CA City Goes Full Crazy, Renaming Common Objects To Fight ‘Male-Centric’ Sexism

When George Orwell wrote his frightening dystopian novel “1984,” a key aspect of the authoritarian society in which the protagonist lived was the people’s mandatory adherence to what was known as “newspeak.”

“Newspeak” was essentially an over-arching compendium of words and phrases that were deemed acceptable by “The Party,” with the tyrannical goal of controlling the way people spoke — and ultimately, thought — by controlling the words and language they were permitted to use.

While most people view Orwell’s “1984” as a cautionary tale against government power, the progressive left seems to have adopted it as a reference guide for gaining and holding power, particularly when it comes to the use of “politically correct” language, as was recently evidenced by the actions of the Berkeley City Council in California.

NBC News reported that Berkeley City Council is moving forward with a plan that would remove all specifically gendered language from the city’s municipal code, to be replaced by gender-neutral language in an effort to be “inclusive.”

In practice, references in the code to “he” or “she” or derivatives of those gendered pronouns would be replaced by “they” or “them” or some other gender-neutral word like an official title or descriptor.

Other examples include changing “firemen” and “firewomen” to simply be “firefighters,” references to “men and women” to read “people,” the phrase “man-made” will instead be “artificial” or “synthetic,” and arguably most ludicrous of all, changing “manhole” as the term for a sewer-system access point to instead be known as a “maintenance hole.”

Those examples and many more were properly noted in a City Council Report on the issue that actually included a table that laid out common official titles that would be used to replace the words “He, She, Him, Her, Himself, Herself.”

A second table in the report included a “non-exhaustive” list of “gendered terms commonly found” in the code. That table suggested replacing “brother” and “sister” with “sibling,” “craftsmen” with “craftspeople” or “artisans,” “manpower” with “human effort” or “workforce,” “repairman” with “repairer,” and perhaps most ridiculous of all, replacing “sorority” and “fraternity” with “collegiate Greek system residence.”

NBC noted that Berkeley was far from the first government to move toward gender-neutral language as an official policy, as the European Parliament did so more than a decade ago in 2008, as has Canada’s Department of Justice and other governmental offices.

Similarly, the state of Washington began as long ago as 1983 to write statutes in gender-neutral language, an effort further codified into law in 2013.

For the Berkeley City Council, the effort goes beyond simply removing potential gender bias from official government documents to be proactively “inclusive” of “non-binary residents” living in the city.

“It is Berkeley being Berkeley, and what that means is it’s Berkeley being inclusive,” Rigel Robinson, the city council member who led the effort, told NBC’s Bay Area-affiliate KNTV.

“A male-centric municipal code doesn’t reflect the reality of the city of Berkeley,” Robinson said.

He added that the move was important because “language has power” — perhaps unwittingly confirming exactly what Orwell had attempted to warn against when it came to the controlling nature of government-authorized “newspeak.” 

The proposed ordinance to change the language in the Municipal Code — which will supposedly only cost $600 — is expected to soon undergo a final review by the council and could be implemented as soon as August.

While everyone can have a good laugh at the absurdity of the Berkeley City Council going out of its way in order to be “woke” and ultra-PC, in the big scheme of things, this manipulation of language isn’t particularly funny at all.

Rather, this simply is the latest attempt by the progressive left to impose their own version of “newspeak” upon the American people, one little bit at a time, until the left controls the entirety of the words that are permissible and those that are banned from acceptable usage. That type of speech and thought control is antithetical to the American way and should be opposed at every step.