A couple of weeks ago, I was admonished for using an offensive word. I was about to sign a service contract with a company and had a few questions about the terms of the agreement. The firm’s representative who I was on the phone with could not provide some of the information I was looking for so I asked if I could speak with his superior. He promptly objected to my use of “superior,” saying that it demeaned him.

I was taken aback by the gentleman’s protest, and honestly found it a bit ridiculous because that word is regularly used in that context by lots of people. I wasn’t in the mood for a debate on the topic so I apologized for offending him and moved on. We both agreed, however, that “supervisor” would have been a more appropriate choice in that instance.

As I thought about the encounter after we ended the call, I wondered whether “supervisor,” or even “manager,” would in fact have been any better. After all, those two descriptors would have similarly elevated someone over him. Following a lengthy debate with myself, I couldn’t settle the question so I simply left it. But the incident prompted me to take a fresh look at one of my written works.

I had just completed the draft of my blog post for that week. In it, I had written about a relationship between a senior officer of a corporation and some of his underlings. That chastening experience on the phone gave me a queasy feeling that the use of “underlings” might be problematic. I decided to look online to see if I could find any red flags associated with it. Within seconds, my search revealed that the word is indeed considered derogatory. The recommended substitute was “teammates.” I didn’t quite like that so I chose “employees.”

I fully agree that all of us need to be as respectful as we can be in our communications with others. The words and language we use do indeed matter greatly. But as a writer, I find the rapidly shrinking vocabulary quite concerning. More and more seemingly innocuous words are now being considered off-limits, both in speech and in writing.

The main problem is that we frequently disregard context nowadays. Some terminology, when used in certain circumstances, can undeniably come across as offensive to some people. But in my view, that shouldn’t necessarily banish those words completely. Would those words that are no longer desirable have to be exiled from our dictionaries at some point then? Or, if they stay, would they need to be labeled somehow to warn people of their inappropriateness? That may become necessary soon because it is quite easy to get tripped up these days.

With the heightened sensitivities around language use over the last several years, I have actually been quite surprised by one glaring thing that has somehow escaped global attention. In the European soccer world, there is frequent player movement from one club to another. These transfers are routinely characterized as buying and selling of players. The typical announcement either says that a club sold a player for some millions of dollars—or other currency—to another club, or one club bought a player from another for that amount. Because these athletes are human beings, referring to them as having been “bought” or “sold” has obvious slavery connotations. But apparently, that hasn’t bothered anyone enough yet because sportswriters continue to use that terminology.

Some other announcements would say that a player was acquired by one club from another. While “acquired” may seem a bit more palatable, one would think that it has a negative connotation also, since it construes the athlete as property. Whenever I hear this terminology being used in the European soccer world, I wonder whether any of the athletes involved are personally bothered by it. All of the clubs in the continent’s national leagues have players from all racial groups. But the Black players in that universe, who in theory should be the ones most offended by the use of that kind of language, have, as far as I know, not vehemently protested against it.

My guess is that the practice is not as troublesome to people, as I am thinking it should be in the current global environment, because everyone in the European soccer universe understands the context in which those words are used. I don’t know how much longer this tolerance will last, but what it tells me is that there are still enough people who are willing and able to put certain things into proper context and react accordingly. It is one of the many great lessons that the world of sports teaches. We should all learn from it.