Descriptives

Overheard in the kitchen:

Chairman: "There's a jar of capers in this cupboard. What on earth are they used for?"

Hay: "They give things a salty taste."

Chairman: "You mean just like a sprinkling of salt?"

Greg Clarke, the Chief Exec of the FA, with a face like a diseased turnip, has resigned over the use of what is, apparently, an outdated term that has been deemed offensive. This despite, incredulously, the fact he was commenting on the lack of diversity in football and was making supportive comments.

Anyone spot the deliberately offensive, yet entirely valid descriptive above?

Who exactly determines whether a word is offensive and how many people have to deem it so before it catches on? Is there some clandestine cabal that sits in judgement on what is and what is not offensive. Does it take just one person to deem it offensive? It's a fact of life that what one person finds offensive another doesn't.

I'm finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with what someone, somewhere, deems to be offensive and chooses, instead, some mangled expression that contravenes both grammar and logic. It seems almost a fashion trend.

Are disabled people now to be referred to as people of disability? Redheaded people as people of red hair? Is any descriptive than ends in the letters 'ed' to be extrapolated into something beyond all recognition? It's especially difficult when not all the people so described are offended by a term and you hear it used by many of those very people on TV, in the media and in Parliament. That's precisely what makes it confusing.

It's almost as if there's a competition to take a descriptive, any descriptive, and turn it onto an offensive term. Once it catches on, then the next item on the agenda is to turn that very term you just invented into the next offensive one.

Diane Abbott took offence at the descriptive; "Black community leaders," in reference to the Stephen Lawrence affair and immediately launched into an attack against; "White people," obliviously unaware of the irony in her use of the word 'white'. A black writer, Joshuah Adams, has criticised the term 'People of Colour'. Why? Because it marginalises what he calls 'black people', a term some find offensive. There simply is no agreement - and there never will be. To quote No.6; "I am not a number, I am a free man."

I say, let a reasonable, grammatically correct and logical descriptive be used and judge the comment on what's being said, not the descriptive. If the entire sentence is offensive, then shout about it; if the sentence is supportive, what, exactly, is the issue and is there some hidden agenda to make someone feel uncomfortable?

If, in a face-to-face conversation, someone claims a term is offensive to them, I'll take notice and make a mental note for next time, but I will enquire as to why they consider it offensive - quite often it stems from some intensely personal experience and not something generic that can be extrapolated. In public discourse with an audience, however, it's infinitely more difficult and someone, somewhere, will take offence, whereas others wont.

However, I'm white in a predominantly white country and can therefore say this. No doubt someone will take offence at that statement of fact. The very word 'they' or 'them' can be considered offensive, and can engender accusations of 'othering' - but what other descriptive of a collection of people can you use? Any group that does not include me is, by definition, a 'them' or a 'they', and that can simply be people without beards - the bastards!

What I really take issue with is the self-appointed offence police, who make arbitrary decisions without reference to the very people they maintain they're protecting or, in the case of social media, not even reading beyond the inflammatory headline. There was a lot of that in the case of old turnip face.

Calling out blatant racism is a good thing - but nuance bypasses the more zealous self-appointees, just as in the case of Greg Clarke. The descriptive word 'coloured' was the focus of the condemnation, not the sentiment of the sentence in which it was embedded. Those people (they) do the anti-racism cause more harm than good.