Nomenclatural Hot Potato
When changing the name doesn't change the underlying reality.
Let’s say you want to affect some kind of social change. You want to reduce a stigma or eliminate a bias, or otherwise alter the perception of a group of people. How would you do it?
Well, there are a couple of different things you could try.
You could talk to individual people about how their views of the stigmatized group lack nuance and empathy. You might change a few minds this way, but it’s difficult, demanding, and above all doesn’t scale; you can’t hold a million one-on-one conversations.
You could try to change the stigmatized people themselves - after all, if a stereotyped group no longer exhibits the stereotype, after enough time the stigma caused by the stereotype is likely to die out. But this is truly difficult. You would be trying to change the behavior of millions of people, which is even harder than getting them to change their minds.
Or you could do what social justice advocates have successfully done: change the language.
There’s a popular view in certain circles that language defines reality.
This is…imprecise.
Language can function as a mediator between the human mind and objective reality, but it does not define reality itself. That is reality’s job. No amount of name-changes will alter protons and electrons; molecules, objects, and physical laws exist regardless of what we call them.
There are many things, however, that don’t exist in objective reality, more abstract concepts that only materialize in the collective human psyche. These aren’t physical things that you can point to; they’re ideas.
And ideas are affected by language, because the words we use to define these ideas are the building blocks of this abstract world.
In this case, it would seem like changing the language people use to talk about an idea can change the idea itself.
Enough talking around the subject: I’m talking about political correctness, or as it’s more commonly referred to nowadays, woke language. All of us in America old enough to remember the last decade or two have had the experience of seeing certain words or phrases replaced by others. The oldest among us have seen it happen over and over again: a word that was once a perfectly acceptable way to refer to something is suddenly tabooed by arcane decision from on high (generally an academic), and everyone has to learn the new word to refer to that thing and make sure to use it lest they be accused of the relevant -ism associated with failure to keep up.
An example that I’ll use throughout this essay is the way that we refer to people who would, today, be diagnosed with low-functioning autism, specifically those far along the spectrum. Here I’m not talking about those who are functional adults, but rather those who require constant care, the more extreme cases that will never be able to live independently.
The oldest way of referring to these people that I can remember is ‘retard’ or ‘retarded’. The word itself means ‘to slow or hold back’ and can be used without valence (as in ‘fire retardant material’); however when used to refer to a person it seems insulting. ‘Retard’ was a common grade-school insult when I was growing up, even though none of us were using it to refer to anyone it actually would have applied to.
But as it turns out, ‘retard’ was, when introduced, a value-neutral replacement for other medical terms like moron and imbecile, which had become derogatory. After all, saying someone was mentally slow or held back wasn’t as insulting as saying they were stupid, right?
But retard became an insult, and so in the 2010s the powers that be decided to replace it with ‘intellectually disabled’ or ‘mentally handicapped’.
After all, saying someone had a handicap wasn’t an insult, was it? And we all know that people shouldn’t make fun of disabilities. Federal rules in the US were changed to use ‘intellectually disabled’ as official government terminology:
Why are we changing the term “mental retardation” to “intellectual disability”?
The term “intellectual disability” is gradually replacing the term “mental retardation” nationwide. Advocates for individuals with intellectual disability have rightfully asserted that the term “mental retardation” has negative connotations, has become offensive to many people, and often results in misunderstandings about the nature of the disorder and those who have it.
In October 2010, Congress passed Rosa’s Law, which changed references to “mental retardation” in specified Federal laws to “intellectual disability,” and references to “a mentally retarded individual” to “an individual with an intellectual disability.”
But here in 2025, the Powers That Be have begun moving again. Intellectually handicapped and mentally disabled are no longer in vogue; after all, saying that people are handicapped or disabled is to make them lesser, to marginalize and dehumanize them. It is a form of Othering, and it is not to be tolerated.
So we get a new word to refer to these people:
Enter Neurodivergent.
These people aren’t morons or imbeciles, they’re not retarded, they’re not handicapped or disabled, they’re just different, brain-wise. And different isn’t bad, in fact, it’s good! We need diversity in the world. Let people diverge neurologically. You wouldn’t want to be enforcing conformity, would you?
(Unless it’s conformity in calling people neurodivergent instead of retarded. Then you want to enforce all the conformity you can.)
