Sure, technically from an idealised CLAT perspective it might be accurate that it's a list that only deals in 'merit'. But that's only if we don't want to get into the argument whether a hypothetical son of a billionaire who's gone to fancy private schools his whole life and has been pushed through multiple private-CLAT coaching sessions is actually more 'meritorious' that the hypothetical daughter of an urban scavenger who taught herself English and learned CLAT through self-study and made it through on quota. Arguably, by most metrics, the latter has more merit.

But, even if we don't get into specifics, do we even want to get into a game where some seats are labelled as meritorious (good), and others are by implication non-merit (i.e. neutral or 'bad')? What about women's quotas? State quotas? Disability quotas? Are all the ones who get into those, without merit?

Really, neo-liberalism comes from neonazi? That's new to me - the word neoliberalism was coined in 1898, when the Nazi party and neo-nazis were not even a glint in baby Hitler's eye yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Origins

Also, neo-stalinist and neo-maoist might make sense, if there was such a thing? Who do you think would fit the bill? Maybe calling the chinese neo-communists could make sense, though it probably makes them sound both cooler (because Neo is cool - have you not seen the Matrix?) and more communist than they actually are, as it might be more accurate to describe them as fundamentally totalitarian / neo-fascist free-market capitalists with a heavy 'guiding' hand of the state, which is communist in not much except the name of the party and a couple of social welfare programmes.

There is a simple reason why it is called a merit list. It's because the list is based on your score only. It treats academic excellence above identity politics and grievance politics. A Dalit can make it to the merit list, but a Brahmin/Kshatriya/Vaishya, a Parsi, a Sikh or a Christian can never make it to the quota list.

The weird thing is, this seems to be a bit of a storm in a tea-cup: didn't realise that it's literally about the Stanford IT department deciding that it shouldn't call people it provides services to "Karens", or use words like "slave" and "master" to describe IT equipment or servers, when most of the tech world has already made some of those changes or is going that way?

That's an interesting point, and also goes for words like socialist, communist, tory, etc. But doesn't it largely depend in that context about how it's used (i.e., if in anger or descriptively), rather than the words themselves needing to be banned or 'controlled'?

I.e., neoliberal by itself is surely not toxic, any more than 'socialist' is toxic by itself: i.e., when used descriptively as in "this government is following neoliberal policies" or "your arguments are fundamentally socialist".

But using any of those as a pejorative would be toxic. Then again, so would calling someone a 'clown', and no one is proposing 'banning' clown or reducing its use in discourse.

https://reason.com/2022/12/21/stanford-elimination-harmful-language-speech-karen-american/

this article pretty much sums up this latest attack on free speech

further, in the merit list/reserved list point, the assumption of reserved candidates having "no merit" is being made by the OP, which might just be more problematic than the actual usage

Interesting post and examples.

As a historical side note, you're right that all this is not a "new-fangled woke project", but it used to be called "political correctness" in the 90s and back then certain people were up in arms about wanting to have the right to use words such as "chairman" or "lady doctor", most of which are now accepted to be somewhat archaic.

Back then, the criticism was about "it's political correctness gone mad", by people like Jeremy Clarkson. Then after a decade or two of relative quiet in those culture wars, the battle is back again with the "wokes gone mad" and are trying to ban my words.

In short, nothing is ever new, language will keep evolving, people will fight about it and will come to some compromises. Rinse, repeat :)

So, this is trending on my TL. ... Theres's been a backlash among the RW because Stanford has brought out a list of harmful words.

https://www.ndtv.com/feature/stanford-university-releases-harmful-language-list-it-includes-words-like-american-and-survivor-3636582

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-stanford-guide-to-acceptable-words-elimination-of-harmful-language-initiative-11671489552

https://www.newsweek.com/stanford-criticism-slammed-putting-american-forbidden-word-language-list-1768543

The full list of words is here:

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguage.pdf

Some examples of harmful words in the list:

- ladies and gentlemen, manpower (sexism)

- white paper, black mark, master, webmaster, slave (racism)

- killing it, war room, pull the trigger, rule of thumb (violence)

- disabled, prisoner, immigrant, homeless (stereotyping based on single characteristic)

RW people are complaining about wokeness as usual, but in my view the list is perfectly valid and we actually need to follow it in India. In fact, even back in school our teachers told us to avoid some of the words in the list (e.g. chairperson instead of chairman, handicapped, retard etc). So the list is not some new-fangled woke project but pretty old in some cases. It also reflects factually accurate info (e.g. Namrata Thapar from Shark Tank cannot be called a "chairman" of her company).

Also, let's look at it objectively: people on LI keep complaining that law firms treat them like "slaves". Not only is this BS (a 1 lakh a month salary in a plush office) but immensely disrespectful to the blacks who actually suffered slavery. Similarly, the word "manpower" sounds cringe.

But most of all, many words routinely used by judges, lawyers and law students in India are very, very harmful. So, the question is this: why not learn from Stanford and make a list of words to avoid in the Indian legal profession, beginning from law schools? In addition to the Stanford words, it can have India-specific words used by lawyers and judges, such as:

Examples:

- merit list and reserved list (it means reserved candidates have no merit)

- ravish (this is used by some people instead of rape.. ugh!)

- outraging modesty (super-cringe)

- concubinage (🤮)

- love jihad (🤬)