The words [Equity-language] guides recommend or reject are sometimes exactly the same, justified in nearly identical language.
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Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. They haven’t emerged organically from the shifting linguistic habits of large numbers of people.
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Prison does not become a less brutal place by calling someone locked up in one a person experiencing the criminal-justice system.
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The whole tendency of equity language is to blur the contours of hard, often unpleasant facts. This aversion to reality is its main appeal. Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually easier to say people with limited financial resources than the poor.
By a doctor, I very much want to be seen strictly as the biological organism that they have spent their life studying. The fact that there are very few doctors, and every person born on this earth will be a patient, means that a standard for unvarnished and concise language is morally praiseworthy in terms of its service of the greater good.
I guess my feeling is, there’s no good reason to get offended by the standard of language that the medical system operates in. There is an ocean of ill people who need help, and we’re not all special, in that sense.
A doctor who is led into a cognitive trap by seeing “diabetic” on a chart, is a bad doctor. I’m not sure small refinements of language are the remedy for that doctor’s deficits.