8

Look to the Future

BECAUSE LANGUAGE AND CULTURE are always changing, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by new terms, new phrases, and new protocols. With the Six Principles of Inclusive Language in hand, you’re now equipped to navigate the uncharted waters ahead. This means you should be able to spot problematic language as it arises, and, by using concepts in your new linguistic toolkit, understand exactly why that language is problematic.

For example, problems might be hidden in a word’s semantic frame—like calling one person “bossy” and another “assertive” for the same behavior. Or the problem might lie in a word’s flavor—what tastes fine to you might taste bitter or unpleasant to someone else. And sometimes the issue lies in the indexicality—like when perfectly grammatical (but nonstandard) words get harshly judged as unprofessional or as broken English just because of who is saying them.

As you navigate inclusive language in the future, you can refer back to the Six Principles to spot potential problems and diagnose some of the most common issues that arise in day-to-day communications. The examples I’ve given you in this book are both practical and high-impact applications of the Six Principles.

1. Reflect reality. Look for distortions like inflating language, which presents reasonable behavior as inappropriate or threatening, and softening language, which presents problematic behavior (usually by people with power) as acceptable. This includes the defense of “just joking,” which falsely claims that a humorous framing makes anything acceptable. Avoid language that presents gender as a binary, use the correct pronouns to refer to people, and don’t assume you know someone’s gender.

2. Show respect. Avoid giving unconscious demotions when you meet someone who doesn’t match your mental models. When you encounter an unusual name, take the time to make sure you are spelling and saying it correctly. (This includes finger spelling.) Don’t use nicknames or pet names without permission. And avoid saying “sir” and “ma’am” when you’re not sure of someone’s gender.

3. Draw people in. Use requested identity terms, and when a disability (or other) term becomes unpleasantly negative due to pejoration, use the new requested term instead. Speak respectfully to disabled people, and don’t unconsciously demote them or presume they’re incompetent. Don’t casually point out the ways people are different and avoid using diverse in ways that suggest that diversity only involves people who are in marked categories.

4. Incorporate other perspectives. Don’t assume that your experience is everyone else’s experience, especially for situations in which you’re in the dominant group. When taking perspective, follow through with that second step—“what would this be like if I had that person’s lived experiences?” Make sure you’re not accidentally leaving people out of the pronoun circle with words like you, us, and everyone. And don’t focus only on the perspectives of white people or of powerful people who do deeply problematic and antisocial things (rather than their targets).

5. Prevent erasure. Use gender-neutral language to include people who aren’t male—because words like mankind, guys, and manpower aren’t universal. Avoid misnaming people and put in the effort so you don’t mistake one underrepresented person for “the other one.” Use language that reflects the real variety of skin tones, don’t forget that women who love women exist, and when creating or updating historical narratives, make sure you incorporate indigenous history.

6. Recognize pain points. Phrase your compliments so they’ll land well and avoid compliments that reveal lowered expectations. Avoid jokes and terminology that lightly reference history or painful experiences for other people, including words like master/slave or master bedroom. And be careful with mental health terminology—avoid using terms like crazy or schizophrenic or OCD just to describe problematic behavior.

PRACTICE

The number one way to internalize new ideas, acquire new skills, and create new habits is practice. If you practice—especially with a friend or accountability partner—what felt hard at first should start to feel like second nature.

To prepare for scheduled events, like press releases or ad campaigns or videos or talks, you can use the inclusion checklist in the Resources section as a starter template. (This is like the checklist you’d make for a cookout or party, where you think through the guests and their needs.) The more you practice using a checklist, the more you’ll start to make inclusive choices without even being reminded—like gender-neutral language to address and refer to people.

