Beware, word police and David Morrison are on the beat

Diversity Council Australia chief and Australian of the Year David Morrison.

It’s official: no zone of life is safe from the long noses and wagging fingers of the lifestyle cops and word police.

Not content with having strangled social life with irritating rules — making people stub out their fags in public places and put down their pint glasses at 3am — now the know-alls are barging into work life too. Into workplace banter, no less; into the chitchat that can make the 9 to 5 grind that bit more bearable.

We’re doing it wrong, you see. Apparently our workplace repartee is toxic and dangerous, like everything else we do when we don’t have a PhD-wielding expert whispering advice in our lugholes.

Words At Work, a campaign launched by Diversity Council Australia, is designed to correct the unwittingly racist, sexist, disabilist lingo of your average boneheaded worker.

Spearheaded by David Morrison, Australian of the Year and former lieutenant general, it’s about getting people to “think about the words they use” and use only words that make everyone feel “respected, valued and included”.

Some of the advice is patronisingly obvious. Apparently you shouldn’t walk about your workplace saying things like “abo”, “retard”, “fag” or “dyke”. Who knew? Everyone, I expect. Show me a workplace where such blatantly prejudicial terms are casually used and tolerated, and I’ll give you my salary this month.

But Words At Work also warns against using terms such as guys and girls. You shouldn’t say “Hey guys” in an email or meeting because it might make female workers feel left out.

This is nonsense. Guys is an increasingly de-gendered word, especially in workplaces. It’s the modern version of team, colleagues; it even has a whiff of comrades to it these days.

The meaning of girls is changing too. In an era when ­Madonna (57) sings about being a Girl Gone Wild, and Lena Dunham (30) has made a hugely popular television show about young women called Girls, the idea that referring to women as girls is offensive doesn’t stand up.

Ah, sorry: I shouldn’t say “doesn’t stand up”; that’s potentially disabilist. Seriously. The promo video for Words At Work wonders if phrases such as “walk the talk” are acceptable considering some people can’t walk.

This is a recipe for social paralysis, for being so insanely obsessed with the words we use that we never chill out and chat. No offence to insane people, by the way: insane now is used simply to mean silly, daft. And that’s the point. Language evolves.

In the Words At Work video, a worker swiftly corrects herself for saying “That’s so gay” (homophobic), by saying: “I mean that’s so lame!” Well, a few decades ago calling something lame would have been considered offensive. How do you think lame people (“persons unable to walk without difficulty”) felt when they heard their condition being used as shorthand for rubbish or naff?

And it’s believed naff has its origins in gay British slang of the 1950s, possibly as an acronym for “Not Available For F..king”. That is, it meant someone who was straight and therefore boring. ­Offensive to straight people?

This is where the mad — PC correction: unwise — obsession with chatter gets us: to a situation where we just don’t know what it’s safe to say, and where we all turn stiff and uncertain and less willing to engage with each other.

The urge to police banter is taking hold cross the West.

On US campuses there are clampdowns on “microaggressions”, which one expert describes as “brief … verbal indignities”. Everything from asking someone with a foreign name “Where are you from?” to commenting on a black girl’s (sorry, woman’s) hair has been rebranded a racial microaggression on some campuses. Which means even people making polite conversation and paying compliments risk being branded bigots.

In Britain, as in Oz, there are efforts to change how people chat at work. There’s often an ageist bent to this lingo-policing. Surveys show that high numbers of young employees, and many bosses, consider terms such as doll, pet or sweetheart unacceptable.

The only people who use those terms are the old.

When I left school I worked in a warehouse briefly, and the older guys there always referred to the young women who worked on the office side of things as “doll” or “darling”, and to the young men like me as “son” or “laddie”. They weren’t being misogynistic or demeaning — they were being sweet. The thought of those sort of old blokes now being chastised simply because they use old-fashioned language makes me sad. We talk about using language that makes people feel included, yet at the same time we exclude those who, because of their age or class, use “bad” words.

The war on workplace chat speaks to the misanthropy of our age. It implies that even everyday conversation is a moral minefield. It undermines that sense of solidarity we gain when we engage with each other directly and freely. It cripples social engagement. Oh god. I shouldn’t say cripple. Sorry.

Maybe we should all just stop talking to each other? Perhaps we should all be assigned an interpreter, from Diversity Council Australia, who could translate our bovine banter into PC speech so that our colleagues are never offended. It’s the only solution.