We have for some time been in the grip of activists who insist we change how we speak because it is offensive to them. The University of Tennessee has agreed to the demands of a gay activist group and has issued instructions that students must no longer use personal pronouns like ‘him’ and ‘her’ and ‘she’ and ‘he’ because those pronouns are offensive to gays, lesbians and the transgendered. George Orwell, in his dystopian novel 1984, described how Newspeak worked to control people by making words mean something other than the truth. ‘Foetus’, for example, is the Latin word for ‘baby’, and was used by the medical profession as a convenient way of differentiating between a born and an unborn baby. The abortionists, however, succeeded in convincing a majority of the population that the word ‘foetus’ did not mean ‘baby’ at all, but that it meant ‘inert lump of non-living matter’. Language is always changing, and today the word ‘less’ is now used where ‘fewer’ is grammatically correct, and there are many other examples of the rules of grammar falling by the wayside, all of which makes it easier for Big Brother to introduce Newspeak words effortlessly into the public consciousness and for gay activists to determine that gender pronouns are offensive and must not be used. President Obama recently ordered the name of the Alaskan mountain Mount McKinley be changed to the native Inuit Indian name of Denali because the name of an American president was offensive to them, much to the surprise of the Inuits.

When is a name not a name?
When is a verb cause for shame?
A pronoun offensive to speak?
Renaming a native named peak?
The activist Left claims the right
To change what offends in their sight
The truth is now something to paint
In terms that will stifle complaint
We know in what way this will end
East Asia was always our friend