What in the word?

My instinctive reaction to the broad, undifferentiated cuts to federal departments and programs was skepticism and distress. Would the cuts affect the cleanliness of our air and water, the safety of our food supply, our protection from diseases believed long ago eliminated (or, worse yet, newly evolving)? If so, they were incredibly worrisome. But at the same I reassured myself that there were probably many government-subsidized programs that could stand to be pared down after close examination. So, I was willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt.

However, it quickly became clear that there was to be no close examination, that the Administration’s actions were far more indiscriminate, disruptive, and threatening to our national wellbeing than we could have imagined — i.e., that no one seemed to be looking at a program’s effectiveness, cost effectiveness, or alignment with our national goals or strategies.

And when officials started dictating what language federal employees could or could not use, well, that’s when alarm bells started clanging. We’ve seen that script before — fortunately for us rarely in the U.S., besides during the McCarthy era or on the pages of some of the greatest works of dystopian fiction still on library shelves: 1984, Animal Farm, Farenheit 451, and yes, even Harry Potter with its Ministry of Magic regulating the contents printed in the Daily Prophet (sounds like “profit”).

Which words were banned first? Diversity, equity, and inclusion or references to them. Closer to home at Planet Word, programs that focus on language science have also come under scrutiny.

For the past 3 years, we’ve been proud to house the Language Science Station (LSS) project led by the University of Maryland in partnership with Gallaudet and Howard universities. As part of the LSS, undergraduates and Master’s students are trained to carry out a variety of linguistic research studies with museum visitors, the goal being to demystify linguistics and engage museum visitors in real citizen scientific research. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation, but given the staffing cuts and potential budget cuts to the NSF, funding for the LSS in the future is in question. That’s a loss for the students and professors involved, for the field of linguistics and the broader social sciences, and for making science more accessible — an important goal in a world that is so reliant on scientific discovery and progress.

As one National Science Foundation program officer put it in an anguished email to colleagues:

We have to make the value of our research publicly visible . . . We need to emphasize . . . the broader societal importance of language science — how children learn to read, how bilingualism benefits communicative function, how language disorders impact education and healthcare. If the public and policymakers do not see the relevance of our work, we risk losing critical funding and infrastructure permanently.

Other suspect terms on the watchlist include hate speech, implicit bias, multicultural, and disability, to name a few on a list published in the Washington Post (Feb. 4, 2025). Not surprisingly, they are all concepts that are core to exhibits at Planet Word. We actually want visitors to understand how words can wound or create divisions in communities, how implicit bias can creep into decision-making, how education benefits from taking into account our multicultural society in order to help students achieve their highest potential, and how accommodating those with disabilities elevates us all.

As at all museums, one of our goals is to inspire curiosity — the bedrock of education and the pursuit of knowledge. Thanks to our NSF-funded Language Science Station experiments, visitors’ curiosity about language was tapped or heightened; they were able to investigate, to ask questions, to wonder, and to learn. We all lose when avenues to follow our curiosity are closed off.

There’s no disputing that words have tremendous power. They can describe worlds we’ve never seen or create characters we’ve never met, but who somehow feel like our best friends. The appropriate word can put muscle into feelings and galvanize action. They can lift us up or tear us down. But how have we arrived at a place where words have become so weaponized and so threateningly powerful that they need to be banned or banished?

In the last few years, seeing efforts around the country to ban books, I felt like I was being transported into the past; I was shocked that battles I believed long settled were rearing up again (sort of pointless in a time when books are available “virtually” everywhere). What could possibly be the point of trying to restrict access?

But here we are in 2025, finding ourselves once again needing to fight — but not just for the right to read certain books, but also for the right to use certain words. It’s like we’ve been transported back to Orwell’s 1984 and forced to use Newspeak. How did this teleporting to the past happen? I would argue that the seeds for this disturbing trend were sowed in 2017, with the introduction of the Orwellian phrase “alternative facts.”

You might have breathed a sigh of relief that 1984 (and even 2017) came and went without our country becoming authoritarian, but let’s keep an eye on what’s happening now, and let’s not forget that Orwell didn’t just write about 1984 — he also predicted, scarily, that

[by] 2050 — earlier, probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron —they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be…The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought as we understand it now.

—Ann Friedman, founder of Planet Word