At $569 a pop—there was money in reeducation—the six-week class in Cerebral Acceptance and Semantic Sensitivity that social services forced me to take was certainly edifying. True, we began with elementary no-no’s like “not the full deck,” “D-word as a sack of hammers,” or “two sandwiches short of a picnic,” whose insulting lightheartedness belied the lasting injury their casual deployment would occasion. As I didn’t need to be told that you weren’t supposed to call people stupid anymore, I figured I could get through this indoctrination in the same way I’d survived public school: with a book in my lap.
Yet we moved rapidly on to less obvious prohibitions. “Dumb” was out even as a synonym for mute. Forget being “dumbstruck”; our earnest young instructor, a skinny, fragile character named Timmy Muswell, commended the lackluster substitute “surprised.” A “dumbwaiter” could seem to allude to a “dumb waiter” and cause gross offense in the hospitality industry. Since an appealing alternative to zoning out with my heavily thumbed Evelyn Waugh novels was playing the innocent pain in the neck, I raised my hand.
“Excuse me, but if our older house happens to have one, what are we supposed to call a D-word-waiter, then?”
“You could call it . . .”—Timmy punched at his phone—“a small elevator used for conveying food and dishes or small goods from one story of a building to another.”
“In that case,” I said, “it might be more efficient to have the mechanism taken out.”
The class tittered. The instructor was not amused. He was never amused.
We had also to protect the feelings of the inanimate. Thus automotive safety could no longer rely on “crash-test dummies” (Spotify had long before expunged the eponymous band); a fiberglass clothing model was respectfully dubbed a “mannequin.” “Dumbbells” were “weights.” Although by now we’d all gotten the message that calling someone “thick” was hate speech, we might be underaware that a piece of wood could no longer be thick, either; at a lumberyard, we should ask for a board “two inches fat.”
As a person could not be “dense,” neither could text or fog. As a person could not be “simple,” neither could an arithmetic problem; we should prefer “easy,” which I was obliged to observe did not mean the same thing—but Timmy moved rapidly on, because any reference to degrees of mental difficulty made him anxious. “Deep” could unfairly distinguish the profound, so the “deep end” of a swimming pool might more cautiously be identified as “the part with a lot more water in it.” “Slow” was loaded; best describe an application process, say, as “gradual” or “drawn out,” while a car up ahead keeping your progress to a crawl was “proceeding at a reduced speed.” A waltz was not “slow” but “sluggish,” a word that hardly made me want to hit the dance floor. Rather than risk bruising egos with “backward,” it was prudent to walk “in reverse.” Needless to say, heroin users were no longer “dope fiends,” although if you were an opioid addict, surely having your perspicacity traduced was the least of your problems. “Getting the dope on” people should be rephrased “getting the intelligence on” them, and here Timmy grew flustered, because any allusion to intelligence was starting to feel risqué. “Or intel,” he revised. On realizing this was merely shorthand for a quality that we all enjoy in equal measure, he recommended “doing background research on someone” instead.
If people could no longer be “dim,” then neither could lousy lighting; darkened rooms were “poorly illuminated.” The “dimmer switch” was now the “knob that raises or lowers brightness”—though once again Timmy kicked himself, because “bright” was also forbidden, so he amended hastily, “Or maybe the ‘knob that raises or lowers how seeable everything is.’” As a purportedly “brilliant professor” was no quicker on the uptake than anyone else, so also a “brilliant sunset” was better described as “red.” Oh, sorry; Timmy never would have said “quicker on the uptake” unless reminding us that the tribute was scandalous. “Quick” alone was out; a safer adjective was “fast.”
“Does that mean,” I interjected, “the King James Bible now has to be retranslated as ‘the fast and the dead’?”
He ignored me.
Our instructor stressed that compliments in the workplace like “you’re looking smart today” or “that’s a smart outfit” could get us sacked. Commending a gesture as “thoughtful” risked implying that some folks cogitated more than others, so we were on more solid ground with “considerate” or “indicative of having paid attention to what I might like.” Which prompted Timmy to add that because the notion that anyone might possess “gifts” that others didn’t was objectionable, he recommended that at Christmas we gave one another only “presents.”
