VisitBritain–Britain’s flagship tourism agency which provides you with fresh perspectives of the UK’s diverse cities, modern twists, historic icons and green spaces full of unexpected gems–has created a 50-page language guide for their workers that tells them what words they can and cannot say to secure an inclusive and innocuous workplace for everyone. The company, which gains a £54 million-a-year grant from the Department for Media, Sport and Culture, claims ‘words and phrases used for generations are no longer acceptable’ and ‘the guide was developed with input from our business events industry partners.’
Some examples of the words that their new language guide has ruled out are: ‘guru’, as it has said to have been appropriated from Hindu culture, ‘minorities’, ‘powwow’, ‘blacklist’, ‘blindspot’ (wasn’t hard to see that coming), ‘lame’, ‘walkthrough’, ‘sanity check’, ‘man up’, ‘guys’, ‘man hours’ and ‘ladies and gentlemen’. In lieu of saying these words, they have advised using the following terms: ‘expert’, ‘marginalised’, ‘meeting’, ‘deny list’, ‘missed opportunity’, ‘uncool/cheesy’ (surely offensive to vegans), ‘review/guide’, ‘confidence check’, ‘be brave’ (not sure I’m man enough), ‘everyone/team’, ‘person hours’ and ‘everyone’.
The move came one month after MP Penny Mordaunt told Whitehall Chiefs to stop using woke language in official documents where traditional words would be more accurate. They were also influenced after Staffordshire Police, in one of the many alternatives to catching criminals, caused controversy when they released a similar language guide which prohibits words such as ‘policeman’. They said: ‘we word our content to avoid masculine and feminine pronouns (‘he’ or ‘she’), with gender-neutral language “preferred”.’
This is not the first time VisitBritain has gone woke: last year, they issued an accessible and inclusive toolkit for those in the tourism business, which includes practical guidance on providing an inclusive welcome, designing accessible buildings, employing disabled people and creating quality accessibility information. It warned people against using phrases such as ‘suffers from’, ‘handicapped’ and ‘is a victim of’. The actual language guide is full of ‘don’t’s’ but very few ‘do’s’. So, if you do meet people who appear to be suffering from something and it is affecting their life how do we describe them?
Commenting on the use of ‘gender neutral’ language, Senior lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of Kent Dr Laura Bailey said: “It should be about trying to listen to and understand different perspectives and do whatever we can to avoid offending people, acknowledging that we won’t get it right every time…We’re not censoring people, just encouraging people to learn and be considerate.” Dr Bailey also managed to squeeze in a comment about the (much disputed) gender pay gap which, if we were really gender neutral, would be very hard to discuss.
Thus the attack on our freedom of expression continues with another example of creeping authoritarianism in our country. If you can control language you can control people as Orwell clearly explained in 1984. VisitBritain is supposed to help people to visit Britain, perhaps they should stick to their mission.
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I worked there, it’s a quango run by ‘career women’ who are typical of that type who thoughtlessly embrace the ‘latest thing’ and surround themselves with aspiring younger versions of themselves.
“Some examples of the words that their new language guide has ruled out…”
Good, now I know which words to use as much as possible.
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