The left is not a monolithic block of automatons. There is some large number of persons who support most progressive positions but decry this sort of top-down control of language along with the way it’s used to enforce an orthodoxy of opinion. Labelling this as an “absolute state” of the left is a mischaracterization of the positions of most progressives I know.

No, this is not "the absolute state of the left". This is the state of some loud people who think they have the final word on ethics and morals. Unfortunately, many others have allowed them to flourish, rather than shutting them down.

I agree with some of the items on Stanford's list, though most of the words I think are pretty harmless, or at least should be. That doesn't mean that some people wouldn't feel harmed by them, but it's just my personal opinion that the harm is minimal, or that yes, some people do need to learn that not everything is about them, and that language has moved on, and no one actually associates the word they're using with the thing they feel offended about. (Like, if I were to say something was "lame", I would not expect a person who couldn't walk to be offended by that, as that's just not what "lame" means anymore. Ditto for words like "dumb".)

But "master"/"slave"? Sure, those words suck. "Tranny"? Sure, 90% of the people using it are using it as a slur, and I don't want to be associated with shitty people like that. "Black-" prefixes meaning things that are bad, and "white-" prefixes meaning things that are good? Yeah, screw that, that's bullshit.

But then we get to... "Tarball"? Associated with "tarbaby"? What, are you kidding me? "Brown bag"? I'd never heard of the association with "brown paper bag test"; I always thought of it as "brown bag lunch", as in the kind of paper bag I'd always use to bring my lunch with me to school when I was a kid. Is the negative association actually a thing, or is this just Stanford's hand-wringing over nothing?

I'm also really annoyed by the "person-first" stuff. Not only is "person who has immigrated" a mouthful, but I don't know any actual immigrants who would consider being called an "immigrant" offensive. Worse, I think trying to put a stigma on words like "immigrant" ends up putting a stigma on the entire idea of being "a person who has immigrated", which is a shitty thing to do.

I've gone to the effort to write all this out to attempt to demonstrate to you that not everyone on the left -- or even a "majority of mainstream" or whatever you think -- would come up with or agree with the entirety (or even a majority) of a boneheaded list like this. My perspective is absolutely not unique in this, either.

  > The absolute state of the left.

it seems (anecdotally) to me that this kind of language policing is mostly pushed from the top down... maybe im wrong tho...