I’ve even heard the term neurospicy used, as if brains were a kind of salsa and most people’s were bland.
Hell, being neurodivergent or neurospicy actually sounds kind of…good? Like, it makes you different and special, and who doesn’t want to be different and special? After all, it’s just a divergence, just a little bit of spiciness. Aren’t those good?
(I know of no one who would ever want to have low-functioning autism. It’s not fun or pleasant or cool to have.)
There’s something to this. I don’t understand it very well, but there is genuinely something about using language to change minds. I’m not saying it’s always a bad thing.
However.
Sometimes, it turns into a game of what I call Nomenclatural Hot Potato.
Nomenclatural, for referring to the names of things.
Hot Potato, for the game in which a potato is heated up in the oven and then tossed around, wherein the goal is to catch and throw it fast enough that you don’t get burned, so the potato ends up going from person to person, with no one wanting to keep hold of it for long.
When does a game of Nomenclatural Hot Potato start?
Someone wants to change the perception of a group of people by changing what they’re called, so they campaign to get the name changed.
Imbeciles become retards.
However, the characteristics of the group of people haven’t actually changed. Those people behave the same, look the same, feel the same. They leave the same impressions.
So the meanings that used to be associated with the old word slowly accrue to the new one. Mental retardation, once a clinical term without judgement, becomes a schoolyard insult.
So a new generation of people see that a group is labeled with an insulting name and, wanting to change the perception of that group, campaign to get the name changed, believing that by changing the word we use to refer to the group, we change the attitude towards that group, that the new word will have new associations.
Only the underlying reality still hasn’t changed, so the new word accrues the same associations as the old one-
Retards become intellectually disabled people-
And the cycle starts again.
Like a potato passed from hand to hand, the word-changers seem to believe that so long as they keep moving, keep changing the way the group is referred to, they can keep anyone from getting burnt.
Intellectually disabled people become neurodivergent-
And on and on it goes.
Nomenclatural Hot Potato is a theory, and theories are tested by using them to predict the world (which, when done in a controlled manner, is called an experiment). So what does NHP predict?
It predicts that the train won’t stop at neurodivergent. At some point neurodivergent will come to mean something akin to what retard once meant, and a new word will be chosen by the Powers That Be to take its place. It also predicts that whatever is chosen won’t actually solve the problem, because the people meant to be referred to with whatever new label emerges won’t have actually changed.
The association between retard and people who have low-functioning autism or Down syndrome or whatever - it didn’t come from the word, it came from the people. And those people aren’t changed by the words we use to refer to them. Changing the word at best buys you a small amount of time, until the word gains the connotations its predecessors had because it’s being used to refer to the same people.
When we think about intangible things, our thoughts are limited somewhat by the vocabulary we can use to think about them. People in 2000 BCE might not have been able to think about diminishing marginal utility or intersectionality, because those terms, and many of the concepts they rely on, hadn’t been fleshed out or defined at the time. In this case, changing the vocabulary can change the way people think and perceive the world.
However, when we think of tangible things, our words are reflections of the things that exist in the real world. Changing the words we use is like changing the label on a bin or the name on a map - the contents of the bin and the city itself are unaffected, and so eventually the new label or name comes to mean the same as what the old did.
Calling Detroit ‘Richopolis’ wouldn’t change anything about the economic conditions the city faces; labeling a bin full of underwear ‘Coats’ doesn’t change its contents.
In the end, Nomenclatural Hot Potato is what happens when people try to change the perception of a real, tangible, observable thing by changing its referent, and find to their dismay that calling a wolf a sheep does not, in fact, turn it into an herbivore. It’s a pointless game whose sole purpose inevitably becomes a virtue signaling competition for those with the time and energy to learn the latest trendy terms.
I get that we may not want to use words that have come to include negative connotations to refer to people with whom we don’t want to associate those connotations. I get that language changes and evolves over time, and that there’s nothing wrong with that.
But in the end, those who play, and especially those who begin games of Nomenclatural Hot Potato need to take a serious second look at what they’re doing, because the connotations of words come from people’s experience of the underlying reality. They’re a reflection of people’s actual experiences, not the cause of them.
Is there any meaningful distance between this and the concept of the euphemism treadmill? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill lists moron->retard->special needs->intellectual disability as one of several examples of euphemism treadmills.