Commentary Change in linguistic usage is normal, and it can either add to or detract from language’s expressive power. It’s much more likely to be sinister when directed by some organization acting in an official or public capacity than when it arises spontaneously from the population at large. Directed change in linguistic usage is usually in pursuit of some practical or ideological end, acknowledged or unacknowledged—or both. The American Medical Association (AMA), for example, wants doctors to cease using the word disparity, meaning difference in characteristics or in outcomes in different groups, and to use inequity instead, meaning (in its opinion) inequality, for it wants to replace inequality also by inequity. In so doing, it’s propounding a worldview that’s thoroughly communist, more thoroughly communist in fact than that of Marx and Engels themselves, who had no inhibitions against denigrating whole groups for their own backwardness and cultural inferiority, and even …