The way words sound matter. And the shorter, the better.

It’s what I want to keep shouting at the moral crusaders du jour, who consistently fail to clock this. Instead, these do-gooders – often spotted in HR departments, academia, Hollywood, and social media – keep forcing people to jump through linguistic hoops and then wonder why folks respond negatively.

Duh. It’s because people don’t want to say “members of the white cisheteropatriarchy,” they want to say “bros.” They don’t want to say “settler colonialism” – “colonialism” was fine. They don’t want to say “lived experience”; every experience is lived (unless you’re a zombie). And enough with “systems of power and oppression,” we were good with “The Man.” 

Likewise, people don’t want to say “bodies with vaginas,” “individuals who cannot hear,” “enslaved people,” “cisgender,” “African-American,” or “neurodivergent.” They want to say “women,” “deaf,” “slaves,” “straight,” “black,” and “crazy.” Forcing others to add extraneous syllables to communicate is a real microag–, er, a turn-off. 

Acronyms too

And then you’ve got to add on the absurd acronym inflation required to demonstrate morality nowadays. LGBTQIA+/2S, TERF, BIPOC, AAPI, etc. A fresh one seems to emerge every day...

Um, URM? If you say so! I looked it up and it means underrepresented minority. Good to know; I was out here thinking Jasmine wanted to hire someone from the Unix Reference Manual community.

Words that work

As a comedian, I’ve learned (the hard way) all about the difference between words that work when said aloud and those that don’t. Punchlines work better when they include quick words that feel like a verbal slap in the face instead of multisyllabic words/phrases that land like feathers. There’s a reason Seinfeld loves words like chimps, dirt, and sticks. They work. Also: If your punchline’s got a hard -k sound in it, all the better.

You see (well, hear) the same kind of thing in slang too. The briefer the word, the greater the impact. There’s a reason kids gravitate to terms like sus, mid, based, and fit. People want direct verbal paths. If you want people to get onboard with how you speak, make communication faster, not slower. 

The ultimate proof is found in slurs that stick. Consider how the most infamous ones sound: Fag, chink, spic, kike, mick, wop, n****r, etc. It’s simple to say them. They’re short and punchy; they pack a punch. Hard -k sounds aplenty too. The lesson: If you want a term to spread far and wide, make it sound like something that’d pop onscreen during one of those old school Batman TV show brawls. On the other hand, if you want a term to be mocked and ridiculed, insist on language that only tenured professors and extremely online people understand.

Typing vs. speaking

You’d think high-scoring-SAT-verbal intellectuals would catch on to this shorter-is-more-impactful notion, especially considering how often they’re derisively referred to as “woke” “cuck” “snowflakes.” Instead, these wonky linguistic avengers keep trying to wrestle people into using clinical jargon that antagonizes more than it uplifts. To make matters worse, when resistance inevitably results, they’re quick to identify that as evidence of hateful views...   

“Say LGBTQIA+/2S.”
“Um, no.”
“Then you hate LGBTQIA+/2S people!”
“Nah. I just don’t want to say that many syllables. I liked being able to just say ‘gay.’” 

A lot of this is about typing vs. speaking. It’s relatively easy to type LGBTQIA+/2S, but to say it aloud is literally 10X more effort than saying a one syllable word like “gay” or “queer.” And if you think that’s just a small issue, you underestimate people’s laziness.

(Note: I’m actually a fan of laziness. I find it’s frequently an instigator of efficiency. You’ve heard that saying “If you want something done, ask the busiest person you know.” Well, if you want something done quickly, ask the laziest person you know.)

Check in with anyone who’s ever designed the interface for a checkout process: Every extra minuscule step you force someone to take increases the likelihood they’ll bail. “Just one more click” may seem like a molehill, but it’s actually a usability mountain. The same applies to spoken syllables: Instead of Don’t Make Me Think, it’s Don’t Make Me Speak.

Booksmart people (e.g. journalists, academics, and the Twitterati) spend so much time writing and reading that they forget how rare doing either of those things is in our culture. In reality, people speak and listen WAY more than they read and write; so it’s no wonder they bristle when told to speak in a way that feels awkward. It’s not that they’re filled with hate, it’s that they want to get from point A to B ASAP.

What about compassion?

Some counterarguments to this p.o.v.: 

“Oh great, more elite bashing.” Nah, I love elites! Without the elites, I’d be the elites – and no one wants that. I trust surgeons, pilots, and other people who actually went to school over anyone who does their “research” on YouTube.

“You hate intellectuals.” If someone keeps giving linguistic directives that routinely ignore how normal people actually speak, are they really that smart? It seems pretty dimwitted to force people to take verbal long cuts and then label them -phobic -ists if they choose a more concise path. 

“But my heart’s in the right place.” I believe you. And it’s worth noting dehumanizing often starts with creating an enemy image – and then using language that depicts them as less than, criminal, or even evil. Clearly, that’s something to consider. However, I’m not sure that’s what’s happening in these cases. Instead, it often feels more like language cops doing a stop and frisk campaign on how those they deem “suspicious” speak.

“The old way of speaking is hurtful and you should be more compassionate.” This reveals a lot of what’s happening under the surface here: It’s a battle between generations. Young people are wielding cultural power (the only kind they really have) over the Boomers and other aged folks who screwed them over. I get that. But also: If you love compassion so much, consider being more compassionate to older people and consider they were raised in an era where people were routinely called “spaz,” “retard,” and worse. When it comes to the threshold for what’s considered hurtful, one’s generational mileage may vary. If the olds can’t figure out how to use emojis, they’re gonna have a tough time learning a whole new vernacular, y’know? (Vaguely related: Don’t get me started on the idea that words are violence. If you think that, I’m happy for you because my guess is you’ve never experienced actual violence.)

