worth noting that insults don't need to be real language or any language.
Just laughing can be incredibly offensive.
So an aggressor has infinite words to use and is effectively impossible to censor.
I hesitate to mention SouthPark, but they do an episode where Cartman is especially cruel using laughter as his weapon. It's quite effective and obviously offensive. Unlike the list in the article.
The interesting thing to me with this instance of the euphemism treadmill is that people seem to have either amnesia or zero cognitive dissonance about words that were once deemed insensitive and mean the same damn thing. 'Retard' replaced 'moron', for instance, because moron was deemed insensitive in the medical world. Before that there was the gamut everyone knows of: idiot, stupid, etc. These words are only effective as insults because of their meaning, but proponents of suppression pretend the words live in a no-man's land of having no meaning, existing only as being derogatory.
The only thing more insane would be the expectation that insults of any kind, for any reason, no longer be tolerated (some do suggest this, which is at least consistent).
They would be better off with a class on sensitivity training, that basically boils down to "stop being a dick". Besides lists of acceptable discourse or newspeak, they should teach students to be civil.
And if people still need a list or a class to be taught that e.g. the N word is offensive, they have no place in Stanford.
Imbecile, special needs, oligophrenic, whatever, something associated with intellectual disability will be used instead.
They are not trying to ban "harmful language" from being said or written, they are trying to have you suppress "harmful thoughts", or ideally render you incapable of harbouring them.
Do you want Stanford (or anyone else) to dictate what you can think?