I am writing this from Marrakech, which is a sentence I have now had a full week to enjoy. But I could not have typed it the week before that, because the week before that I was in an airport at midnight, folded into a seat designed for a smaller and more optimistic person, on a flight the airline cheerfully described as a red-eye. Not a late flight. Not an overnight departure. A red eye. Named, without apology, for what your face looks like when it’s over.
Nobody put that through a committee.
This is remarkable when you think about it. Which I am now doing, loudly, in a riad in Morocco, because that is apparently how I vacation. My wife is at the pool. I am inside, interrogating airline vocabulary. We are both exactly where we belong.
We are living through a golden age of linguistic renovation. Words that once seemed perfectly fine have been quietly escorted off the premises by people with lanyards, strong opinions, and a shared Google Doc titled something like “Phase Two: The Reckoning.” “Homeless” became “unhoused,” which is a genuine improvement in framing, until you follow the logic all the way down the hall. Because if you are “unhoused” and then you get a house, what are you? “Un-unhoused” requires a linguistics degree and a glass of water. “Unhomeless” was right there, intuitive, self-explanatory, practically gift-wrapped. Nobody took it. It just sits in the lot with its little suitcase while the rest of us try to parse “un-unhoused” over our morning coffee. The paperwork alone. The poor clerk.
“Stewardess” became “flight attendant.” “Mailman” became “mail carrier.” Someone wrote a LinkedIn post that used the phrase “as a society, we must do better.” As a society, we wrote that post and then used the word “killing it” in the very next status update, because we are a species of jaw-dropping contradictions held together by caffeine and selective outrage.
We are doing so much better. We are absolutely, spectacularly exhausting ourselves trying to do better.
The psycholinguist Steven Pinker has a name for this. He calls it the euphemism treadmill: the process by which a polite new word replaces an offensive old one, only to absorb the same connotations over time and require yet another replacement. “Toilet” replaced “water closet.” “Restroom” replaced “toilet.” At current velocity, our grandchildren will be asking airport staff for directions to the “personal restoration suite,” receiving a pamphlet, a brief orientation video, and a follow-up survey about their restoration experience.
And yet.
I know this because I took a red-eye to get here. I arrived in Marrakech looking exactly like my thesis statement: bloodshot, slightly confused, walking with the quiet dignity of a man who has lost an argument with a seat belt. A week later I am fine. Rested, caffeinated, fully restored in the personal suite of my own riad. The essay, however, remains. Some things cannot be fixed by sleep or mint tea or the sheer redemptive power of a good tagine.
Red Eye Just Sits There
“Red-eye flight” has never once been summoned before a committee. No task force has convened. No sensitivity reader has circled it in red, which, now that I think about it, would be poetic and also hilarious. No style guide has flagged it. No op-ed has demanded its retirement. It just floats there in the lexicon, bloodshot and completely unbothered, the golden retriever of aviation terminology: happy, untroubled, shedding on everything, answerable to no one, occasionally licking its own face in public.
Think about what we are actually saying. Red eye. We are describing a human eyeball in active physiological distress, and we have decided, as an industry, that this is the brand, this is the pitch, this is what we are selling. Delta will sell you one. United will sell you one. They will list it right there on the website, between “Main Cabin” and “Business Select,” with zero shame, a competitive fare, and a little clock icon that should legally be required to look ashamed of itself. The eye is red. Book now, seats are limited, the pretzels are very small, and there will not be enough of them.
Meanwhile, “grandfathered in” has been on a quiet watch list for years. “Blackout curtains” attracted scrutiny on a few design blogs, apparently because someone felt the name was sending a message that curtains have no business sending. “Lame excuse” has been flagged in more than one corporate style guide, presumably by someone using a standing desk and a deep sense of purpose. The Associated Press Stylebook releases annual updates like a nervous landlord slipping lease amendments under the door at two in the morning, which is ironically also when your red-eye departs, and yet red-eye sits in there completely undisturbed, comfortable as Trouble McFussbucket on a couch he is absolutely not supposed to be on, radiating the serene confidence of an animal who knows he has already won.
And it is not alone out there.
