When the Government Takes Our Words Away

On March 7, 2025, The New York Times published a list of words and phrases that government agencies under the Trump administration must now limit or avoid. The list, which you will find below, was compiled from government memos, official and unofficial agency guidelines, and other documents viewed by The New York Times. This list, of course, is incomplete and the sources for the list vary in authority. Also there were no governmental guidelines across agencies as to how and when these words and phrases were to be limited, avoided, or simply deleted from their public-facing texts and websites.

Even glance at the list, and you will see that absurdities abound. George Carlin would’ve had a field day here. It’s fine, for example, to use the word “men” freely, but not in the phrase “men who have sex with men.” And we must avoid mention of “females” and “women” entirely. What about the word, “political?” Surely, a useful term to keep around? Nope. It’s too political. Also “climate science,” a phrase we no longer need because we no longer need science anyway. Which brings us to the useless word, “pollution.” Just leave it alone. And “injustice?” Why bother? It’s a troublesome word that leads us to a lot of unpleasant predicaments. And so on and so forth.

As the article makes clear, however, there is much we don’t know about the policies behind this aggregated list. And we know even less about how those policies will be applied in the real world where language lives and breathes.

But there are darker implications to assembling such a list in the first place. In her book on cultural memory, Between Past and Future (1961), Hannah Arendt remarks that the spirit of revolution that arose in the West between America’s revolution in 1776 and the upheavals in Budapest in 1956 had words or phrases attached to them that we have often forgotten.

In America, for example, she cites the phrase “public happiness” as a core concept for our own revolution. Around that phrase much revolutionary energy crystalized, and as the phrase fell out of use, so too did its unique energy. (To read a full and convincing explanation of Arendt’s treatment of the phrase, see her 1961 piece in Commentary, available here.)

It almost seems a radical idea to me now, this notion of “public happiness,” and yet it touches a nerve. It brings to life a unique energy, a new way of re-imagining human happiness as a community project. A happiness, then, that is both public and communal. What a concept!

But if you lose the phrase, as Arendt explains, or if it falls into disrepair and cliché, as it did, you lose the energy that once organized a significant chapter in the history of our country. You lose a potent source of happiness.

This loss of energy, Arendt implies, occasioned by the loss of words and phrases that activate that energy, represents the primary danger posed by censorship and the historical amnesia that censorship cultivates. Trump’s orders obviously cannot delete these words from the language, but they can dispel or weaken the energy that once gathered around them by simply banning them. Force them into the shadows, compromise their reputations, and you dilute their strength. If you want to hang out with the MAGA tribe, these lists proclaim, then you can’t hang out with words like “justice” and “women” and “equity.” The less often these words appear in our official documents, the less powerful, the less real, their concepts and referents become.

If, for example, we banned the word “justice” from contemporary usage, we would gradually forget the deep history of justice, why it was a necessary concept for a civil society, and how it was once a touchstone for our most basic humanitarian instincts.

Such words as “equality” or “inclusion” or “diversity” . . . these are words that carry the heavy weight of a healthy democracy, and if they lose their strength, as Trump intends them to do, then our democracy will also lose its strength as well.

If that happens, if these words suffer an assault on their basic humanitarian premises, then Trump will have taken another step in weakening the principles that are now straining to keep our democracy in the hands of the people for whom it was originally designed. He will have weakened a few of the important principles on which our government relies to maintain its credibility both at home and abroad.

And he will have done it with a list. The simplicity of the tactic is frightening, the efficiency of it potentially debilitating.

The attack on our democratic word hoard has begun. And it will not stop.

What can you do?

It’s not complicated. Keep these words alive however you can. Keep them in circulation, use them in conversation, in notes, in correspondence, in your social-media posts.

Watch your back, though, deploy these words and phrases judiciously, but keep them alive.

If we exercise our language, this is a fight Trump can’t win. Read George Orwell if you have questions. No one has ever defeated the English language.