Before the Codex Changed: Old Words, New Gatekeepers
This is a dirty blog. Not for the reasons you will expect. The dirt is the behaviour and attitude it discusses, not the detail. There is no porn here.
Before 5th edition, Dungeons & Dragons was mostly played by straight white guys. By 5th edition the culture shifted openly and visibly. The best rules, for my money, remain 1st and 2nd edition Advanced. That is not nostalgia. It is observation from someone who has played across decades and tables.
The larger change was not just mechanical details of a game system. To a large extent it was who sat at the table. It is easy to highlight that social shift within the hobby. But there is something deeper occurring which is not so often discussed. It was the language that became permissible around the table and far beyond it. The type of players shifted for sure but so too did the cultural terminology. These two changes occurred simultaneously. Although they have happened interdependently they are also independent topics.
Political Correctness arrived as a control mandate. It was sold as compassion. In practice it functioned as an attempt to stamp out labels for things in the delusion that erasing the words would magically erase the things themselves. What it actually did was disable accurate communication. When you cannot name a pattern, you cannot discuss the pattern. That is not progress. That is fog.
A great many words that by the 2010s were treated as automatic insults and career-ending slurs were not regarded that way in the 1980s. They were comedic or clinical descriptors for specific, regularly observed phenomena. People used them the way a mechanic uses the correct name for a part. The intent was recognition, not hatred.
A large portion of that shift happened inside what later became the LGBT cultural formation. That formation is not the same thing as the older "gay and lesbian scenes" as they were known. The older scene had its own internal language, its own codes, its own ways of sorting behaviour and personality. There was a rough cultural accord. Specific words distinguished specific roles. A fag-hag was not the same as a dyke. Those terms pointed at observable, behavioural, relatively predictable personae. They were shorthand. They did a job: communication, stereotyping of observed social roles required for easy navigation.The language relevant to an emergent and identifiable culture.
Today many people under forty have no idea what those distinctions even meant. The organic culture that produced them was replaced by a manufactured one. Top-down social engineering and gatekeeping did the replacing. The original minority subculture’s own language was treated as the problem rather than as a working toolkit. That subculture became an early test-bed for Orwellian thought-control techniques that later spread more widely. I lived through the change. I am not theorising from a distance. I bare witness.
Smoking dames and impenetrable dams. Those symbols were once codices for particular cultural roles. Talk about them now in the old register and you risk cancellation, even though the intent is description, not attack. The new orthodoxy insists the words themselves are violence. The old culture treated the words as tools. The terminology was associative, referential based on previously existing backstory and lore. One of those two approaches prioritises control of speech. The other prioritises the ability to point at reality and say “that is what is happening.”
I refuse to abandon the original terminology simply because agents of agenda-based social-engineering pogroms have successfully persuaded a critical mass of people that the words are now offensive. The words are mere words. Mouth-noises with assigned conceptual meaning. The intent remains non-offensive. The intent is communication. When a culture decides that precision itself is the crime, the culture has already chosen fog over clarity.
This statement is not a defence of every cruel use of every old word. It is a defence of the right to keep functional language when the alternative is enforced vagueness. Patterns of behaviour still exist. Roles still exist. People still sort themselves into recognisable types whether or not the current year permits the old labels. Pretending otherwise does not make the patterns disappear. It only makes honest conversation about them more difficult.
That fog is a device. It is divisive. The control is the point. Once a group accepts that certain accurate descriptors are radioactive, the descriptors can be withheld or reissued at will by whoever holds the cultural high ground. That is not liberation. It is management.
I will continue to use the words that do the actual work. If that makes this post unpublishable in polite circles, so be it. The alternative is to accept that communication itself must be subordinated to the latest gatekeeping project. I lived through the organic version. I have no interest in pretending the manufactured replacement is an improvement.
Gamifying : Before The Codex Changed : Layer One
Gamifying : Before The Codex Changed : Layer Two :
Words As Spells, Cognition As Circuitry