“Tone deaf,” a phrase deployed almost exclusively by the very people doing the linguistic renovating, in the very articles calling for more careful language, has never once been reviewed. It just keeps showing up, blissfully unexamined, like a raccoon at a dinner party that everyone has agreed not to mention.
“Killing it.” We say this to each other approximately four hundred times a day. Your presentation killed it. That outfit is killing it. You are absolutely killing it, Janet. Janet beams. Nobody calls anyone. Nobody issues a memo. The killing continues, unabated, across all platforms and time zones, and somehow this is fine, this is a compliment, this is Tuesday.
And then there is “blind spot,” which is, I must stress, currently being used in a diversity and inclusion workshop somewhere in this world, as you read this sentence. A corporate trainer is standing in front of a room of well-meaning people, delivering a presentation on seeing others more fully, with the centerpiece being identifying your blind spots. The irony is not subtle. The irony has not been sent to sensitivity training. The irony is, in fact, killing it.
The Arbitrary Hall Pass System
What determines which phrases get renovated and which ones get a permanent hall pass? This is the question red-eye forces into the open, and the answer, arrived at after extensive research, ninety minutes of airport sleep, and one week of excellent Moroccan coffee, is: absolutely nothing consistent. It is not a system. It is not a philosophy. It is a mood, loosely organized, operated by rotating volunteers.
There seem to be two requirements for a phrase to get hauled before the committee. First, it has to be applied to a group of people who find it reductive or harmful. “Unhoused” replaced “homeless” for exactly this reason, which is legitimate and good and which we have already discussed at length, and which still produces the certificate problem at the other end when the clerk has to figure out what to call someone who is no longer unhoused and cannot in good conscience type “un-unhoused” into a government database without weeping softly into their ergonomic keyboard.
Consider the Washington Redskins, who were eventually and correctly required to change their name. A reasonable outcome. What nobody apparently discussed in the conference room is that they could have simply changed the logo to a potato. Same name. Zero controversy. The cheerleaders become the Spudettes. The mascot is a large, friendly russet in a helmet. Merchandise sales go through the roof. This option was available. Nobody took it. We are not a serious people.
“Brainstorming” got flagged because someone was worried about people with neurological conditions, which is a caring instinct, bless its heart, even if the concern turned out to be roughly as well-founded as worrying that “deadline” is traumatizing for people who work near cliffs, or that “bombing” is going to destabilize the stand-up comedy industry, or that calling something a red-eye might upset. Well. You see where this is going.
Red eye describes no community. It targets no group. It offends no constituency except possibly eyeballs, who have no lobbyists, no newsletter, no LinkedIn presence, and who are frankly far too tired to organize a boycott. It describes a symptom of capitalism-enforced sleep deprivation experienced by millions of people every single night, hurtling through the dark at thirty thousand feet on pretzels and misplaced optimism, and we have collectively decided that this is fine, this is a product, this is just something that happens to adults.
Second, the phrase has to be used by people who attend meetings. Aviation does not attend meetings about language. Aviation named a seat “Coach” seventy years ago and has never once entertained a follow-up question. They named another one “Economy” and simply dared you to feel something about it. They named an entire zone “Basic Economy,” which is just “Economy” with consequences, and they did all of this without a single focus group on feelings. Red-eye departures leave at eleven-thirty at night, arrive looking like a medical condition in a trench coat, and the airline industry’s official position on this is: correct, here is a tiny bag of pretzels, please do not recline, the person behind you has feelings even if the scheduling department has never once considered developing any.
Why This Actually Matters, Unfortunately
Here is the part where I am contractually obligated to make a real point. I will be brief. I am on vacation.
Language renovation, when it is working, is just empathy with a style guide. When a group of people says “this word makes us smaller,” updating your vocabulary is not weakness, performative compliance, or political correctness devouring itself in an ouroboros of good intentions. It is the bare minimum of paying attention. It is, in fact, free. You do not even have to file paperwork, which distinguishes it from being un-unhoused. Research on language and social identity confirms what most of us already know if we think about it for thirty seconds: the words we use to describe people shape how those people are seen, how they are treated, and how they see themselves. This is not complicated. This is just listening, which is a skill that is, at present, killing it in some circles and absolutely bombing in others.
