Nationally-respected linguist unpacks the bizarre thinking behind the local Dem censure of Larry Stone

Many local political watchers in Santa Clara were scratching their heads (ooops, apologies if that verb "scratch" makes anyone feel unsafe) around the local Democratic Party's decision to call for the resignation of Assessor Larry Stone over his use of a rural metaphor ("sucking tit") in an interview with a local journalist. Dr. Alan Perlman, forensic linguist and long-time language activist and outspoken critic of political correctness and language control, surveys the intellectual and academic roots of the attempted cancelling.

Opportunity Now: What's the big deal about Larry Stone saying his potential opponent is "sucking" off the "union tit?" It's a metaphor. It's colorful. It's kind of funny. Everybody uses phrases like this all the time and everybody knows what they're saying. What's the offense?

Dr. Alan Perlman: There have always been euphemisms that people use to talk around things that are delicate, such as sex, bodily functions, and death. What's different about today's attempts at language control is that they're concerned with something other than delicacy and propriety: language has become politicized in the service of a political world view. In my view, I would separate the phrase "sucking on the tit" from woke prohibitions around issues like race, which are in an entirely different social space. But it would be remarkable and regrettable if the two kinds of prohibitions bled into each other, so that now slang, even vulgar slang, can be sexist. The speaker in this case has made what some people consider an etiquette or context error, but I have not seen that expression, or expressions like it, politicized in this way.

ON: It's hard to say exactly what they found so outrageous. I don't think they were responding to it on racial grounds. It may be vulgar, but so what?
AP: The prohibition against revealing or talking about female breasts goes back a long way in our culture. But not everybody buys it nowadays: there is even a Free The Nipple movement. But what we are seeing now is a radical escalation of the policing of language. No matter how tenuous or indirect or bizarre the connection, practically anything can fall into the Woke Catch.
Maybe the thinking goes like this: It's about the breast. and only women have breasts, so this must be a sexist slur. But that doesn't follow. People--men and women alike--have been using this phrase for decades and decades without sexist intent or impact. It is worthwhile to note that comic George Carlin included "tit" as one of the words you cannot say on tv, in his epic takedown of puritanical speech restrictions in the sixties.
ON: I was looking at some of the complaints around Stone's comment, and even those critiques use harsh imagery: "lashing" out, "shield," etc. I get what they are saying, they're good writers and impactful speakers, and I don't think for a moment that their language suggests that they are advocating violent action. It's a metaphor for goodness' sake. I get it. Everybody gets it. This is how humans talk.
AP: There is an entire branch of linguistics called Cognitive Linguistics. It's concerned not only with the meaning of individual words by themselves, but also with the shades of meaning, and relations to similar words and metaphoric content. If I say "I am steamed", that does not mean I am reduced to a liquid and heated to the point of evaporation. But it does mean I can be angered to a point of extremity. If I say "I went from History to Biology," of course I didn't go anywhere. Almost every sentence has some metaphor hidden somewhere in it. You can't give a three minute speech without metaphor. And the Woke people who are raising hell {Editor's note: No, this does not mean Dr. Perlman is suggesting that Wokesters are descending to Dante's 9th circle and magically making it ascend) simply are unaware of the ubiquity of metaphor, and that the door is completely open to any kind of interpretation anybody wants to give it.
If you go far down into language you find metaphor in its deepest levels. "Revert" used to mean to literally turn around and go back. Now it has abstract, even psychological meaning--"reverting to childhood behavior." There are thousands of terms that originally had concrete meaning, but now mean something else.

ON: What's your advice for politicians who get in the crosshairs of this movement. Ooops, sorry, I meant people who get, um, criticized for their language?
AP: I think that they and everybody need to learn that what we are up against is formidable, and we need to prepare the appropriate counter arguments in advance. Because they will come after us. A basic knowledge, at an early age, of the workings of language is essential. A few commonsense principles -- about the difference between literal and metaphoric speech, for example -- are enough to put the language police in their place. Your Assessor should be able to say: "Look, I didn't mean anything literally, and while this may have been a vulgar expression to some ears, it is not a sexist expression and doesn't not deserve the type of disapproval it's receiving. If you were offended, I'm sorry, but it is slang: maybe it was more appropriate in a locker room than in a commencement address, but there's nothing wrong with it and everybody knows that in their heart. Let's move on."
The onus is not on people to avoid saying certain things but rather to have an appropriate response to the cancellers ready. Unfortunately, people are pathetically ignorant of language and how it works, so they are easily put on the defensive.
More from Dr. Perlman here.

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Photo taken by Jason.