EDITORIAL: The spooky word police of the CBC

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If the CBC has decided that it will no longer use about two dozen words because some people might find them offensive, that’s up to the CBC.

But what would possess the state-funded television, radio and online network that gets $1.2 billion of taxpayers’ money annually, to suggest Canadians shouldn’t use them?

Ever since the CBC announced the list this week with 18 of the words featured in an online graphic, it has been widely mocked. Justifiably so.

Among the words the CBC deemed inappropriate are ghetto, brainstorm, grandfathered, tone deaf, lame, first-world problem, blackmail, blind spot, savage, spooky and tribe.

A few others, such as crippled and gypped, have largely fallen into disuse on their own because that’s how language evolves over time.

But blackmail is now considered offside?

Language evolves over time. Some words viewed as inoffensive in the past are considered offensive today.

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But the opposite is also true. Words considered offensive decades or centuries ago have new meanings today which aren’t offensive.

How many people, when they hear that something has been “grandfathered in” — that is, exempted from new rules because it existed prior to those rules — would have known without the CBC dredging it up, that it has its origins in Blacks being denied the vote based on who their ancestors were?

Obviously, that was racist and wrong, but it has nothing to do with what the word means today.

Language police enthusiasts also ignore the importance of context and the intent of the speaker.

In what universe other than the bizarre one the CBC exists in, would calling for improved living conditions for people living in ghettos be considered racist?

Finally, the more serious intent of banning words is not to control speech, but thought.

Years ago, the CBC (along with other media organizations) decreed that in order to be objective, it would not call terrorists the accurate label terrorists when they were killing innocent civilians by blowing up buses or flying planes into the World Trade Center.

Instead, the CBC suggested, “bombers, hijackers, gunmen (if we’re sure no women were in the group), militants, extremists, attackers or some other appropriate noun.”

Of course, when you refuse to call terrorists, terrorists, you’re no longer being objective about what terrorism is.