1678: Berkley Censorship Jul 19, 2019

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The city of Berkley voted recently to change 40 gendered words from official use. This included some that relate to words for people—who have gender—like 'firemen' to 'fire-fighters' but what garnered the most public outrage was probably 'manhole' to 'maintenance hole' which is clunkier and not as common to find, and 'brother' to 'sibling', which is less specific. One difficulty is, however, is that language does not naturally change in this way, so getting people on board is not easy, nor necessarily beneficial for understanding. You can hear more about the pros and cons of this sort of thing in the Word Facts video on Censorship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFwACamZhmM

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