Where practice comes in especially handy is as preparation for on-the-fly events. (This is like having a well-stocked fridge and pantry so you’re ready for anyone who might drop by your place.) In everyday conversations with people ranging from colleagues to family to people you’ve just met, you’ll be able to use your new habits to communicate with appropriate warmth and respect. For example, you’ll know how to avoid misgendering people, pay attention to and use names correctly, and give good compliments. And be ready to shift modalities! For example, if you speak an oral language but no sign languages, if you always have something on hand to write with and on, you’ll be able to communicate with people who are Deaf or have other situations where they will need to communicate with you via writing. Your inclusive language habits will make the people you speak with feel taken into consideration and valued.

At the end of each chapter that covers a Principle of Inclusive Language (Chapters 2 through 7), you’ve got five quick wins and three more in-depth activities. If you focus on the quick wins and activities in each chapter for a full month, you should end up in good shape for internalizing that Inclusive Language Principle. By the end of six months, you will have a whole set of inclusive language insights and habits that will feel increasingly normal and natural for you.

If you find a person or a group to do your inclusive language activities with, you can check in with each other every few weeks. Here are some useful questions you can ask each other:

1. Is there something you’re finding really challenging or difficult about this activity?

2. Is there something that has been surprisingly easy?

3. Do you feel like you’ve seen positive outcomes? Or maybe that you’ve avoided a mistake you might have made earlier?

4. Is there something you wish you’d said or done better? What could you do in the future so you feel better about it?

Like any other skill you work to acquire, the more you practice and the more you focus on the places that could improve, the better your outcomes will be.

GET READY TO MAKE MISTAKES

As you move forward with inclusive language, you’re bound to make a mistake now and then. It can be easy to feel like this is the end of the world—like people will think you’re a terrible person, that you’ll feel shame forever. Or that you’ve permanently damaged a relationship.

But when people know that you’re doing your best to stay up to date, and that you’re inviting corrections and feedback, most mistakes you make won’t matter that much. Because you’ve shown that you care not only about your good intentions, but also about your good impact.

What’s more, when you own your mistakes, apologize, and move to fix things, you usually end up strengthening relationships. The cycle of making a mistake, taking responsibility for it, and fixing it can actually foster more trust in you than if you’d never made a mistake at all.

Here’s an example from the summer of 2022. The singer, rapper, flautist, and entrepreneur Lizzo released a single called “GRRRLS” that included the line, “Do you see this shit? I’m a spaz.”

In Chapter 4, I talked about the cycle of pejoration and the ways that scientific and technical terms about disability often become more negative. Spaz, the shortened version of spastic, is one of these words. Spasticity is a term used to describe abnormal muscle tightness from contraction and involves muscle stiffness, muscle spasms, and involuntary contractions. Millions of people with cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and strokes have to deal with spastic muscles that are painful, make it difficult to move, and are visually apparent.¹

But like so many other disability words, spastic and spaz have also moved into more general usage as an insult for someone who isn’t in good physical control of their body or maybe emotions. Someone inept or hyperactive or otherwise unpleasantly chaotic. Spaz is considered by many people in the disability community to be too pejorative to use in slangy ways. (Note that for many Black Americans, spaz doesn’t have this kind of negative flavor—another way we can see how complex and context-dependent language can be.)

So when Lizzo—whose lyrics and performances are usually extremely inclusive—used the word spaz, many people were surprised and hurt. There was a huge outcry on social media. People tweeted about their own spastic diagnoses and physical pain. They said that in 2022, we should know and do better. That there should be no place for words like these in Lizzo’s music.

It made news. It was bad publicity. It was a public embarrassment.

And Lizzo turned around and did exactly the right things. Just days after the original release of “GRRRLS,” Lizzo made a public apology and announcement:

(Note that plenty of other musical artists have had ableist language in their music, but at the time I wrote this, only Lizzo had been called out to such an extent. This is surely because Lizzo is Black—as I mentioned in Chapter 2, the actions of people of color are more likely to be described using inflating language, even when those actions are perfectly reasonable. So when we’re pointing out problematic language, we want to make sure that we’re pointing it out for everyone who is using it, across the board.)

