Patricia Cornwell has revealed she is now using the word “fisherfolk” instead of “‘fisherman” to avoid offending her readers.
The best-selling crime writer known for the Kay Scarpetta novels has said she constantly grapples with the problem of which words are deemed acceptable or not.
Cornwell admitted to having to use alternative vocabulary in her work, saying that the gender-neutral “fisherfolk” had replaced the traditional “fishermen” amid greater public sensitivity over causing offence.
The American author said: “I deal with this all the time, like you can’t say a vehicle is ‘manned’. It has to be ‘crewed’.
“I spent about 45 minutes yesterday trying to figure out the politically correct way to refer to people who fish for a living. Can’t call them ‘fishermen’. So I called them fisherfolks.
“Everybody’s so worried about offending everybody.”
Widespread neutering of language
Her comments come after a string of controversial decisions on the use of language made by major organisations, including the BBC.
Last year, Katya Adler, the BBC’s Europe editor, faced a backlash after using the term “fisherpeople” on a Radio 4’s Today programme, despite women making up only a small fraction of trawler crews.
Words that could be linked to historical racism were also reviewed by the BBC following Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, with “blackballed”, “blacklisted”, and “nitty-gritty” highlighted in training material on racial bias.
Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals Trust this year became the first to adopt gender-neutral language in its communications. The NHS trust introduced terms such as “chestfeeding” alongside “breastfeeding”, “human milk” with “breast milk”, and “birthing parent” instead of “mother”.
Similarly at the University of Manchester, a style guide was issued advising that words such as “manpower”, “chairman” and “mankind” could be replaced with the gender-neutral terms.
Speaking to The Sunday Times, Cornwell said of the linguistic trend: “I mean, when are they going to say you can’t call them black holes any more? What will it be, a non-white hole?”
Cornwell has argued that issues of racial division have been made worse by the advent of social media, saying: “Instead of pulling everybody together, it’s divisive. They keep saying we are different.
“We’re treated different because I’m a woman, or I’m gay or I’m black or I’m white, or I’m Hispanic or trans or whatever it might be. And that is a real shame. This has got to change, or the planet won’t survive.”
Cornwell is set to publish her latest Kay Scarpetta thriller, Autopsy, through HarperCollins on Nov 25. The novel is the 25th to feature the fictional medical examiner with the first title, Postmortem, first published in 1990.