Considering that “grasp” could convey mastery some people lacked, we should instead “grip” or “seize” our coffee mugs. “Command” could also mean an unjustifiable sense of intellectual dominion, so in a position of authority we should issue an “edict” or “direction.” Admiring classifications such as “savvy,” “scholarly,” and “erudite” couldn’t help but imply the existence of benighted characters who exhibited none of these qualities, so if we were hell-bent on acclaiming colleagues, we should keep to wholesome, simple—sorry, uncomplicated—compliments such as “I like you” or “That is good.” Alas, avoidance of “piercing,” often applied to the smarty-pants and the fruit of his or her overrated labors (a “piercing analysis”), also stymied mention of how fashionable young people decorated their bodies with loops and studs. “Hole in the nipple” would have to suffice. We couldn’t use the word “bovine” even in relation to cows.
Our most salubrious unit was Cognitive Equality in the Kitchen. “Meatball” being a slur, subs with marinara sauce should contain “orbs of ground beef and veal.” “Turkey” was defamatory, so every Thanksgiving we were meant to acquire a “domesticated gallinaceous bird”—and good luck to us, because even Timmy couldn’t remember “gallinaceous” without checking his notes. We could no longer flavor the stuffing with “sage,” either; if we insisted on adding the conceited herb, “poultry seasoning with furry leaves” would identify the plant for most people. Because the word was synonymous with dunderheads—not that Timmy put it that way—best not say that a sauce had “lumps.” A carelessly prepared blancmange had “bumps.”
No one could have “chops” in the slang sense anymore, so we could only sauté “pork pieces.” As “weiner” was a term of abuse, the ballpark staple was exclusively a “hot dog.” “Gooseberry fool” was off the menu. Back in the day, “spud” doubled for “thicko,” so hereon in we could only bake potatoes. Apropos of previous lessons, a deep-dish pizza was now a “tall-dish pizza,” while quick breads were “hasty breads.”
We were treated to an overview of recent culinary history. When Nestlé sought to cover its corporate backside by rebranding its powdered drink mix Nestlé Swift, self-deputized police on social media called the company to account, because “swift” could also mean mentally adroit; hence the hurried re-rebranding, Nestlé Rapid. Hostess had long before scrambled to remove its filled chocolate cakes called Ding Dongs from the shelves of every American supermarket. Trying to leaven our session with fascinating anecdotes from abroad, Timmy explained that the candy comparable to M&M’s in the UK had also faced a trademark dilemma, because by 2012 the sweets were subject to an indignant nationwide boycott. When the tweaking of “Smarties” to “Smardies” was widely ridiculed, the subsidiary slunk out of business.
Dullness being associated with all those other unmentionable D-words, we should designate crummy knives as “not cutting well,” though “lacking an edge” could be misinterpreted as lacking acumen. In kind, the existence of exceptionally “sharp” people had been exposed as fallacious, so efficacious blades and cooking shears should probably be described as . . . Well, we couldn’t say “keen,” which also meant astute, so maybe “good at slicing or snipping” or “capable of hurting your finger.” Given the impropriety of the tags “sharp cookie” and “clever cookie,” Timmy said it might be judicious to avoid “cookies” altogether. Perhaps we could opt for a touch of the cosmopolitan and, like the British, call them “biscuits.”
When the class first convened, it had the atmosphere of high school detention. Bad boys who’d all sinned against MP dogma, we exhibited the smirking, slouching collusion of mutinous teenagers. Early on, a few of us would get a drink after our struggle sessions to share tales of what terrible line we’d crossed to land us in the class and to hoot over Timmy’s latest lexical embargo. But the insubordinate ambience didn’t last. Most of us were too terrified of putting a step wrong. I wasn’t the only one whose custody of children hung in the balance, and given those stakes—I’m sorry if this comes to fellow travelers as a disappointment—I myself put a firm lid on the snark in class after the first day or two. Why, by applying the same discipline I mustered at fifteen when marching through the rituals of my family’s faith like a robot, I soon passed for a brown-nosing pleaser eager to master the vernacular of esteem and inclusion. Besides, even the subversive contingent got caught up in the game, competing over who could come up with contraband our instructor had missed.
“Hey, Timmy,” a classmate might pipe up with enthusiasm. “If you can’t be a ‘whiz kid’ anymore, you shouldn’t be able to take a whiz, either, right? Like, you should only take a leak.”
Or I remember one woman contributing in a spirit of excited discovery, “It seems to me that to claim someone is ‘reflective’ necessarily implies that other people aren’t reflective—that is, some people don’t think hard about things and don’t contemplate the world with nuance and subtlety.”
“That’s right,” Timmy concurred. “Any elevation of one person’s intellectual powers is necessarily a derogation of someone else’s. If there’s no implied comparison—a pejorative comparison—the compliment is meaningless.”
“But my point is,” the woman followed up, “if you can’t have reflective people, can you have reflective tape?”
There was another fellow who’d seemed pretty hip at first—sarcastic, prone to underbreath remarks at Timmy’s expense—but who by the fourth week raised his hand to say, “Excuse my language, but folks in my office used to toss off ‘That guy is a complete tool.’ There’s a touch of ‘asshole’ about ‘tool,’ but it definitely impugns intelligence. So what about ‘tool’ as in ‘screwdriver’? Should we say ‘implement’?”
“The implement shed?” I said skeptically.
“Why not?” he shot back.
“It sounds—” I caught myself just in time. The fact that I came so close to unthinkingly using a certain word aloud made me feel a little sick. “It sounds odd,” I finished lamely, and kept my mouth shut for the rest of the hour.
I took a few half-hearted notes, if only to remember to tell Wade and Emory choice absurdities later, although our household’s raucous, wine-fueled evenings of full-throated mockery were consigned to the past. I had to content myself with whispered confidences at bedtime and despairing snippets shared with my best friend over coffee on the rare occasions she could spare an hour (Emory was spending more time in New York). Sonia Whitehead had put quite the damper on our once spirited, irreverent home life. Or I preferred to blame Sonia, though the more immediate buzzkiller was our youngest child. Lucy was hyperalert to any slip of the tongue, like an offhand dismissal of a sitcom as “dopey.” As we’d yet to give our youngest a computer, tablet, or phone, a hankering to record these careless missteps, the better to report them during Sonia’s regular “home checks,” may have explained a slight uptick in Lucy’s interest in finally learning to write by hand.
But unless Timmy’s taboos were entertaining, there was no point in committing his lectures to memory. No final exam would measure how well we’d internalized all this “semantic sensitivity,” because the Mental Parity movement didn’t believe in exams. Even if we did take a test, we would all have to pass. Any difference between our performances would ipso facto display merely a difference in processing—that is, the variable presenting behaviors that disguised our incredible sameness. So they didn’t bother. Propped in those community-center desks with my mind wandering gave me a taste of what it must have been like for my students to dream away my own classes. It was discouraging.
Being on our best behavior even en famille was especially hard on Darwin and Zanzibar, for whom domestic derision of the doctrine that dominated our lives elsewhere had provided a vital release valve. Rather than self-sanitize their stories at the dinner table, they clammed up. Those two kids seemed to speak exclusively to each other, which seemed unhealthy. Although it’s a jarring descriptor for siblings, I’d characterize their dealings with Lucy as “courteous.” As for Lucy herself, she had acquired an air of superiority that neither her age nor her talents would seem to justify. She tended to brisk around the house, chin raised at an officious tilt, as if conducting an inspection. The impulse may have been unconscious, but I tended to give her second helpings of anything at a meal that was prized or in short supply. She got plenty more after-school root beer, and the latest iPad was already slated for her ninth birthday in July.