How Americans think about our evolving debates over language

People generally want to be inclusive, but many are wary of top-down dictates on what constitutes “correct” thinking

Some of the most interesting conversations taking place in Western democracies today are about language—what is okay to say, what is not, what is outdated, what is in vogue. Language is always changing, and there are often good reasons for that. As our societies have evolved morally and begun to prioritize inclusivity and tolerance, we’ve sought to shun the use of slurs against groups of people who share a common trait and adopt terms that specific populations desire to be called. After all, most of us want to be respectful toward others and have no desire to actively offend them.

But fostering widespread acceptance of new terms and phrases can be tricky for a couple of reasons. As New York Times columnist John McWhorter has written, part of the trouble with the “latest thinking” about certain terms is that it tends to be based on “an attractive but shaky idea that language channels thought: Change how people say things and you change how they think about things and then the world changes. That’s not how it works, though. Good intentions frequently don’t translate into efficacy.”

Moreover, this kind of thinking often isn’t based on input from the actual groups of people at the center of those debates—or, at least, from a representative sample of them. The example that immediately comes to mind is the recent debate over the term “Latinx,” which represented an attempt by English-speakers to change a Spanish descriptor (“Latino”) for the purpose of making it more inclusive.¹ It was never clear that actual people of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity were pushing for this change. In fact, according to multiple polls, a paltry 2–4% use the term. A sizable share have even said they find it offensive.

There are plenty of other examples. The term BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) came and went in the blink of an eye. Disagreement about using terms like “pregnant people” in lieu of “pregnant women” have seemed to pit gender identity against the female experience. One less-remarked-upon discourse has focused on efforts to replace the term “homeless people” with other phrases that are supposedly less stigmatizing, such as “unhoused” people or “people experiencing homelessness.” Some housing advocates have argued that removing the stigma could actually make it harder to convince politicians of the urgency of solving the problem of homelessness.

I’ve become fascinated by these debates, which have been reignited over the past decade or so.² However, they have mostly taken place in the upper echelons of society—in academia, activist social media spaces, DEI seminars, and the like. We don’t usually hear what ordinary Americans, who likely don’t have near as much time to dedicate to such meta conversations, think. Which made me wonder: what does the rest of the country think about all this?

Lucky for us, the New York Times set out to answer this question just a couple years ago. In conjunction with the polling outfit Morning Consult, the Times conducted a national survey that gauged which words Americans still viewed as acceptable versus which they thought should be left behind.³ I found the results quite enlightening and wanted to highlight some of the most interesting takeaways.

First, here is the overall picture of words that Americans say they would (“Yes”) or would not (“No”) use:

As we can see, many of the terms that have been part of the mainstream lexicon for years, if not decades, remain very popular. When it comes to racial or ethnic identity, for example, most Americans continue to use the widely accepted “Hispanic” and “Latino” over “Latinx.” Similarly, they are likelier to use “Asian” or “Asian American” instead of “AAPI” (Asian American and Pacific-Islander). Interestingly, both “black” and “African American” appear to be accepted terms, though black Americans themselves have a slight preference for the former:

In observing why some of these newer terms have failed to catch on, McWhorter noted that “a lot of these racial name changes tend to come from above or outside a community rather than within it.” He added, “I don’t know the histories of ‘A.A.P.I.’ or ‘BIPOC’ in detail, but none of these terms emerged from the folk, as it were. They are enlightened suggestions from the educated and the highly activist. It isn’t an accident that I learned of all of them on Columbia’s campus.”

Additionally, when it comes to questions of sex and gender, Americans continue to embrace conventional terms like “pregnant women” (over “pregnant people” or “birthing people”) and “breastfeeding” (over “chestfeeding”).

However, there are some terms that people seem to generally agree are outdated or needlessly offensive. This notably includes the term “spaz,” which is based on the medical condition “spastic diplegia,” a condition that causes motor impairments in the arms or legs. Spaz has typically been used as an insult to describe someone who is clumsy or prone to losing control. Consternation over this word came up a couple of years back in a debate over song lyrics from artists like Beyoncé and Lizzo.