We often see apologies when a public figure says or does something problematic. What is far less common is seeing a public figure make an apology that is backed up by actions that actually repair the problem. At what was surely considerable expense, Lizzo rewrote the line, hopped into the studio, recorded a new version, and oversaw the distribution of the new version of the song. And all of this in less than a week.

I see Lizzo as an inclusivity role model (for example, in her reality competition show, Watch Out for the Big Grrrls), and this incident is a great example of best practices when it comes to inclusive language mistakes. Would it have been better for her to understand in advance that spaz is a problematic word in other communities and avoid using it? Sure. But you can’t know everything in advance, and there are always going to be words you don’t know are problematic. So once you’ve made a mistake, you can use the same best practices:

1. Make a real apology that shows that you understand precisely what the problem is and states your genuine commitment to inclusive language. (If you don’t show that you know why something was a mistake or problematic, people may have a hard time believing that you want to do better.) Instead of focusing on how bad you feel, focus on what was problematic about your language.

2. Do what you can to fix the problem. If it’s an ad or press release or video or something similar, redo it with the problematic language fixed and then re-release it. If it’s more casual or spoken words that can’t be unspoken, then the apology should include examples of how you will avoid making the same mistake again in the future. For example, you might say, “I’m committed to avoiding ableist language in the future, and I welcome feedback on how to do this.”

We all know that to err is human. So acknowledging that you make mistakes and that you will make a real effort to fix them demonstrates that you are realistic, sincere, and committed. Inclusive language mistakes aren’t the end of the world, even if you’re famous. They’re just a part of building and maintaining relationships.

STAY UP TO DATE AND ELICIT FEEDBACK

Language is a collaborative project. And so is inclusive language. We collectively decide what is and isn’t appropriate. What’s old-fashioned and what’s modern. What’s respectful and what’s impolite.

As the culture changes, our language changes. You’ve probably seen how some words that were acceptable when you were growing up are no longer appropriate today. What’s more, there are words that are acceptable today that in a few years may be considered problematic.

This is one of the main reasons why this book is centered on Principles of Inclusive Language and not just a long list of “bad words” and “good words.” The principles will stay the same—but some of the words that are relevant to the principles will change.

Like any complicated machine, inclusive language requires regular maintenance and tune-ups. You can do this by:

1. staying up to date on inclusive language, and

2. eliciting feedback on your language use.

One of the best things you can do to stay up to date is to look into what people in other groups are saying. You can search for what they are saying about language specifically, and you can immerse yourself in their culture and learn the language more organically.

For example, you can choose a group of interest and then:

• follow people from this group on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and other social media sites;

• read blogs, listen to podcasts, and subscribe to newsletters put out by members of this group; and

• read novels and watch movies by members of the group. You’ll want to be careful and make sure that it is actually in-group members who have written the books and made the movies. Gatekeeping by publishing houses and Hollywood means that a lot of American books and movies involving underrepresented people have been produced by people who aren’t members of those groups.

If you’ve made checklists for yourself, schedule regular tune-ups for those checklists and make sure the words you have in the “inclusive” column are still good. As time goes on, there is a good chance you’ll see changes in terms involving race and ethnicity, terms involving disability, and terms involving gender and sexual orientation.

Another great way to stay up to date is to let people know that you’re invested in improving your inclusive language fluency and that you’d like feedback. Getting feedback is especially useful when you’re leading a team, giving a presentation, or doing any other kind of public speaking.

Is there someone in your life who can give you good feedback about inclusive language? Make a plan to reach out and ask them for advice.

But be careful that you’re not going to overburden them, and make sure that your power dynamic won’t be an issue. For example, if this person is someone you know from work, they shouldn’t be your report. You’ll also want to avoid asking people from an impacted group to persuade you that inclusive language is necessary. For example, don’t ask a nonbinary person to explain and justify pronouns or an Asian person to convince you that you should stop saying “Oriental.”

If you keep on learning about other cultures and other groups, keep yourself open to feedback, and keep on applying the Six Principles, you will be able to easily navigate the inclusive language changes that lie ahead.