Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

Nitpick, there are two kinds of "flopping" in sports, which you can both observe e.g. in soccer.

One is to simulate a made-up foul as you say, basically trying to mislead the referee into giving an unjustified penalty. This is clearly illegal and constitutes a foul itself.

However, often players flop to highlight fouls that actually happened but were so subtle or hard to see that the referee missed them.

The results are still ridiculous - Ronaldo rolling in pain on the grass because the other player had briefly pulled his jersey - but the greater strategy here is valid: If small, subtle fouls went unpunished, they'd be an easy way to gain an unfair advantage for your team. So the game would very quickly turn into a contest of how to hide fouls best from the referee. By highlighting fouls to a ridiculous degree, players are counteracting this.

> committed suicide > died by suicide > Ableist language that trivializes the experiences of people living with mental health conditions.

I had a friend commit suicide, and one of my mum's colleagues - also an acquiantance of mine, who I'd chat with in the pub semi-regularly - also committed suicide many years ago. I've suffered with depression for much of my life since my teenage years (undiagnosed until I was well into my twenties), and I have a close family member who's spent maybe a quarter of their life over the last 20 years institutionalised, with much of the rest of the time in close contact with mental health authorities. I've had many friends and colleagues over the years who've suffered with mental health issues.

But apparently "committed suicide" is "ableist language that trivializes the experiences of people living with mental health conditions."

No.

It isn't.

It is a brutal term that aptly captures the daily visceral struggle of both those with mental health issues who are battling suicidal thoughts, and those who are left behind after a friend or relative does commit suicide. It very well captures the trauma and impact of such an event. It also avoids the final indignity of stripping the unwell person of their agency, and therefore their humanity. It is 100% certified appropriate (were such a certification to exist).

The only thing harmful about this list is that it exists and that somebody, or some group, got paid actual money (presumably as part of their day job) to compile it. In 200 years time, if somebody authors a book called, "The hideous and shameful annals of bullshit jobs in the early 21st Century" I have no doubt at all that this will rank very highly.

Let's call this list what it is: thought policing. Whoever is behind it sits somewhere on the same spectrum as the real world Morality Police of Iran, or the fictional Thought Police (and the Ministry of Truth, who control language - and in particular are replacing it with Newspeak) in George Orwell's 1984.

The word toxic has become heavily overused, but this list is an absolute examplar of it: it is a product of deeply warped and corrupted thinking. Some terms on the list (which I don't think need repeating here - racial slurs, and the like) are considered pretty universally offensive but that does not justify the presence of the rest.

Overall what we have is a pretty transparent and unsophisticated attempt to control people by those too stupid to understand the negative impacts of their actions on wider society.

I would have hoped for a lot better from an institution such as Stanford with a rich history of valuable contributions (including to hacker culture).

If there's any way in which word usage influences our thoughts, there's not much evidence of it. E.g., there are ungendered languages, but the societies that use them are absolutely not more feminist than those where a gendered language is spoken. And suppressing slurs usually leads to substitution by other words, showing that the thought very much stays alive, independent of the word.

This list is 95% absolutely ridiculous and I’m what you’d probably consider a proponent of social justice.

It’s deeply funny, but also tragic because while there should be an attempt to make language inclusive, lists like this make the movement look like a joke.

In their minds, because in real life this just doesn’t exist.