Remember years ago when it was said that the word 'blackboard' was offensive and should be phased out in favour of chalkboard? Some people said it was an urban myth, but the fact remains that these days you won't hear it referred to as a blackboard in school any more. In today's world of social media it's much harder to dismiss things as 'urban myths', especially when those encouraging such woke wordplay are those who actually run social media.
Another example of Twitter's descent into totalitarian left-wing bias arrived last week thanks to one of their official blue tick accounts. The guys (sorry, folks or people) at Twitter Engineering tweeted last Thursday that they intended to use more 'inclusive language' and would encourage the use of the following words in place of 'non-inclusive language'.
The thread suggests that the terms will be enforced 'across internal resources', adding: "Words matter in our meetings, our conversations, and the documents we write". Once again this is a slippery slope and who knows where it will end? Many are now of the mindset that Twitter will eventually become a wholly left-wing social media outlet where conservatives, nationalists and even centrists are banned. Perhaps one day use of any of the above terms such as 'blacklist' or 'he/him/her' will result in a ban. Indeed, the programmer who is reported to have spearheaded the 'inclusive words' initiative tweeted last week that the intention was to "eventually adopt inclusive language across Twitter". By 'adopt' we assume he means 'enforce'.
That programmer is Regynald Austin. Austin was inspired by an email he received that included the technical term 'automatic slave rekick'. He was so 'offended' that he embarked on his word crusade: "I was madder than I ever thought I'd be in the workplace. This has to stop. This isn't cool. We have to change this now".
Strangely, for someone so offended by terms that he says "hearken back to oppressive parts of United States history and culture" his Twitter handle is @negroprogrammer. Surely he should begin by censoring himself!
If you haven't joined yet, please consider joining Parler - the free speech alternative to Twitter. You can sign up to Parler here. It's especially important if you have a lot of followers on Twitter and want something to fall back on when they kick you off. You can find us on Parler by searching for the handle 'Binlabour'.
