ROGER KIMBALL: At Columbia… that’s all, folx!
Undoubtedly the best moment in the testimony of Minouche Shafik, the President Columbia University, before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last week was elicited by Representative Jim Banks. Why, he wanted to know, was the word “folks” spelled “folx” throughout an official guidebook for the School of Social Work?
Shafik coyly suggested that perhaps the authors did not know how to spell, which might well be the case. But you cannot watch her squirming response without feeling the hot, sticky, and slightly nauseating air of disingenuousness wash over the proceeding.
“Folx,” as Shafik must be aware, is just the latest instance of weaponized orthography disseminated by the academic left. Think “Latinx” and you are on the right track. “Folx” is the certified preferred term for the LGBTQWERTY+ “community,” something Shafik, the leader of an Ivy League outpost of “wokeness,” must surely know.
And she very, very likely does:
The page has since been deleted, but here's an archive from December 2023 from @Columbia University:
"For Latinx Folx"
Double whammy!https://t.co/zfsNq9gZPR pic.twitter.com/Ozbvkik62v
— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) April 17, 2024
Hey, you know who else has used “folx?”
But when in doubt, deploy a little academic taqiyya to keep the red state represenatives guessing:
They implement this insane made up language and terminology because they just think like "latinx" it will be widely accepted, and then when people notice it, they claim stupidity and feign ignorance about it. https://t.co/oVNyhy9npQ
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) April 17, 2024
At this point, I’d be adding the usual “update Newspeak Dictionaries accordingly” line, but our betters in Silicon Valley are already on the case: I just noticed that my spellchecker in both Outlook and Word doesn’t redline “folx,” so at some point, it became an approved word at Microsoft. (But oddly, at least for the moment, not on my devices built by those reactionary neanderthals at Apple. I assume that will be fine-tuned in the next iOS update, if not sooner.)