7 BANNED WORDS: a challenge/opportunity for the linguistic and literary community

Minnesota is well known, and deservedly so, for its literary community of writers and readers. Minnesota is also well known for having a liberal approach to much of life. Here's a fantastic opportunity for Minnesota's literary community to exercise national leadership.

windows at Open Book, Center for Book Arts

Photo by J. Harrington

In 2007, the new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary dropped a number of words. Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris responded with the publication of The Lost Words. More recently, the current administration in Washington (they who must not be named) has banned the use of 7 words in 2018 budget documents from the Center for Disease Control (CDC).. They are not the seven words you can't say on television that George Carlin made famous.

The seven words CDC can't write in a budget document are:

• "diversity,"
• "fetus,"
• "transgender,"
• "vulnerable,"
• "entitlement,"
• "science-based" and
• "evidence-based."

We quickly checked several online versions of a thesaurus and found that many of these words lack readily available synonyms. Merriam-Webster failed on "fetus," but Dictionary.com/Thesaurus.com came through. "Transgender" synonyms were non-existent everywhere we checked.

People who work with words have been know to invent new words. It seems incumbent on the word-smiths of the world to now assist the CDC in its time of need. We challenge fellow and sister wordsmiths to respond, somewhat as did Macfarlane and Morris, to the CDC's Seven Lost Words, by creating, providing and publicizing alternatives to the seven words in the bullet-list above. Perhaps locally, The Loft Literary Center might take a leadership role. Maybe AWP would like to offer leadership assistance. Maybe it should be a collaboration of those organizations with PEN America. We just don't see how those who claim to honor and love words can let this opportunity pass.

                     The Words Under the Words

By Naomi Shihab Nye

for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem

My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes,

the damp shine of a goat’s new skin.

When I was sick they followed me,

I woke from the long fever to find them

covering my head like cool prayers.

My grandmother’s days are made of bread,

a round pat-pat and the slow baking.

She waits by the oven watching a strange car

circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son,

lost to America. More often, tourists,

who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines.

She knows how often mail arrives,

how rarely there is a letter.

When one comes, she announces it, a miracle,

listening to it read again and again

in the dim evening light.

My grandmother’s voice says nothing can surprise her.

Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby.

She knows the spaces we travel through,

the messages we cannot send—our voices are short

and would get lost on the journey.

Farewell to the husband’s coat,

the ones she has loved and nourished,

who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky.

They will plant themselves. We will all die.

My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.

When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press,

when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms,

He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name.

“Answer, if you hear the words under the words—

otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,

difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”

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