THE INVENTION OF NEW SPEECH CODES and the censoring of “outdated” words is no longer confined to the university. Departments of state, public sector organisations, corporations and cultural institutions are all complicit in the re-engineering of the English language.
Whereas once upon a time campus radicals were in the forefront of challenging traditional language usage, today sections of the cultural and political establishment are playing a pivotal role in the promotion of semantic engineering. The media has become so habituated to the practice of semantic engineering that Buckingham Palace’s official recognition of the vocabulary of transgender identity politics (preferred pronouns) in its New Year Honours list scarcely registered.
Semantic engineering aims to change public language to transform prevailing cultural attitudes and norms. It offers its practitioners control over language and serves as a source of cultural power. This point was recognised decades ago by the culture warriors,