But the process by which we decide which words need updating is so wildly, gloriously, cosmically arbitrary that it occasionally makes the whole project look less like a moral reckoning and more like a scavenger hunt run by people who lost the list and are now just pointing at things. Some words get retired because it is genuinely, obviously the right thing to do. Others skate through because nobody happened to write an op-ed that week, or because the industry that owns the phrase has never once held a meeting about anything other than fuel costs or whether to charge for the pretzels. The map of what has been reviewed and what has not tells you less about ethical progress and more about who has a newsletter, a deadline, and a blind spot the size of a regional jet.
“Killing it” roams free. “Tone deaf” remains in heavy rotation among the very people who would retire everything else. “Blind spot” is being used right now in a workshop about inclusion, in a room with good lighting and a catered lunch, and absolutely no sense of irony. And somewhere in a stadium gift shop, a Spudettes jersey sits unbought, unrealized, a monument to the road not taken.
And red-eye: the bloodshot, unrepentant, physiologically accurate brand name for an overnight flight to somewhere you didn’t entirely want to go at a time no reasonable organism would choose. It will outlast all of us. It will outlast the euphemism treadmill. It will outlast the AP Stylebook. It will outlast whatever replaces “restroom” and whatever replaces that, all the way down to the “personal restoration suite” and beyond.
It will be sitting quietly in the terminal, boarding last, reeking of airport coffee, asking for nothing, apologizing to no one, completely at peace with itself, eyes wide open and aggressively, defiantly red.
Some of us could learn something from that.
I’m working on it. From Marrakech. On my fourth coffee. My eyes are fine. Mostly.
P.S. I finished this in the Lisbon airport, where I have just arrived on a morning flight. Not a red-eye. A civilized, daylit, chronologically appropriate flight, taken by a person who has learned absolutely nothing from any of this. My eyes are blue. Both of them, actually. Two beautiful, well-rested, historically significant blue eyes, gazing out at the Lisbon terminal with something approaching serenity. Call me.
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call "aggressively adequate"—better than "aggressively terrible" but somehow more concerning. He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia with three disappointed potted plants, a judgmental pig named Trouble McFussbucket, and a wife who smiles politely at his life choices.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his well-being). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting for an agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie." He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
Red Eye Has Nothing to Fear
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I am writing this from Marrakech, which is a sentence I have now had a full week to enjoy. But I could not have typed it the week before that, because the week before that I was in an airport at midnight, folded into a seat designed for a smaller and more optimistic person, on a flight the airline cheerfully described as a red-eye. Not a late flight. Not an overnight departure. A red eye. Named, without apology, for what your face looks like when it’s over.
Nobody put that through a committee.
This is remarkable when you think about it. Which I am now doing, loudly, in a riad in Morocco, because that is apparently how I vacation. My wife is at the pool. I am inside, interrogating airline vocabulary. We are both exactly where we belong.
We are living through a golden age of linguistic renovation. Words that once seemed perfectly fine have been quietly escorted off the premises by people with lanyards, strong opinions, and a shared Google Doc titled something like “Phase Two: The Reckoning.” “Homeless” became “unhoused,” which is a genuine improvement in framing, until you follow the logic all the way down the hall. Because if you are “unhoused” and then you get a house, what are you? “Un-unhoused” requires a linguistics degree and a glass of water. “Unhomeless” was right there, intuitive, self-explanatory, practically gift-wrapped. Nobody took it. It just sits in the lot with its little suitcase while the rest of us try to parse “un-unhoused” over our morning coffee. The paperwork alone. The poor clerk.
“Stewardess” became “flight attendant.” “Mailman” became “mail carrier.” Someone wrote a LinkedIn post that used the phrase “as a society, we must do better.” As a society, we wrote that post and then used the word “killing it” in the very next status update, because we are a species of jaw-dropping contradictions held together by caffeine and selective outrage.
We are doing so much better. We are absolutely, spectacularly exhausting ourselves trying to do better.
The psycholinguist Steven Pinker has a name for this. He calls it the euphemism treadmill: the process by which a polite new word replaces an offensive old one, only to absorb the same connotations over time and require yet another replacement. “Toilet” replaced “water closet.” “Restroom” replaced “toilet.” At current velocity, our grandchildren will be asking airport staff for directions to the “personal restoration suite,” receiving a pamphlet, a brief orientation video, and a follow-up survey about their restoration experience.
