Joan Collins in the film Empire of the Ants (1977)

Source: Public Domain

Ah, the beauty of language! The English one is as rich as they come, with words such as “osculation,” “verbigeration,” “concupiscence,” “mithridatism,” and “onomatopoeia.” I could go on forever. The latest to be added to an already bulging dictionary is “Toobin.” For any of you unfamiliar with what doing a Toobin is, it is something most young people, especially boys, do while dreaming of sex with a girl. Doing a Toobin became part of the language after Jeffrey Toobin, a left-wing writer for CNN and The New Yorker, was caught masturbating on camera while talking to his editors at the magazine. The New Yorker has become so woke nowadays that masturbation, I would think, is a sine qua non for its writers. He was nevertheless suspended, but doing a Toobin is now part of the language, and if some of you oldies out there have forgotten all about it, turn on CNN and you’ll see Toobin raging against Trump and—hopefully—not masturbating.

When I was at boarding school during the ’50s, a Toobin was referred to in manuals as self-abuse. Not many of us agreed with that depiction, but I’m getting away from the point of my story, which is about language, and the importance of language. Control of language is the most important part of a totalitarian regime. Those nice guys who gave us political correctness knew what they were doing. The natural continuation was woke and the forbidden words in order to get us all thinking and speaking the way they wanted us to. Threats to freedom of speech by woke adherents became the closest Uncle Sam had ever come to a dictatorship, with the media, the academy, Hollywood, and some very big corporations in cahoots. Censoring free speech by The New York Times—and altering history with its false 1619 theory—now lies in ruins thanks to The Donald and chaps like a rich man with twelve children called Musk. Yippee!

Mind you, it’s still much too early, but I can’t help celebrating. DEI is not dead, and rats like Zuckerberg will switch back against Trump the moment he stumbles. But at least we’re talking like human beings once again: We can now buy things rather than purchase them. I can get help rather than obtain it. I can write about my parents rather than my father and mother, and talk about the manpower we lack at times rather than the people who are absent. And my kids can tell me about their husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend rather than their partners.

My friend of more than sixty years, the actress Joan Collins, refused throughout the PC terror period to call herself an actor. “I am an actress,” she corrected those who called her an actor. Good for you, Joanie, and that goes for other terms as well, such as “hero,” “God,” and “chair” to refer to women. De-gendering our way of speaking is supposed to empower the weaker sex, the one I always refer to as the fairer one. It did nothing of the sort. It simply confused the issue and made it possible for the dwarfs of the media to play big shot.

A similar impulse has guided efforts by the PC dictators to popularize inclusive language about race and gender. Engineering how people speak is a totalitarian regime’s dream come true. When I told someone I hardly knew that I was nearly blind in one eye he corrected me: “You mean you’re visually handicapped…” I told him to go and reproduce himself but used a word that begins with the letter F.

Just imagine the kind of world these bums were planning for us where we replaced older terms with newer, more sensitive ones. One was no longer crippled, they were handicapped, the latter word used by sensitive people in the first place. Nothing wrong with being “disabled,” in fact it is far superior to the ghastly woke term of “differently abled.” What a world these people had in store for us. “Unhoused” rather than homeless, the latter already being a euphemism for bum or bag lady.

Inventing euphemisms in order not to wound sounds nice, but it was nothing of the sort. Calling a Walkman a Walkperson is as dumb as those mini-Nazis who tried to control us through language. A female reporter for an English rag took umbrage when I referred to an airline stewardess as a, well, stewardess. Apparently I should have called her an attendant or something like that. (I thought attendants were those men in male bathrooms who gave you a towel after you washed your hands.) All these euphemistic terms came about so ugly-looking people could take umbrage with their betters. They called for inclusive language, which in reality was controlling language. I only hope that the next four years will see female-marked terms return with a vengeance. And while I’m at it, Toobin should always wash his hands.