The 'nonsense' clamp down bringing us 'cave dwellers' and 'fishers'

WIPO, the grandly acronymed World Intellectual Property Organisation are patent experts who, from their base in Geneva, recently issued a decree to staff to avoid offence by continuing to use well-worn phrases that even our own Orwellian Labour Party haven’t banned. Yet.

The UN agency is ‘clamping’ down (which is a phrase that should only ever be used when referring to woodwork or the Third Reich) on masculine specific terms to stop women becoming ‘misrepresented’ (who produces this utter gibberish?).

I had similar some years ago when a previous line manager decreed that we must not use the word ‘brainstorming’ because it might ‘offend epileptics'. So, with the edict ringing in my ears, I undertook a ‘thought shower’ session instead before the kids asked what one of those was? Before I went back to brainstorming and risked the wrath of the lingo police.

I digress: WIPO have decreed that cavemen and women are now to be referred to as ‘cave dwellers,’ although I am unsure as to when the cave word would ever be used in a patent application, but hey ho…

I am no longer an ‘Englishman’ but now an ‘English person’ and Fishermen, hot on the heels of Sam Smith and his ‘fisherthem’ comment are now ‘fishers.’ So, daydreaming of the next time I am in my wife’s ancestral seat of Cornwall, as the wind blows and the storm batters the hardy stone rock in, say, the harbour at Porthleven as I chat to a Cornish ‘person’ (male) wearing flip flops and tie die shorts, I may ask if ‘they’ are a ‘fisher’? No doubt it would only stoke the anti emmet fire, and I may well find myself as herring bait to save spoiling his next pint of Spingo…

A waiter or waitress are now ‘restaurant servers’ which I don’t get as both genders are already catered for and only two syllables as opposed to five, and a midwife is now to be known as a ‘birth attendant’. If anything, with that last one, I, and my fellow brethren should be offended having been excluded in all millennia from such an occupation. That said, I would find it strange if my wife had a male midwife (mid husband?) in what is the most personal, if beautiful yet traumatic time of a woman’s life.

My friend Darren is no longer a lumberjack (and the Monty Python sketch is now redundant) as he is now to be known only as a bog standard wood chopper, or ‘chopper’, which may have negative connotations as it is too closely aligned with the 70’s bike of choice and as a double entendre for a constituent of a gentleman’s secret garden.

The NHS, gawd bless them, not to be outdone, are getting in on the lunacy with ‘chestmilk’ being fed to babies as the Red Cross decree that ‘people who are not women’ can get pregnant and have periods, despite there being as much proof of that as there is of Haitians being ravenous around the American cat and dog fraternity.

Oh, please, stop the world, I want to get off! I genuinely can't abide this nonsense anymore and, even more galling are those that subscribe to this gibberish as they continue to pretend that everyone is offended by every utterance as the majority look on aghast whilst the deranged and disturbed believe they have got one over the rest of us by this folly seemingly now becoming common place…

Brett Ellis is a teacher