So the big picture remains fairly clear: while Americans are open to discarding some outdated terms, they generally have not adopted newer changes pushed by activists and academics. Part of this may be a widespread aversion to “political correctness,” which has made some people feel anxious about using the wrong word and risking backlash for doing so. Another large-scale survey found that an astounding 80 percent of Americans agreed that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” In one of the study’s focus groups, a 40-year-old American Indian man put it thusly:

It seems like every day you wake up something has changed … Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? … You are on your toes because you never know what to say. So political correctness in that sense is scary.

Indeed, there are a few reasons why some people may be frustrated by these language changes. First, there is no doubt a perception that they are being declared almost by fiat by people who work in institutions that have outsized influence over shaping the culture—academia, media, activist spaces—even though that segment of the population is relatively small and their views on cultural matters tend to be unrepresentative of the rest of the country’s. It was notable, for example, that one of the Times columnists reacting to these answers seemed genuinely surprised that big majorities of Americans clearly preferred the term “pregnant women” and that they had no qualms about referring to a home’s “master bedroom.”⁴

Second, it may feel to some people as though the terrain is constantly moving under their feet, making it difficult to keep up—that what was thought to be enlightened language five minutes ago, such as Latinx or BIPOC, is now dated or unacceptable.⁵ Another Times columnist reflecting on the survey results described these difficulties well: “I think this gets at part of the problem with all of this language policing: It can be hard to keep up, even when it is, well, literally your job to keep up. And who makes the rules, anyway?” In this way, efforts at creating more inclusive language can ironically sometimes become exclusionary when the vast majority of the population doesn’t know what is or isn’t acceptable and feels that the lines keep shifting.

Finally, no one likes a hall monitor. No one enjoys the feeling that they’re constantly being watched and judged by others, especially if those others sit on a higher sociocultural rung, waiting to pounce when someone commits a language faux pas. There is a great need for activists to exhibit some grace in these conversations if they hope to convince people to adopt their preferred attitudes.

This seeming tug-of-war between those on the front lines promoting language changes and everyone else may continue on for some time. But, McWhorter observed, it may be inevitable that the trajectory of this debate continues in favor of those who sit atop America’s cultural institutions:

…the people most committed to this kind of change tend to be more educated, given to thinking about groups and actions in the abstract – as opposed to those who may be too busy living an existence to be concerned about the labels for it. In any case, where we are headed is that a certain sliver of our population will control a rich jargon of prescribed terms, of little import to most people.

Language in healthy societies inevitably evolves over time. The important question for us to consider is whether these changes are necessary, organic, and built with community and stakeholder input with the goal of producing wide acceptance—or whether they are simply the product of group of people with nothing better to do.

1. For those who do not speak Spanish, adjectives describing a man end with an “o” while those describing a woman end with an “a.” The argument from those advocating for the adoption of “Latinx” (or its Spanish-language equivalent, “Latine”) is that defaulting to “Latino” supports a male-dominant view of Hispanic ethnicity, and limiting the terms to “Latino” and “Latina” reinforces a gender binary that excludes people who do not identify as a man or a woman.

2. See, for example, the numerous efforts by universities to roll out new language guidance—and the backlash to some of them.

3. You can take the interactive quiz to see how you match up against the rest of the country (though it is unfortunately paywalled).

4. McWhorter, himself a linguist, has pointed out that this term is often incorrectly deemed problematic based on errant assumptions about its historical origin.

5. A personal example that comes to mind was when I heard an older neighbor in the small Missouri town where I went to college refer to a “colored person.” It’s very possible he meant it in a disparaging manner. But it’s also possible that he was searching for what he thought was the enlightened term—“person of color”—but confused it with a more outdated term that sounded very similar (and one that notably remains in the title of one of the nation’s preeminent civil rights organizations).