https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/28/university-of-michigan-it-department-wants-people-to-stop-saying-picnic-preferred-pronouns-and-girl/
The University of Michigan’s technology department is doing the important work of protecting students from the horrors of words like “picnic,” “girl,” “man,” “preferred pronouns,” and “honey,” even though the real horror would be finding these offensive. The list, created by the “Words Matter Task Force,” details words and phrases deemed anathema to an “inclusive” work and academic environment, offering awkward or non-specific replacements.
The strangest inclusion on the list would have to be “picnic,” which finds itself on the chopping block due to a false story about its origin. Rumors spread across social media contending that the word “picnic” developed in the context of lynching black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, but these claims have been debunked.
The word actually derives from the French “pique-nique,” which was coined in the 17th century to describe people coming together to eat as a group, with participants responsible for bringing different food. The university thus wishes to censor language based on an internet hoax.
Likewise, the common expression “long time no see” is derided for potentially being derogatory towards people from Asian descent. Or Native Americans. No one is quite sure. Due to the ubiquity of the phrase, it is virtually impossible to trace its origins, but it likely arose as a direct translation from Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, or a Native American dialect. Yet the leap from “may have started from direct translations from an undetermined language” to “harmful and exclusionary” is vast.