A Historic Power Imbalance? The Left's use of the word “problematic” does not explicitly state the problem; We are to intuit it — There is a kind of délicatesse involved…

When my fellow academics refer — as they started doing a great deal toward the end of the last century — to the problematics of a topic, they are listing not annoying things that need to be fixed but intriguing twists that deserve extended consideration. 

Investigating the origins of the word "problem(atic/al)" — the adjective of which has recently enjoyed a renaissance among the Left — in the New York Times, the Columbia University linguist John McWhorter asks the question, What’s So Problematic About ‘Problematic’? 

These days, the plural “problematics,” as wrinkle-browed exegesis of complex academic issues, is a marginal term. So is the straightforward sense of “problematic” meaning “full of problems,” as in “Sunflowers are problematic as a large-scale crop.” The word is in wide circulation, but its current incarnation is as a euphemism for a very specific kind of problem or a very specific kind of person.

Its newest usage is a way to say, without saying, that something is perpetuating a historic power imbalance — especially when it comes to race. An example is “Your fave is problematic,” a catchphrase that got around for a while starting in the 2010s as a way to call out fandom for people whose values are deemed to be incorrect. Fandom for the television host Trevor Noah earned this designation when a series of his old tweets, including coarse jokes about subjects such as “fat chicks,” surfaced in 2015. The most recent star deemed to be problematic was Patti LuPone, who in a recent New Yorker article referred with rather acrid dismissal to two Black stage stars.

It’s significant that this use of the word “problematic” does not explicitly state the problem. We are to intuit it. There is a kind of délicatesse in this, a way to circumvent the thorny national conversation about concepts such as intersectionality, wokeness and cancel culture. That impulse toward euphemism, too, is a natural part of language. And it is no less clear as a result.

 … As for the ancient Greeks, the transformation of a word that meant to propose something would surely have struck them as otherworldly. But then again, “nice” started out meaning “ignorant.” In any language, plus ça change … well, the more they change.

One last problem for consideration: You might imagine someone of Harding’s era would recognize the expression “no problem,” but it didn’t really come into circulation until the 1960s. Sometimes what seem like very ordinary words or expressions are recent coinages. My favorite example is “oink.” The first written “oink” is in 1910. Before that, a child who was asked what pigs say would probably answer either “squeak” or “wee-wee,” as in the little piggy that went “wee-wee-wee all the way home.” And if you think about it, “wee-wee” is closer to the sound of pigs than “oink.” Bring back “wee-wee”!