Enjoy. An extract takes up the remainder of this blog piece:

NICE proposes linguistic solution to the “obesity” crisis

NHS staff have been told not to call people “obese” by the medicines watchdog. In the latest version of its inclusive language guide, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) instructs medical workers to describe the badly overweight as “people with obesity”. It also warns against using “diabetic”, and “alcoholic” rather than “people with diabetes” and “people who are dependent on alcohol”. [J4MB: in a similar vein, are short people “people with shortness”?]

Other banned words include “homeless”, which is replaced by “people experiencing homelessness”, while “disadvantaged people” become “people who are underserved”.

The guide claims it’s “good manners” to use such alternatives because they don’t indicate that a condition is “what a person is”. But according to FSU General Secretary Toby Young, the advice will be a “fat lot of help”.

“The obsessive language policing by woke mandarins is symptomatic of the intellectual vacuity of the progressive left, who now think the way to help disadvantaged people – sorry, the ‘underserved’ – is to relabel them in a more politically correct way,” Toby told the Telegraph.

“A fat lot of help that will be, if I’m allowed to use that word. What a ‘person with obesity’ needs is not a nice new label, but a GP appointment so they can get a prescription for Ozempic.”

For many people, the obvious response to the NICE guidance might seem to be an eye-roll or a belly laugh. The trouble is that such nonsense can too easily morph into an informal – or even a formal – speech code, with all the risks that carries of not-so-funny disciplinary action.

Full story here.

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