And yet.
I know this because I took a red-eye to get here. I arrived in Marrakech looking exactly like my thesis statement: bloodshot, slightly confused, walking with the quiet dignity of a man who has lost an argument with a seat belt. A week later I am fine. Rested, caffeinated, fully restored in the personal suite of my own riad. The essay, however, remains. Some things cannot be fixed by sleep or mint tea or the sheer redemptive power of a good tagine.
Red Eye Just Sits There
“Red-eye flight” has never once been summoned before a committee. No task force has convened. No sensitivity reader has circled it in red, which, now that I think about it, would be poetic and also hilarious. No style guide has flagged it. No op-ed has demanded its retirement. It just floats there in the lexicon, bloodshot and completely unbothered, the golden retriever of aviation terminology: happy, untroubled, shedding on everything, answerable to no one, occasionally licking its own face in public.
Think about what we are actually saying. Red eye. We are describing a human eyeball in active physiological distress, and we have decided, as an industry, that this is the brand, this is the pitch, this is what we are selling. Delta will sell you one. United will sell you one. They will list it right there on the website, between “Main Cabin” and “Business Select,” with zero shame, a competitive fare, and a little clock icon that should legally be required to look ashamed of itself. The eye is red. Book now, seats are limited, the pretzels are very small, and there will not be enough of them.
Meanwhile, “grandfathered in” has been on a quiet watch list for years. “Blackout curtains” attracted scrutiny on a few design blogs, apparently because someone felt the name was sending a message that curtains have no business sending. “Lame excuse” has been flagged in more than one corporate style guide, presumably by someone using a standing desk and a deep sense of purpose. The Associated Press Stylebook releases annual updates like a nervous landlord slipping lease amendments under the door at two in the morning, which is ironically also when your red-eye departs, and yet red-eye sits in there completely undisturbed, comfortable as Trouble McFussbucket on a couch he is absolutely not supposed to be on, radiating the serene confidence of an animal who knows he has already won.
And it is not alone out there.
“Tone deaf,” a phrase deployed almost exclusively by the very people doing the linguistic renovating, in the very articles calling for more careful language, has never once been reviewed. It just keeps showing up, blissfully unexamined, like a raccoon at a dinner party that everyone has agreed not to mention.
“Killing it.” We say this to each other approximately four hundred times a day. Your presentation killed it. That outfit is killing it. You are absolutely killing it, Janet. Janet beams. Nobody calls anyone. Nobody issues a memo. The killing continues, unabated, across all platforms and time zones, and somehow this is fine, this is a compliment, this is Tuesday.
And then there is “blind spot,” which is, I must stress, currently being used in a diversity and inclusion workshop somewhere in this world, as you read this sentence. A corporate trainer is standing in front of a room of well-meaning people, delivering a presentation on seeing others more fully, with the centerpiece being identifying your blind spots. The irony is not subtle. The irony has not been sent to sensitivity training. The irony is, in fact, killing it.
The Arbitrary Hall Pass System
What determines which phrases get renovated and which ones get a permanent hall pass? This is the question red-eye forces into the open, and the answer, arrived at after extensive research, ninety minutes of airport sleep, and one week of excellent Moroccan coffee, is: absolutely nothing consistent. It is not a system. It is not a philosophy. It is a mood, loosely organized, operated by rotating volunteers.
There seem to be two requirements for a phrase to get hauled before the committee. First, it has to be applied to a group of people who find it reductive or harmful. “Unhoused” replaced “homeless” for exactly this reason, which is legitimate and good and which we have already discussed at length, and which still produces the certificate problem at the other end when the clerk has to figure out what to call someone who is no longer unhoused and cannot in good conscience type “un-unhoused” into a government database without weeping softly into their ergonomic keyboard.
Consider the Washington Redskins, who were eventually and correctly required to change their name. A reasonable outcome. What nobody apparently discussed in the conference room is that they could have simply changed the logo to a potato. Same name. Zero controversy. The cheerleaders become the Spudettes. The mascot is a large, friendly russet in a helmet. Merchandise sales go through the roof. This option was available. Nobody took it. We are not a serious people.
