The legislature of the State of Washington, no doubt totally stoned pursuant to their recent legalization of marijuana (pot, maryjane, reefer, Maui wowie, etc.), has just enacted a bill requiring the use of gender neutral language in all official documents. For example, “chairman” must now be changed to “chairperson.” This will undoubtedly lead to some confusion in the legislative cafteria, which will now be forced to stop serving “manicotti,” but instead will serve “personicotti.” Such a change will likely confuse those attempting to order such an Italian dish. Whoops! I mean a dish from the ethnic cuisine developed by the inhabitants of an area on the Eurasian continent shaped not unlike a boot.

We are already far down the slope to Orwellian newspeak. People who throw bombs at school buses are no longer “terrorists”; they are now “militants.” A guy who chops his wife into sukiyaki and uses the result as compost in his garden is no longer a “homicidal maniac;” he is now  “a person suffering from a mental disability.” Somebody who sleeps in the gutter clutching a bottle of cheap hooch is no longer a “drunken bum;” he is now “a sufferer from the disease of alcoholism.”

Circumlocutions are a characteristic of cultural collapse. It is unacceptable to say what you actually mean for fear that the emperor will follow the advice of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland: “Off with her head!” You may not even use words that are even vaguely reminescent of forbidden words.

But again, this is great!

Eliminating words from the language vastly reduces the difficulty of spelling bees, although it does make the game of Boggle somewhat more challenging. But we can ameliorate this problem by allowing shorter words to count, words, say, like “I” and “a.”

Periphrasis makes it much, much easier to write high school essays. Remember being told to write a five hundred word composition on “How I Spent My Summer Vacation?” The assignment will now be entitled “The Activities in Which I Engaged, Including Not Only Their Names, But Also the Details of the Manner in which I Carried Them Out, During the Time Period which Followed the Cessation of Classes at the Conclusion of the Vernal Season but Preceded the Initiation of Classes on the Day Previous to This One.” The expansion of a ten word sentence into a five hundred word essay using this method, without adding a single additional thought, I leave as an exercise for the reader.