As a lifelong Republican married almost as long to a lovely and devout Democrat, we finally had occasion to raise a glass when we at long last didn't cancel each other's vote. Likewise as a fervent capitalist running a profitable business inside a prison, I find myself cavorting with liberal activists who share my mission to fix a prison system badly in need of repair but who insist on peppering their conversations with words like "slave labor" and conspiracy theories about the prison-industrial complex. With citizenship in several of America's belligerent tribes, I can see the war of words in all its splendor.

That war began for me in 1956 when I was but a first grader in communist Hungary. Our teacher had us memorize a list of words slandering communism with the admonition that if we heard such words from our parents, we were to tell our teachers so our parents can also be better educated. Some kids lost their parents for a few days, some longer. My parents were very polite to me during this time. This has colored my view of the word police.

Fast forward to Oregon's state prison for women where I founded my Access2online business, my legacy project really, to teach inmates to make websites and online documents accessible to the disabled. The inmates earn a job skill with a future, the disabled get their right to participate in our great digital adventure, and I earn a few bucks to start my nonprofit foundation the Second Chance Net. What's not to like?

Turns out "disabled" is not to like. It's "people with a disability" or "people with special needs", which is where I learned my first rule of political correctness; always use more words. I realize I shouldn't be in such a hurry, but "inmate" turned into adults in custody, which was long enough to get its AIC acronym. I got to meet the Governor, a charming lady with a good heart who had proclaimed the name change. So I was happy to use it in the prison, but was given a dispensation when speaking to anyone on the outside so they could understand me. When speaking to anyone in California's prisons, I had to remember their expansion for inmate is "justice involved". In Maine, it's "residents", and so on in other states.

When I pointed out that the Oregon inmate uniforms still said "inmate", as did most prison signs, I was told the state had spent millions to get this far, and they'd need a few more to take care of the uniforms and a great deal more than they had planned for. All the while, we had essential inmate support programs underfunded and making the rounds with their begging bowls.

Perhaps the Governor felt that by simply making the word available, the woke community would propel it to go viral. That's when I learned my second rule of political correctness; new words require lots more planning, money, and effort than its promoters expected before the public starts using them.

I was so busy with other things that quite some time went by before I asked an important question from a few AICs who worked for me, "Is inmate an offensive term?"

I got a stammering of "Not to me", "The CO (Correctional Officer) says it is", "Haven't thought much about it", and finally one that had an impact, "I don't care what they call me if they treat me as well as you." Perhaps a bit of brown-nosing, but it was said quickly without thinking, so of course I got to thinking about it.

The implication was that we use what little courage, wisdom, and perseverance we can scrape together to treat inmates as humans, and work on our words with whatever little is left. That inmate's premise was that kindness was a limited resource and should be applied where most needed.

In days to follow, I saw her counsel in action. COs who called them adults in custody but still treated them like inventory, certainly an exception to most COs who treated them with respect. Therein I discovered my third rule; words do not change behaviors. Indeed I suspect some of those kindness-challenged COs excused their callousness because they had grown an enlightened word to do it with.

We progressed from "illegal alien" to "undocumented workers", and then we separated children from undocumented workers. We enforced laws written long ago for illegal aliens, but with a little search-and-replace correction to feel better.

Now this has nothing to do with swinging the pendulum in the other direction. Using racial or ethnic slurs are not political correctness problems with new words. Those are threadbare old words with clear meanings and the unmistakable intent to attack, injure, and dehumanize. Here I'm talking about words that have the potential to be recalibrated, refined, refurbished -- dare we say redefined.

Words are redefined every day, particularly in our elastic, living American English. Redefining words can become surprisingly effective when done by example. Consider the challenges faced by our parolees with the ex-felon stigma. We can cook up a new word fir ex-felon and hope employers, landlords, and other gate keepers will catch on, and that they will not then use that new word to label and segregate for punishment those working for a second chance. Do we really expect a new word will cure the cold hearted? More powerful is the example of the scientist, statesman, professor, business executive, analyst who gets up to the podium and says, by the way, I'm an ex-felon. And he uses that word loudly and proudly so no one in the audience will be confused about their misguided prejudice.

And there is the matter of courage. The City of San Francisco declared that ex-felon would be replaced by “justice-involved”. A squeamish restaurant owner posting a sign "We welcome the justice-involved” will take a lot less heat than one who takes a stand with "We welcome ex-felons". But that bold restaurant owner will have confronted the stereotype head on with a frontal attack on its marginalization of his fellow human beings. He may lose more customers than the “justice-involved” approach, but the change he brings will be more than cosmetic.

And the cool thing about redefining words by example is that it can be incremental whereas adopting new words are not. Every single example of a stereotype-trampling ex-felon takes an irreversible step in the right direction, a memory repeated in polite and impolite circles. A politically-correct word switch that doesn't cross the finish line slips back into the dustbin of history with all the money and effort wasted, somewhat like our country's forgotten attempt to make our highways metric.

Alcoholics Anonymous credit much of their success on the required initial statement, "I am an alcoholic." No mincing of words. No inoffensive, revisionist terms to mask their stark reality. They call themselves what they are, and then they work hard, very hard, to change the meaning of that word at least as it applies to them. After several drink refusals, a business colleague at a party once blurted out, "No thanks, I'm an alcoholic." We knew the guy and our admiration for him went through the roof right then and there. Important is how our definition of alcoholic also changed. We knew some alcoholics slept next to dumpsters, but we also personally knew a successful one in a 3-piece business suit.

Add to that what I've learned from compassionate attempts to see all individuals by their proper racial, sexual, gender, and incarceration identities when heard by the less progressive. A refusal to adopt new terms comes with implications or accusations of bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, racism, stupidity, and various character defects. What may have started as harmless word banter easily escalates into disagreement over fundamentals, and soon we have people opposing progressive ideas because they felt attacked or at least prejudged by the labels heaped on them to start.

I've been at gatherings where good-natured ridicule of a new word like microagressions or attempts to remove gender from a manhole cover gave way to a blowhard pitching victimhood. And soon his audience was bellowing against change and progress of any kind. That stopped being an audience where I could have a thoughtful conversation about mandatory sentencing guidelines or against sending mental disease patients to prisons.

So do we take the moral high ground and proclaim that we don't need to find common ground with the few ignorant, defective, deplorable people who disagree? Then we forget how close Trump came to victory. That's not so few who disagree. If we want their support, I suggest we reprioritize how we treat people compared to how we call them. The votes we earn will empower the meaningful change we seek.

If we speak plainly and ask whether we should welcome ex-felons, we stay focused on the important question and just might stir everyone's better angels to redefine the word.

Using good words and doing good deeds is not an either-or question, but we should be as inclusive as we say we are when we encounter someone doing good without our choice of words. I expect no one to share my opinion about words, but for comparison, here's a video about what I do instead of what I say. Toleration is not just a bumper sticker we use to accuse others.

Progressives aren't prone to self-doubt, but we should consider its usefulness in order to achieve our vision.