Last year a popular Instagram training guru invited his followers to guess climbing terms he thinks should be eliminated from our vocabulary. The words he had in mind were actually rather banal—so banal, in fact, that I can’t even remember what they were. Essentially they were the self-deprecating things we all half-seriously say about ourselves. “I ‘suck’ at climbing!” Etc.

People commenting on the post, however, took this prompt in a more critical direction. Soon commenters began dishing out various climbing words that they implied were problematic, not inclusive, offensive, or even capable of causing literal harm to others.

I wasn’t surprised to see some people call out made-up words like “thuggy”—which climbers have historically used to describe powerful routes or movement; which presumably derives from “thug,” a word that has been used both positively and negatively in hip-hop and elsewhere in American culture; and which also ultimately originally comes from India and a Hindi word for “thief.”

What actually surprised me, however, was seeing how many people following this thread were taking these thoroughly flippant suggestions seriously. Not only seriously, but as if these random people on this random Instagram thread were actually exposing perceptive insights of a kind that absolutely proved their worldview, which is that rock climbing is yet another mechanism by which people are excluded, oppressed, and marginalized in our society.

What I found fascinating, if scary, about this thread was not the sophomoric rigor and reason being applied, but the speed at which these ideas were quickly reified into new norms. Norms that we now presumably all must follow.

My thing is this: Actually, no, we don’t. We actually don’t have to accept things that don’t make any sense, and these attempts to make words taboo, which aren’t actually bad, under the implausible argument that doing so is how we achieve progress and justice goals makes no sense. Here’s why.