This Week's Inquirer: Stop banning words. That’s not how language works.

Language doesn’t exist from the top down, and any attempts to impose artificial rules upon it from above (say, by the government) are doomed to fail.

Sure, book bans might be all the rage — literally. But you know what’s even hotter than a book burning? Word banning.

It’s happening right now — and not just by the usual suspects.

Impulses to police language from the top down are surfacing from both the left and the right — and both are wrongheaded for the same reasons.

Some of the banners are exactly the folks you’d expect: the fascists. No, not the fascism-curious American state governments currently flexing their Mussolinis — er, I mean muscles — from Florida to Tennessee to Montana. Rather, these are the people who first mastered fascism: the Italians.

Read the full column at Inquirer.com.