This new run on the outrage treadmill projects the contemporary left’s obsession with race and racism onto the right.In a 1994 New York Times op-ed, the famed linguist Steven Pinker introduced the “euphemism treadmill,” the idea that as much as we keep replacing more benign-sounding terms for those that have acquired a negative valence, ultimately, “concepts, not words, are in charge,” so when we “give a concept a new name, … the name becomes colored by” our underlying negative associations once more over time. Eventually a new name has to be invented, and the game starts all over again.Thus, we...
