Ideologically driven language manipulation under the guise of "inclusiveness" is a real problem too.
It's like the folks read Orwell and took it as an instruction manual rather than a warning.
If doing X instead of Y costs me nothing, yet doing Y causes someone else to suffer, why should I continue to do Y?
> But deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought DOUBLETHINK, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists...
That motive is not explicitly stated in 1984, but it is in (the posthumous) Such, Such Were the Joys.
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part49
Is this not the origin of Big Brother? of O'Brien saying it is not enough for Winston to accept; he must love?
> Flip and Sambo had chosen to befriend me, and their friendship included canings, reproaches and humiliations, which were good for me and saved me from an office stool. That was their version, and I believed in it. It was therefore clear that I owed them a vast debt of gratitude. But I was not grateful, as I very well knew. On the contrary, I hated both of them. I could not control my subjective feelings, and I could not conceal them from myself. But it is wicked, is it not, to hate your benefactors? So I was taught, and so I believed. A child accepts the codes of behaviour that are presented to it, even when it breaks them.
This an oversimplification of something more complex and critical. Because the more you keep trying to avoid hurting or offending others as your first thought or action, you interrupt flow of thought and living. It becomes increasingly harder if the offending word list grows each day. What was X is now Y.
Too much effort to pre-filter everything all the time. If someone is offended I try to adjust my word or action choices, but only after, prophylactically, not pro-actively, which can lead to overthinking day-to-day living. That is not to say that I haven't put my foot in my mouth as the words left my mouth, but slips happen.
That said, unless one lives one's life with elbows permanently out, there are really not so many Y's as to be intellectually taxing. Even Gen. Robert E. Lee, whom I suppose very few would accuse of being woke, recommended that gentlemen avoid Y.
> What was X is now Y.
When in Rome, tempora mutantur.
