A New York Times writer explores language “on the left,” meaning political liberals. The article also helps us understand choices for business communicators and my challenges revising Business Communication and Character (11e).

The first sentence of the article includes the word “freshman,” and already I have questions. At Cornell, we have been using “first-year” as a gender-neutral term for some time. Of course, this only exemplifies the Amy Harmon’s point about changing language.

Harmon describes frustration on all political sides, including needing to adapt to changing language, skepticism about “wokeness,” and choosing semantics over action

I fear that my book, revised but not yet published, is already out of date. Did I give “BIPOC” and “Latinx” too much attention and “LGBTQIA+” too little? Should I have addressed “wokeness”? I’ll wrestle with all this in the 12th edition.