Learning an entirely new languages is hard, at any age, but probably harder as we grow older as our neuro pattern matching has been solidly programmed for decades. I am continuing to study both Norwegian and Spanish and while achieving success, it seems harder for me now than when I studied Spanish in high school. The English language, like all languages, evolves over time. Recently, parts of the language are evolving very rapidly. Once upon a time, “they” and “them” referred, usually, to groups of people (i.e. plural). Today, we are expected to refer to individuals as “they” or “them”, an item I have difficulty parsing when reading news reports referring to an individual. Languages include many idioms that become a standard part of our terminology. However, many idioms originated at a time, or in a context, where they were derogatory terms associated with ethnic or racial groups. Here is a list of some idioms and their history. The term “moron” is said to have originated with the discredited eugenics movement of over 100 years ago. Because of its association to that, I have learned that this is now a forbidden word in the 21st century. I did not know that. The commonly used phrase “tipping point” – used extensively in climate change commentary, originated in racism. However, for whatever reason, this phrase is still widely used and acceptable. The original phase, from the 1950s and 1960s, was that as the racial makeup of a neighborhood tilted towards fewer white people, the neighborhood would reach a “tipping point” after which whites would move out. Terms like “hooligans” and “paddy” as in “paddy wagon” were meant to be derogatory towards immigrants from Ireland. The term “voodoo” may be considered improper to use, but it seems to depend on the context, which makes understanding the rules challenging. Therefore, the new recommendation is that the word voodoo should no longer be used at all. Most words or phrases that are no off limits do, in fact, depend on context. For example, the commonly used labor descriptive “blue collar” has sometimes been used to make negative associations with immigrants from Mexico who were doing mostly manual labor jobs. Consequently, the recommendation is that we should not use this term, at all, to be on the safe side. (The term “blue collar” was first used by a news reporter in 1924 to describe construction workers who wore a blue shirt. came from those who wore blue shirts versus the bosses who wore white shirts. About ten years later, the term “white collar” was used to describe office and managerial workers.) The rules by which long used idioms are “ok” or “not ok” are not clear. As noted above, that “moron” was a term used in eugenics makes its use wrong today, but “tipping point”, which referred to racial barriers, is considered okay. How come? I have no idea. The list of words and common phrases that are now off limits is very large. There are almost 3,000 on that list. Since a conversational language vocabulary may be as few as 1,000 to 2,000 words, this is akin to learning entirely new languages. The list of words and phrases that are now considered taboo, at least by someone, somewhere is indeed large. This implies most of us must learn a new language dialect, which is not easy. (I think it is still okay to use the word taboo, but how can we know?) Indeed, there are some that say English is itself a racist language (probably all major languages have similar issues – check out highly gendered Romance or Germanic languages). Overcoming this seemingly requires everyone to learn a new language that has not even yet been defined. The experts on racism in language note this is probably not workable either. Similarly, some who do not speak Spanish (typically white American academics) have proposed that Spanish must be redefined to remove gendered nouns – even though the majority of native Spanish speakers (around 70%) do not support this. Instead, the demands, coming mostly from people who do not speak Spanish and if they do, are non-native speakers, come across as “white colonialism”. After stealing their gold, land and cultural, now these proponents are seen as stealing their language.