@Orderhhh
Don’t see what all the fuss is about. It’s just political correctness doing what political correctness does. It’s merely the changing of language to remove or modify any language that anyone else personally finds offensive or exclusionary. Left wing politics 101 at least since the Blair era.
I was long sneered at by feminists and called a ‘Daily Mail reader’ and ‘right wing’.
Well my morally superior guardian readers, congratulations. You now have the world you wanted. Your side of the debate have won and my side have lost. I have accepted this now, I suggest you all do the same.
Political correctness as a point of principle has won, language will be modified to remove terms that people find offensive and/or exclusionary. It’s an on-going never ending process as it’s based on a principle with no end point. There is now a duty not to offend and if your language does offend you change your language, you don’t tell people not to be offended. The left wished for this and now they have it. They must have known when arguing for this that it wouldn’t just be language that offended them that would be changed but all language that offended would be phased out.
I think many people honestly didn't.
Something I've come to realize over the years is that many people, especially younger ones, are very bad at seeing what kinds of logical conclusions an idea is likely to come to over time once it's released into the wild, so to speak. They assume people's underlying sense of what is right and good will remain the same.
Personally I think this is why in many cultures elders function as the leaders rather than younger people.
And many people just don't have much subtlety in the way they think about and use language. They take things at face value.
I'm not sure is this was always the case or not, but there is now a fairly large group of urban people with university educations who don't really seem to be higher order thinkers. Most see themselves as progressives, but it is essentially a conservative position for them, based on a kind of received wisdom and the values they grew up with rather than anything else. They don't have a sophisticated understanding of analysis, politics, language, science, etc. Though they think they do.