WIPO, the grandly acronymed World Intellectual Property Organisation are patent experts who, from their base in Geneva, recently issued a decree to staff to avoid offence by continuing to use well-worn phrases that even our own Orwellian Labour Party haven’t banned - yet.

The UN agency is ‘clamping’ down (which is a phrase that should only ever be used when referring to woodwork or the third Reich) on masculine-specific terms to stop women from becoming ‘misrepresented’ (who produces this utter gibberish?).

WIPO has decreed that cavemen and women are now to be referred to as ‘cave dwellers,’ although I am unsure as to when the cave word would ever be used in a patent application, but hey ho…

I am no longer an ‘Englishman’ but now an ‘English person’ and fishermen, hot on the heels of Sam Smith and his ‘fisherthem’ comment are now ‘fishers.’

Brett Ellis has had enough of changes in languageBrett Ellis has had enough of changes in language So, daydreaming of the next time I am in my wife’s ancestral seat of Cornwall, as the wind blows and the storm batters the hardy stone rock in, say, the harbour at Porthleven as I chat to a Cornish ‘person’ (male) wearing flip flops and tie die shorts, I may ask if ‘they’ are a ‘fisher’? No doubt it would only stoke the anti-emmet fire, and I may well find myself as herring bait to save spoiling his next pint of Spingo…

A waiter or waitress is now a ‘restaurant server’ which I don’t get as both genders are already catered for and only two syllables as opposed to five, and a midwife is now to be known as a ‘birth attendant’. If anything, with that last one, I, and my fellow brethren should be offended having been excluded in all millennia from such an occupation.

That said, I would find it strange if my wife had a male midwife (midhusband?) in what is the most personal, if beautiful yet traumatic time of a woman’s life.

My friend Darren is no longer a lumberjack (and the Monty Python sketch is now redundant) as he is now to be known only as a bog-standard wood chopper, or ‘chopper’, which may have negative connotations as it is too closely aligned with the 70s bike of choice and as a double entendre for a constituent of a gentleman’s secret garden.

Oh, please, stop the world, I want to get off! I genuinely can't abide this nonsense anymore.

Even more galling are those who subscribe to this gibberish as they continue to pretend that everyone is offended by every utterance, as the majority look on aghast whilst the deranged and disturbed believe they have got one over the rest of us by this folly seemingly now becoming commonplace.

  • Brett Ellis is a teacher.