Someone, please, get Donald Trump hooked on Tetris or Sudoku so he’ll stop playing word games:
The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including “fetus” and “transgender” — in official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.
Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionin Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden terms at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden terms are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”
In some instances, the analysts were given alternative phrases. Instead of “science-based” or “evidence-based,” the suggested phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” the person said. In other cases, no replacement words were immediately offered [Lena H. Sun and Juliet Eilperin, “CDC Gets List of Forbidden Words: Fetus, Transgender, Diversity,” Washington Post, 2017.12.15].
Trump is restricting certain words at other agencies as well:
A second HHS agency received similar guidance to avoid using “entitlement,” “diversity” and “vulnerable,” according to an official who took part in a briefing earlier in the week. Participants at that agency were also told to use “Obamacare” instead of ACA, or the Affordable Care Act, and to use “exchanges” instead of “marketplaces” to describe the venues where people can purchase health insurance.
At the State Department, meanwhile, certain documents now refer to sex education as “sexual risk avoidance” [Lena H. Sun and Juliet Helperin, “Words Banned at Multiple HHS Agencies Include ‘Diversity’ and ‘Vulnerable’,” Washington Post, 2017.12.16].
Beware the irony and danger of an unhinged tyrant telling others what words they can and cannot use. First words, then certain words online, then whole collections of words bound in lovely covers….
Asked to explain its word ban, the currently headless Department of Health and Human Services only plays more word games:
In response to ABC News’ request for comment from the CDC, an HHS spokesperson responded in a statement.
“The assertion that HHS has ‘banned words’ is a complete mischaracterization of discussions regarding the budget formulation process,” the HHS statement said. “HHS will continue to use the best scientific evidence available to improve the health of all Americans. HHS also strongly encourages the use of outcome and evidence data in program evaluations and budget decisions.”
ABC News asked HHS for further clarification but has not yet received a response [Morgan Winsor and Dan Childs, “HHS Disputes Report That It Has Banned CDC from Using Words like ‘Diversity’ and ‘Fetus’,” ABC News, 2017.12.17].
The second and third sentences are irrelevant to the question of whether CDC officials can write “vulnerable” or “diversity” in their budget documents. The first, complete with quote marks, does not deny the facts but only suggests more words games to obscure the facts.
We’ve suffered nearly a year of Donald Trump’s using the White House pulpit to bully us all with his verbal manipulations. Now he’s upping his game with detailed manipulations of the language used in government documents.
I believe it is time to purchase copies of book and video of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ as I am sure that is going to be on the soon to follow ‘banned material list’. The slippery slope always begins gradually.
Francis, maybe the book to get very soon is the Dictionary, so we can look back on the days when our society had all those words.
Now that the GOP (especially the more radical of the GOP) have near-full federal power, I see that “government” is no longer a monstrosity that needs to be reduced, and is now a useful tool to promote and advance a political agenda.
On the brighter side, I would like to thank the Trump administration for selecting my classes’ vocabulary list for the week.
I don’t have a problem with trying to standardize language across federal budget documents if that is an editorial decision. It’s a little hard to understand how banning these specific words does that, and it does seem like creeping newspeak.
-Science is science. It owes nothing to and owes no consideration to community standards and wishes.
-Human rights and equality are right and equal guidelines. They owe nothing to and owe no consideration to community standards and wishes.
-Community standards and wishes allowed the lynching of black people.
-Community standards and wishes gave the good people (the political minority) in South Dakota a top five “most corrupt” state in USA.
-Community standards and wishes steer elections. Science, human rights, equality and political purity are overriding moral values, far superior to the standards and wishes of any group of citizens.
The Department of Justice has been directed by Trump to ban the following words and phrases:
Complicit
Conspiracy
Private Server
Guilty
Next Sunday, Christmas Eve day, I expect a smaller than usual crowd at the Conservatives with Common Sense breakfast. I believe due to the small crowd, the topicmaster will be choosing “sexual risk avoidance” as the topic for the debates instead of the traditional and scheduled topics.
Guests usually welcome.
Does the group purposely set themselves apart from other Conservatives by labeling themselves as having common sense when other Conservatives don’t?
Common sense and conservative should never be used in the same sentence.
O—vocab lists! Beautiful. Keep teaching well.
Roger—ha! O should include your words on the list after we get back from holiday break.
Read “The Difficult Case of Donald Trump.” It explains it all.
You are missing the message. Read the words folks: The forbidden terms are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”
The administration of HHS is drowning in programs that are not fact based but are spending money at a rate that cannot be sustained. Each of these words have no factual meaning but are rather benign words that bring nothing but ambiguity to the discussion and that was the whole point of the action. HHS is asking for its people to base their requests on factual studies. On exact measurements. On actual occurrences.
Would any of you actually give the money out of your wallet to someone that said they needed it to “bring diversity to the KKK”, or to protect “vulnerable body builders” “provide owed entitlement to rich people”, “search for transgender, people in the military” “declare a fetus is not a baby”, “evidence-based mystical dragons” and “science-based anti-gravity machine”? These are all words used to bolster a “point of view” not facts.
OldSarg, if Obama had banned the use of certain words in government, you would be screaming “fascist” or “communist” or “dictator.” Despite your weak explanation of why words need to be banned, it is quite clear why the words are being banned: because the Trump administration sees these words as threats to their agenda, science be damned.
If you don’t think a study, for instance, is “evidence-based” or “science-based” the answer is not to ban the words. The answer is to explain the reasons why the study is flawed. If the study is flawed in some way then it is not “evidence-based” or “science based.” This should be common sense.
Resorting to banning words is the first step towards banning people who use those words and banning books that have those words in them. Trump does not want to battle in the “marketplace of ideas.” Trump wants to eliminate the opposition to his ideas. Never mind that his ideas are often unsupported by facts or science or logic and reason. Trump wants to dumb down the level of political discourse and decision-making to knee-jerk reactions and emotional responses. To paraphrase Shakespeare, Trump has decided that the first thing we do is to get rid of the scientists. Ban their words, pull their funding, discredit science as fake news.
Banning words is censorship and beneath the dignity of our democracy and insulting to our citizens. However, given Trump’s track record of attacking our esteemed democratic institutions, it is not surprising.
believe due to the small crowd, the topicmaster will be choosing “sexual risk avoidance” as the topic for the debates instead of the traditional and scheduled topics.
Grudz special guest for this series is none other than Purple Heart owner Donald J Drumpf who will regale the crowd with how his personal VietNam was navigating sexual liasons without catching clap.
Again, unable to confront the argument as presented, OldSarg makes up strawman phrases that no one is using to make a pretend point that exists only in his self-absorbed mind. Tedious.
Old Sarg would put words in people’s mouths and labels over their heads that aren’t real. Donald Trump would eliminate the use of real words that express things that challenge his nightmare-land agenda.