From the Boston Globe, by way of my favorite football sportswriter:

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“‘Sold down the river,’ an idiomatic expression deployed to communicate betrayal . . . alludes to the practice of selling and transporting enslaved Africans down the Mississippi or Ohio rivers to plantations in the deep South, where conditions were notoriously brutal. Planters in states like Virginia and Kentucky often exploited enslaved people’s fears of being separated from their families and sold further south to quell insubordination and resistance. American English is riddled with words and phrases with racist origins or undertones. Since the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and the flurry of protests his and other Black Americans’ deaths have inspired, a growing number of public and private institutions are reevaluating their reliance on language with racist connotations or history.”

I know that I, personally, need to take a beat and think about each idiom I use, because I'm sure some of them have racist connotations that I'm either unaware of or don't think about. I have to be better at this.

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I know that I, personally, need to take a beat and think about each idiom I use, because I'm sure some of them have racist connotations that I'm either unaware of or don't think about. I have to be better at this.

+1

I am very much in favor "PC speech" and of ridding my own speech of expressions that have origins which are racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory, and over the years, I have made it a point to stop saying various phrases, so in general I would say my speech is pretty PC.

But I recently used the phrase "mumbo jumbo" (in an email, I used it to describe one of our pandemic teaching models) and literally the very next day came across one of those "12 phrases you didn't know were racist" articles. I emailed the original recipients of the email and apologized. And now we all know.

So it's a learning process, and one I plan to continue.

Recently learned that the phrase "spirit animal". Disrespectful to indigenous peoples.

Now the term "master bedroom" is falling out of favor. It is plantation terminology. The new term is main bedroom.

None of this bothers me. We long ago discarded gendered terms like stewardess, fireman, etc. Nobody died.

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But I recently used the phrase "mumbo jumbo" (in an email, I used it to describe one of our pandemic teaching models) and literally the very next day came across one of those "12 phrases you didn't know were racist" articles. I emailed the original recipients of the email and apologized.

I can understand dropping the use of certain phrases that have the potential to cause harm, once I know that (though to be honest, I think things are beginning to go to extremes, like the whole Trader Joe's product naming kerfuffle).

Why is the apology necessary?

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Why is the apology necessary?

Well, depending on the phrase, an apology could be made in case use of that phrase caused offense. In this case, I didn't think it would be directly offensive, but doing the apology was an opportunity to highlight the problem, acknowledge my lack of knowledge, and hopefully better encourage avoiding the term in the future.

I wrote:

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I just wanted to apologize for recently using the phrase "mumbo jumbo" in a comment here. I was just reading an article about terms with racist origins and that one was in there. I hadn't thought about it before, but I should have known better. I have always taken seriously calls to make our language inclusive and believe that the way we speak should reflect our values. And in fact I teach about these ideas when I teach my linguistics class. This time, my own language use didn't match my ideals.

WTG, you wrote

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though to be honest, I think things are beginning to go to extremes, like the whole Trader Joe's product naming kerfuffle

And you might see my response above as an example of taking it to extremes. It might be a little over the top, but I'm ok with that because that sort of fast-tracks efforts to incorporate changes. And it makes other things look less extreme, also good.

BTW I don't know about the TJ kerfuffle.

I can see your point, SK, particularly given your professional position.

Although there may be those who doubt whether this is the way that it happened, finding your own mistakes and fixing them on your own initiative is, to me, the best possible evidence of good faith.

A more high value teachable moment would be to attempt to teach the process of taking no offense and seeing no offense where obviously no offense was intended. The navel gazing inherent in such adherence to a strict no-potential-offense policy serves nobody.

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taking no offense and seeing no offense where obviously no offense was intended.

Yes, but you can still make changes, which is what I was trying to say. Just because no one was upset with what I said, just because I didn't receive an angry email calling me out for using a problematic expression, doesn't mean I don't need to stop using the term.

So no one took offense, but I still saw it (eta: apologizing) as the right thing to do.

That's how I learned to stop using the term "retard" or "retarded" -- although this was years ago. I learned that it was an offensive term (and I agreed with that completely) and I decided not to use it ever again. In that instance, I don't think it was a case of my using it first (and I wasn't a language prof back then either).

So, you don't need offense (given or taken) to be involved in order to change something.

Nor does an apology necessarily have to be the result of (or in response to) offense.

It's just the right thing to do.

I think you did the right thing by apologizing. Just because no one said they took offence doesn’t mean no one was offended. Many Black, Indigenous, and people of colour don’t don’t call out every time something racist comes up because it would consume their whole lives. Calling yourself out even when no one has called you on it is, in my opinion, the right response. It also lets people know that if you inadvertently say something that has a racist history they can let you know and be pretty sure that you’d welcome the new learning.

For me, it comes down to intent. And benefit of the doubt. And basic kindness.

Here's the problem I see in our world today...

No matter what one says, someone is offended or otherwise dissatisfied.

If you apologize, you're "woke" or "virtue signaling". If you don't apologize, there's someone whose feelings are hurt.

I guess I would hope that with friends and professional colleagues, I would be accorded the benefit of the doubt and that they would assume that I simply didn't know about the origin of something and that there was no intent to offend. I would welcome and accept someone telling me about the history so I could avoid the phrasing in the future if I chose to do so.

But I also need to point out that there are people who seem to take offense at all sorts of thing. You can never satisfy them.

There is no simple approach. There are people who can turn a lovely phrase that is politically correct in every way, but with the intention of belittling, offending, or being outright hurtful. That's why I don't think it's as easy as taking out all the potentially offensive words and phrases out of our language.

Of course there are some words that are clearly meant to injure and those should be off limits. But we've gotten to such a degree of nuance that I, for one, can't even keep up anymore. Makes me want to crawl in a cave and avoid humanity altogether. It's getting so hard to interact with people it's beginning to seem not worth the effort.