When Dickinson College updated its style guide in June, it added a curious new word to the lexicon of diversity, equity, and inclusion: “crip.” In the recent past, says the guide, this slang term for a handicapped person was “used to stigmatize or oppress people with physical disabilities.” Now, however, “it has been reclaimed by some in the disability community,” and so Dickinson lists “crip” among its “terms generally preferred.” Still among the Pennsylvania school’s “terms generally discouraged” is “crippled.”

Got that? In the woke lingo of higher education, as defined by Dickinson’s “Inclusive Language Style Guide,” it’s okay to call a person in a wheelchair a “crip,” but it’s not okay to call the same person “crippled.”

The rules are different at Colorado State University, where a web page on “inclusive language” published by the Student Disability Center labels “crip” as “less appropriate” than other formulations. It suggests swapping “That guy’s a crip” for “Tom is unable to walk.” George Mason University in Virginia offers an identical recommendation. The Critical Disability Studies Collective at the University of Minnesota also frowns on “crip,” saying that “it should only be used with permission from the community or person who is being referred to.”

Such is the confusion of tongues in our ivory towers of Babel. Yet this is more than a mess of crippling contradictions — it’s a crackdown on what may be thought and said, emanating from the places that should encourage the widest range of thinking and saying.

Some of these free-speech fights have seeped into the mainstream, as with the newfangled battles over sex, gender, and pronouns. The quarrels tend to start on campus, where they are at once more encompassing, more intense, and more exasperating. Just about every college and university now seems to have guides to “inclusive” language. In the last decade or so, they have become a genre of bureaucratic literature, full of recommendations and regulations. They’ve also created a paradox for progressives, who lately have crusaded in behalf of so-called banned books in school and community libraries. In the halls of academe, they seek to ban words and phrases.

Most of this goes unnoticed, though occasionally a silly or provocative choice makes national news. A guide at the University of California, Irvine, for example, became notorious about a year and a half ago for its discouragement of the idiom “kill two birds with one stone.” The problem for UCI was not that this hoary phrase is a worn-out cliché, but rather that it employs “violent language.” UCI suggested replacing it with a bad rhyme: “Feed two birds with one scone.” That led to a round of mockery on social media. The guide weathered the negative attention and remained in place. It’s still good for a laugh, but its persistence also reveals the determination of today’s language police. They don’t confine their assaults to English, either. At Michigan State University, the Department of Romance and Classical Studies has a website devoted to “non-binary/inclusive language” for French, Italian, and Spanish — languages whose nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are, as a matter of grammar, either masculine or feminine.

Language of course is always changing, which is one reason why dictionaries come out in new editions. Young people drive much of this evolution, as they learn language and invent new expressions. These come and go, but mostly they go the way of “Gag me with a spoon,” a “Valley girl” phrase that was ubiquitous in the 1980s but today is endangered if not extinct. Others stick around. In The Elements of Style, the famous writing guide by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, the authors predicted that “by the time this paragraph sees print, psyched, nerd, ripoff, dude, geek, and funky will be the words of yesteryear.” That was in the fourth edition, published in 2000. They were right about the impermanence of slang but wrong about these examples, which mostly remain in our vocabulary. Tom Wolfe both lampooned and celebrated the churn of language in his 2004 novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, in a hilarious and vulgar passage on “this year’s prevailing college creole,” in which students adapt the F-word to a variety of purposes but almost never apply it — “the usage had become somewhat archaic,” deadpans Wolfe — to the physical act for which it was originally known.

The authors of campus language guides, however, are up to something else. Their goal is not to describe how people speak and write but rather to prescribe it, in an ongoing struggle to shape and control thought itself. Their inadvertent muse is George Orwell, who identified this agenda better than anybody before or since, first in essays in the 1940s and then in his novel 1984, which introduced “Newspeak,” a satiric lingua franca that shows how totalitarians impoverish language to crush freedom. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” says a character at the lie-infested Ministry of Truth. “In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

The best example of this approach on campus appeared last year at Stanford University, whose “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” announced its intention “to eliminate many forms of harmful language, including racist, violent, and biased” words and phrases. The 13-page guide seeks to purge 161 of them. A few of its selections are sensible, such as the advice not to call a person of mixed-race ancestry a “half-breed.” Others are mundane, such as preferring “firefighters” to “firemen” (which is what Ray Bradbury called book-burners in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451). As for the noun “cripple” and the adjective “crippled,” Stanford rebukes this “ableist language that trivializes the experiences of people living with disabilities.”

Much of the guide is bizarre. It regards “gray beard” as an insult: “It calls out an older, and presumably more experienced, IT or cybersecurity person by referring to their age instead of their name.” It marks “thug” as racist, which may reveal that when Stanford’s liberals hear this word for a ruffian, they immediately think of non-whites. A “trigger warning” is rebranded as a “content note” because “the phrase can cause stress about what’s to follow.” Forget about uttering “ladies and gentlemen,” as it “lumps a group of people using gender binary language that doesn’t include everyone.” Also expunged is a word that was “once used to describe a person who could not speak and implied the person was incapable of expressing themselves” — and therefore making it indecent to refer to this whole enterprise as “stupid.”

Yet it’s not merely stupid — it’s devious. Among the verboten words is “American,” which “often refers to people from the United States only, thereby insinuating that the US is the most important country in the Americas (which is actually made up of 42 countries).” In Stanford’s brave new world of linguistics, the proper term for what is commonly called an “American” is “US citizen.” (Moreover, that patronizing parenthetical statement about 42 countries is questionable: There are 35 sovereign states in North and South America.) A public backlash persuaded Stanford to eliminate the “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” from its website, but its attempt to shove the document down the memory hole failed because the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal has preserved a copy online.

In trying to rub out “American,” Stanford was no pioneer (to use a word that many language guides call “colonialist”). Several years ago, the University of New Hampshire worried that “American” was “problematic.” Colorado State argued that calling a U.S. citizen an “American” is inadvisable because it “erases other cultures.” The most likely erasure, however, comes from the attempt to erase a sense of American nationhood by sidelining the word that Americans are prone to use when defining themselves as distinct from, say, Canadians or Venezuelans. That could be the point. The authors of anti-“American” language guides may envision a world without the American way of life or the American dream. As Orwell warned, when you lose the word, you lose the concept.

Perhaps more than any other school, the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point has demonstrated how a language guide can become a tool of brainwashing. In 2015, it published a list of “racial microaggressions” such as this observation: “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough.” What this line really means, according to the school’s language cops, is that “people of color are lazy and/or incompetent and need to work harder.” Therefore, the idea that hard work leads to success must never be stated. Nor may opinions such as “America is a melting pot” or “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” They are not even debatable claims. They are forbidden. They are thoughtcrimes.

It can seem that the hardest-working people on campus are those who aspire to take offense at ordinary words and phrases. As they sniff around for slights, they are like detection dogs that find false positives everywhere and won’t stop barking. While it’s true that scoundrels will use language to insult, denigrate, and worse, the proliferation and arcana of language guides demonstrate that others strive to become victims. Except we shouldn’t call them “victims.” That’s another no-no, according to Stanford’s guide, which, with a split infinitive, urges its readers “to not define people by just one of their experiences.”

At the bleak and alarming end of the story of 1984, Winston Smith succumbs to the mind control of Big Brother. But Orwell added an appendix about Newspeak, describing the fictional history and methods of making “heretical” thoughts “literally unthinkable.” It’s written in standard English and in the past tense, hinting that Big Brother’s victory was only temporary — and that a rotten regime ultimately will fail in its sinister efforts to cripple free expression.