DAVID THOMPSON: Bad Language.
One might think that the employees having babies and therefore on maternity leave are, in fact, by definition, mothers. One might even think that a hospital, and a maternity hospital in particular, is a place where physical realities of this kind would be difficult to avoid. And yet.
While none of the hospitals’ current staff classified themselves as confused about which of the two sexes they are, it is, I suppose, possible that at some point one of the mothers taking maternity leave may, potentially, be sexually dysmorphic – i.e., mentally ill. But mental illness, even fashionable mental illness, isn’t generally something that one should affirm. Nor should it be a basis for the coercion of others. Farce, after all, soon loses its charm.
As George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language:”
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
Which leads to “The Cambridge University Hospital Trust, which manages a maternity hospital called the Rosie, lost points because staff use the term ‘mother’ when referring to the policies it had in place regarding paid leave, instead of broadening it to include gender-neutral alternatives.”
