If you’ve ever wondered while standing in Ryanair’s priority boarding queue (first in the terminal, then on the backstairs, then on a bus waiting to be brought to the aircraft) what the hell the airline means by priority, you’re not alone.
Safe to say, the word, for most people, evokes something different. If it’s not an act of miss-selling on Ryanair’s part, it’s surely an assault on the word “priority”.
The airline says “it’s all about that extra bag” people may bring on board. “It means you’ve reserved space in the overhead lockers. That’s why we limit the amount of priority spaces to 100 each flight,” it says on its website.
So be it. In any case, Ryanair’s wordplay pales in comparison to some of the linguistic vandalism being wrought in the crusade to make workplaces more socially and culturally sensitive.
A growing list of terms and phrases are now on the linguistic naughty step because they are thought to offend certain groups or individuals even where it is far from obvious that offence is being taken.
Take the term, brainstorming. The buzzword referring to group problem-solving is now deemed insensitive to people with cerebral disorders like epilepsy or those with brain injuries, staff at an Irish company were told at a recent anti-bullying webinar.
The replacement term prescribed for the situation when people assemble to think creatively is “thought-showers”.
The linguistic richness of brainstorming, it seems, is collateral damage in the brave new world of political correctness. Brainstorming dates back to 19th century psychiatry when it was used to define “a sudden and severe attack of mental illness”. The Funk and Wagnall’s dictionary of 1913 defined it as “impulsive insanity.”
It wasn’t until later in the 20th century that it morphed into meaning “a sudden bright idea”. US advertising executive Alex Osborn, who was apparently frustrated with his co-workers’ inability to come up with creative ideas for ad campaigns individually, is credited with the coinage.
Incidentally, it doesn’t have anything to do with the similar sounding barnstorming – defined as being “flamboyantly energetic and successful” – as this writer had initially thought.
Its 21st century replacement “thought-showers” hasn’t really caught on or at least people don’t seem to be going about saying, I’ve thought-showered this problem and here’s what I’ve come up with. Maybe purveyors of the new lexicon need to brainstorm something better.
Next to the linguistic guillotine is nitty-gritty. Getting to the nub of an issue or establishing the important details is said by antiracism campaigners to originate from the slave trade. It is thought to have referred to the detritus found in the bottom of slave ships, though this is disputed.
Another etymology suggests it is a corruption of the French word “nigritique”, a word French colonists used for African slaves. To get to the nitty-gritty was to mix with people of all races. The alternative suggested is “basic facts”.
The BBC rejected a complaint against its former political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, for using the term back in 2021 on a Brexit podcast.
And the list of words and phrases potentially falling foul of the new culturally sensitive workplace is growing.
“Pow wow”, a colloquial term for a meeting to discuss something, can be traced to a gathering of Native American people and is therefore deemed offensive to Native American culture.
Similarly “tipping point”, defined in the Oxford English dictionary as “the point at which a series of small changes or incidents becomes significant enough to cause a larger, more important change”, is potentially offensive on the grounds it may historically have referred to the number of black residents in a given neighbourhood that would trigger the exodus of white families.
Tony Maher of the Plain English Campaign group describes this sort of linguistic policing as a “minefield”.
“Sometimes... I’m just banging my head off the desk thinking what on earth could be up with that [phrase]. I think sometimes people go out of their way to find some form of objection,” he says, recounting a dispute which centred on the use of the word “straight” which one complainant said implied all non-heterosexuals were bent.
“Some of these words and phrases are very plain, everybody knows what they mean, and it’s not obvious why we’re being forced into using newer ones,” he says.
Maher says his group has seen a drop-off in complaints about the use of pronouns or phrases that could potentially offend people, the implication being people are getting fed up with the extent of political correctness.
“People are realising there’s no reason to stop using certain words as no one is actually being offended,” he says.
In hindsight Ryanair’s Jesuitical use of the word, priority, if annoying, is perhaps not the worst lexical crime.
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