DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Princeton University Banning the Word ‘Man.’

Man up, delicate Ivy League snowflakes — and take note, parents writing annual checks of over $60k or more for their kids’ cultural reprogramming. Or as Thomas Sowell wrote 20 years ago in The Vision of the Anointed, on the left’s sustained attack on “The Generic ‘He:’”

Trivial as such crusades may seem, they have been very successful in changing the way people talk in the media, in academia, and in government. Not only is the generic “he” taboo in many quarters, the speech controllers have pressed on to new conquests, attacking such words as “layman,” “craftsman,” “actress,” or “matron,” which violate their unisex view of the world, and also proscribe such phrases as “to master a language” because it uses a sex-specific word. These examples are from an official guidebook put out by the Australian government, which shows how far such crusades have spread. An American guidebook, distributed internationally, declares that there is “a perfectly scientific, completely foolproof, and highly theoretical model for avoiding sexism on the job.” As so often happens, pretensions of “science” are the last refuge of those who offer neither the evidence nor the logic that are integral to science.

The net effect of all this is that young women, especially in educational institutions where they are bombarded with radical feminist propaganda, are led to believe that every use of the generic “he” in books of the past is proof of disdain or hostility toward women, when in fact such usage simply avoided cluttering up the language or forcing writers into strained constructions and awkward phrases. In short, the anointed are helped to make yet another group feel like victims and to regard the anointed as their rescuers.

And exponentially more so these days than when Sowell wrote the above passage, on the “modern” college campus, for both students and their leftwing academic enablers, the will to power derives from victimhood.