“OK Boomer.” For the love of god, I’m not a boomer. I’m only a little bit older than you. Jesus.

“You need to be more sensitive to the oppressed. Do better. Patriarchy this. Systemic that. Privilege/punching down/etc.” I get it, but should the onus really be on the people whose minds you’re trying to change? Trying to force right thought by introducing new terms feels more like an ego stroke for your tribe than an effective persuasion technique. It’s a way of avoiding doing the hard work of genuinely coaxing others to think differently, which requires actual effort as opposed to just finger pointing.

How language evolves

This top-down approach also represents a basic failure to grasp how language evolves. Words don’t stick when they emerge from on-high directives, they bubble up from the bottom. If you want to see how people actually speak and behave, pay attention to UD (Urban Dictionary), not a Ph.D. New terms that get embraced at UD tend to be punchy and concise. Communication is survival of the clearest – and anything that obscures or feels like a mouthful tends to wind up in a language ditch.

It’s also odd that so much of this browbeating comes from the anti-bullying crowd. It’s got a real “say uncle” vibe (or something less gender specific, I guess).

There’s plenty of class signifying going on here too. See: Rich/educated white people insisting on the use of “Latinx” when only 4% of Hispanic and Latino Americans actually prefer the term.

And even if all this worked, changing how people say things doesn’t change how they think. You can force people to speak the way you want, but if it’s just a surface shift, the underlying thoughts and feelings persist. You can twist someone’s arm and get them to say whatever you want, but as soon as you’re out of sight, they’ll likely return to feeling their default setting.

Make it easy

My suggestion to the language police: Make the “right” way to speak easier than the current way and see how that goes. Stop trying to make people say Botulinum Toxin when everyone actually wants to say Botox. Notice how decades of discussing “sexual harassment” failed to make as much progress as a simple hashtag: #metoo. Remember how everyone was saying Coronavirus at the start of the pandemic? Now you only hear Covid. That’s how iteration works; it wears away the edges until you’re down to the essentials. Work with that river flow instead of against it.

If someone keeps taking the long route even after you’ve given them a short cut, that’s a legit sign of something. But if you keep chastising folks for failing to keep up with the latest in rightspeak, that feels more like fashion than compassion.

Comedy

🤪 Check out my most recent standup clips on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

🤪 Recently on Funny How:

🤪 I’m on the road a bit upcoming:

[LIVE] 9/16 - Chicago, IL (Misguided Meditation show)
[LIVE] 9/17 - Iowa City
[LIVE] 9/18 - Davenport, IA

Ticket info here. Coming soon: Albany, NY and New Orleans, LA. Want me to do a show near you? LMK.

Quickies

🎯 Don't release Don’t Worry Darling. Release a documentary about the making of Don’t Worry Darling.

🎯 Special master = ok to say. Master bedroom = not ok to say. Question: Can I say special master bedroom if it's where the special master sleeps?

🎯 I wonder if there’s ever a tattoo artist who sizes up a potential client’s tattoos, thinks they’re lame, and is just like “Nah, man. I can’t hang my art in this gallery.”

🗯 Warning Working Moms: Your Partner Is Your Glass Ceiling. Jo Piazza on essayist Caitlin Moran's book.

“If she wants children and a job, a woman’s life is only as good as the man or woman she marries,” [Caitlin] Moran writes. “That’s the biggest truth I know. All too often women are marrying their glass ceilings.”

Let that sink in for a moment. I did. And then I thought back on the legions of disappointing men I dated, slept with, or desperately wanted to love me in my 20s and early 30s—the brilliant but troubled lawyer who couldn’t start his day without smoking a joint, the depressed trust funder who played 12 hours of video games daily and carried on a cyber affair with an avatar named luvbunnie, the finance guy who tried to steal my dog—and I wondered whether I would have been able to accomplish all the things that I’ve accomplished in the last five years had I married any of them (my five year anniversary was on Saturday).

The answer is f*ck no.

🎯 Whenever I go to a trendy spot, I wind up thinking it's not cool without realizing what’s actually going on is that I hate young people.

Vooza @voozahq

Burners: "Burning Man has everything!" Me: "What about black people?" Burners:

August 30th 2022

1 Like

🎯 A conversation with every man who has a box of cables: “I might need that cable someday.” “What's it for?” “Um, it's a firewire cable to an Epson printer.” “Do you own that printer?” “No.” “Do they still make it?” “No, they stopped making them in 2003.” “Then why don't you throw it out?” “You never know.”

🎯 When something is written with the intention that no one will ever actually read it, you know lawyers were involved

🗯 Jason Fried on how Twitter isn’t the real world.

There’s the world on Twitter and then there’s the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is quite large and not interested in those kinds of things. And it turns out there’s a lot of people who actually agree with what you do, and they don’t live on Twitter. You can be scared of doing things because you’re afraid of the reaction there. But it’s really a relatively small universe of people who are just up in arms about pretty much everything. 

🎯 Hypocrisy sounds like if we had government by rappers and called it hiphopcracy.

🎯 Manifesting is just capitalism's version of prayer. It'd be uncouth to pray to the lord for a new Tesla. But if you're "manifesting" it, that's totally kosher.

🎯 Let’s say I do live forever. It's gonna be Jared Kushner, Peter Thiel, and me just hanging out for eternity? Phew, death has never sounded so appealing.

Up ahead for subscribers: A Metallica drag queen show, Trump and windmills, the garlic conundrum, free love, Steve Kerr's Word doc, why people make art, the US Open, and more...