I'm immediately extraordinarily skeptical about anything that suggests solving a cultural problem by changing language.
That's like trying to solve a math problem by changing the value of pi.
That's like trying to solve a math problem by changing the value of pi.
Language is the utter opposite - it constantly evolves and changes, with new words entering every year and grammatical patterns changing over time as well. The only way to stop a language changing is basically to stop using it.
I don't think that this particular word is the root cause. More important is the reason why people are using it. If you ban that particular word without addressing why people are using it, then those people will adopt a new word to mean the exact same thing. Creating euphemism treadmills doesn't fix anything.
... then they aren't leaders anyway.
Racial slurs aren't acceptable anymore. No one thinks that change is what brought about the civil rights movement, but it's obviously a consequence of it that also contributed to the whole movement in a positive feedback loop.
I don't really want to pick sides on 'ban bossy', but I do think this particular analogy is flawed. Unlike a racial slur (or any other identity-based slur), 'bossy' describes intrinsically negative behavior. People who are 'overly authoritative' or 'domineering' will always be looked down on in society whether or not this word is 'banned' or not.
Their claim may in fact be false. But starting from the assumption that it is false doesn't really add anything to the discussion.
They are, but their usage is limited to linguistic segregation. Nothing better to keep people in check than enforcing a correlation between the words they are allowed to use and the color of their skin.
It is interesting how race issues is one of only a few subjects where anyone that can form an opinion feels qualified to weigh in on it, no matter how far removed they are from the issue at hand.
My father’s name is William Paul Coates. I, like my six brothers and sisters, have always addressed him as Dad. Strangers often call him Mr. Coates. His friends call him Paul. If a stranger or one of my father’s friends called him Dad, my father might have a conversation. When I was a child, relatives of my paternal grandmother would call my father Billy. Were I to ever call my father Billy, we would probably have a different conversation.
I have never called my father Billy. I understand, like most people, that words take on meaning within a context. It might be true that you refer to your spouse as Baby. But were I to take this as license to do the same, you would most likely protest. Right names depend on right relationships, a fact so basic to human speech that without it, human language might well collapse...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/coates-in-d...
Which are pretty much the exact same circumstances where a black person can do the same thing.
You mean, the yesterday's value-neutral racial descriptors that became today's racial slurs when used in the mouth of people with racial hate are no longer acceptable to people who don't share that hate -- but, of course, as has happened many times in the past, that just means that today's value-neutral descriptors will get used as slurs and become tomorrow's verbotten terms, and nothing will have changed.
Making words taboo that are used along with an unwelcome attitude is a particularly ineffective manner of eradicating the unwelcome attitude.