“Brainstorming” got flagged because someone was worried about people with neurological conditions, which is a caring instinct, bless its heart, even if the concern turned out to be roughly as well-founded as worrying that “deadline” is traumatizing for people who work near cliffs, or that “bombing” is going to destabilize the stand-up comedy industry, or that calling something a red-eye might upset. Well. You see where this is going.
Red eye describes no community. It targets no group. It offends no constituency except possibly eyeballs, who have no lobbyists, no newsletter, no LinkedIn presence, and who are frankly far too tired to organize a boycott. It describes a symptom of capitalism-enforced sleep deprivation experienced by millions of people every single night, hurtling through the dark at thirty thousand feet on pretzels and misplaced optimism, and we have collectively decided that this is fine, this is a product, this is just something that happens to adults.
Second, the phrase has to be used by people who attend meetings. Aviation does not attend meetings about language. Aviation named a seat “Coach” seventy years ago and has never once entertained a follow-up question. They named another one “Economy” and simply dared you to feel something about it. They named an entire zone “Basic Economy,” which is just “Economy” with consequences, and they did all of this without a single focus group on feelings. Red-eye departures leave at eleven-thirty at night, arrive looking like a medical condition in a trench coat, and the airline industry’s official position on this is: correct, here is a tiny bag of pretzels, please do not recline, the person behind you has feelings even if the scheduling department has never once considered developing any.
Why This Actually Matters, Unfortunately
Here is the part where I am contractually obligated to make a real point. I will be brief. I am on vacation.
Language renovation, when it is working, is just empathy with a style guide. When a group of people says “this word makes us smaller,” updating your vocabulary is not weakness, performative compliance, or political correctness devouring itself in an ouroboros of good intentions. It is the bare minimum of paying attention. It is, in fact, free. You do not even have to file paperwork, which distinguishes it from being un-unhoused. Research on language and social identity confirms what most of us already know if we think about it for thirty seconds: the words we use to describe people shape how those people are seen, how they are treated, and how they see themselves. This is not complicated. This is just listening, which is a skill that is, at present, killing it in some circles and absolutely bombing in others.
But the process by which we decide which words need updating is so wildly, gloriously, cosmically arbitrary that it occasionally makes the whole project look less like a moral reckoning and more like a scavenger hunt run by people who lost the list and are now just pointing at things. Some words get retired because it is genuinely, obviously the right thing to do. Others skate through because nobody happened to write an op-ed that week, or because the industry that owns the phrase has never once held a meeting about anything other than fuel costs or whether to charge for the pretzels. The map of what has been reviewed and what has not tells you less about ethical progress and more about who has a newsletter, a deadline, and a blind spot the size of a regional jet.
“Killing it” roams free. “Tone deaf” remains in heavy rotation among the very people who would retire everything else. “Blind spot” is being used right now in a workshop about inclusion, in a room with good lighting and a catered lunch, and absolutely no sense of irony. And somewhere in a stadium gift shop, a Spudettes jersey sits unbought, unrealized, a monument to the road not taken.
And red-eye: the bloodshot, unrepentant, physiologically accurate brand name for an overnight flight to somewhere you didn’t entirely want to go at a time no reasonable organism would choose. It will outlast all of us. It will outlast the euphemism treadmill. It will outlast the AP Stylebook. It will outlast whatever replaces “restroom” and whatever replaces that, all the way down to the “personal restoration suite” and beyond.
It will be sitting quietly in the terminal, boarding last, reeking of airport coffee, asking for nothing, apologizing to no one, completely at peace with itself, eyes wide open and aggressively, defiantly red.
Some of us could learn something from that.
I’m working on it. From Marrakech. On my fourth coffee. My eyes are fine. Mostly.
P.S. I finished this in the Lisbon airport, where I have just arrived on a morning flight. Not a red-eye. A civilized, daylit, chronologically appropriate flight, taken by a person who has learned absolutely nothing from any of this. My eyes are blue. Both of them, actually. Two beautiful, well-rested, historically significant blue eyes, gazing out at the Lisbon terminal with something approaching serenity. Call me.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his well-being). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting for an agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
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