‘Bringing home the bacon’ offensive? It’s more of an offence to make a farce of English

As a career reptile – the late Denis Thatcher’s word for the class that also includes Paul Dacre and James Delingpole – I can see some merit in Peta’s plan to make people speak more respectfully about animals.

Its case, announced last week, is that: “Just as it became unacceptable to use racist, homophobic or ableist language, phrases that trivialise cruelty to animals will vanish as more people begin to appreciate animals for who they are and start ‘bringing home the bagels’ instead of the bacon.”

Accompanying examples of allegedly speciesist phrases, with Peta-approved alternatives, were promptly lampooned across social media, to a point that must have caused deep satisfaction and maybe, even, relief, in an organisation to which sensationalism is mother’s milk, yet ever less easy to generate. There are only so many times that you can use women’s bodies to draw attention to the mistreatment of animals – “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” – before some people wonder if even young women, like mink and crocodiles, have the right to be appreciated for what they are.

And creepiness aside, did excitement around Peta’s pinups of Naomi Campbell (pre her fur-apostasy), ever come close to the commotion, following its proposal that the unacceptable “kill two birds with one stone” be replaced with the approved phrase, “feed two birds with one scone”? How many tens, or scores of women would Peta have to pay to strip off, given the competition from fellow objectifiers, to get bona fide influencers, such as John Cleese, recirculating its demands for nothing? “I think,” the comedian tweeted, “Peta’s suggested emendations to traditional old English sayings are pure parsnipshit.”

Perfect. If, as some pointed out, Peta’s new line in linguistic sanctimony may simply invite more ridicule from the nastier omnivores, then that only assists the animal lovers now citing victimisation as another reason to make veganism a protected belief. Win win. Two birds with one scone.

Respect, then, to whichever Peta campaigner grasped that little, at least in Anglophone countries where entire careers are founded on pedantry, is better calculated to cause mass outrage than offences against the language, all the more so when something certifiably antique – such as a 16th-century phrase about bird-killing – is threatened by a neologism. Of course there is not a chance of the public submitting to Peta’s edict, or not until horses and bulls become as adept as human under-26-year-olds at interjecting: “Nobody says that any more. Just so you know.”

Moreover, the organisation’s unconvincing list of metaphors, all so hoary as to be pretty much phatic – nothing more than ritual social content – only underlined the fatuity of insisting its language planning could, ultimately, have any impact on, say, the supply of goats to yoga practitioners, or the availability of unpaid poultry to West End theatre producers, to cite two of their recent concerns.

But as demonstrated by evergreen arguments over less and fewer, by spluttering about apostrophes and sentences beginning with “so”, along with laments for disappearing words – smeuse (“the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal”) – perceived threats to language usage can evoke emotional public responses, capable of eclipsing anything Peta has extracted with its sternest campaign literature. “When you buy a dog,” demands this exterminator of innocent clichés, “what will you do with the shelter dog you kill?”

That its experiments in language manipulation may also recall Orwell’s Newspeak, and real-life attempts to coerce people identified as linguistic miscreants, could, admittedly, be less helpful to Peta’s consciousness-raising. Just because an offending word might be “bacon”, as opposed to say, “diversity”, “fetus”, or “evidence-based” (among words newly ruled out by Trump-era officials), does not conceal a similar intention to privilege its own ideas over others it has arbitrarily ruled unacceptable, having skipped public debate. And if Peta’s intervention was influenced by the linguistic ambitions of current inclusivity pioneers, it should possibly also have noted the resistance when “mother”, for example, is replaced, without public consultation, by “chest-feeder”, “pregnant person”. An initially defiant Wellcome Collection had to concede, earlier this year, that its bold replacement of “women” with “womxn” possibly needed more justification than “conversations with collaborators”.

With little evidence that “flogging a dead horse” has ever contributed to a rise in dead-horse flogging, Peta trivialises, by implication, opposition to deliberately harmful or degrading terminology. You can’t but notice, incidentally, that Peta doesn’t – Naomi Campbell flashbacks? – include, among “unacceptable” comparators, the still-unfinished feminist campaign against overtly sex-discriminatory speech. To memorise Peta’s curious “bring home the bagel” may seem less pressing, to some of us, than assisting leading BBC presenters with their long struggle to understand that terms such as “headmaster”, “the taxman”, “policemen”, “firemen”, or simply, “men” (as in, “the men in Whitehall”), are not, notwithstanding appearances, generic. Even permissive linguists accept, occasionally, that adjustments might be necessary. Steven Pinker, for instance, recently observed that “wife-beater” – a US word for singlet – “has got to go”.

Nobody could argue with Peta’s premise that the most unassuming words can also count, depending on the context. The author of an excellent letter in a recent London Review of Books speculates on what might have happened if the Old English word ‘stay’ – “vital support, self-control, stability, thoughtfulness” – had been used for the Brexit debate, instead of Old French ‘remain’, “with its connotations of death, leftovers and failure”. How many dogs, Alan Goater adds, “ever won a pat on the head and a biscuit by complying with the command ‘Remain’!”

Back to Peta, I think. Although one of the few things missing, by some oversight, from its compendious website is any advice on appropriate animal address, by companion humans. “Could you possibly fetch?” “Is it all right to call you Bingo?” We await guidance from the latest authority on correct form.

• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist