Stop banning words. That’s not how language works.

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.

Just a few weeks ago, a lawmaker from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party introduced a bill that would outlaw the use of non-Italian words — mostly English — from official government communications. “It is not just a matter of fashion, as fashions pass, but Anglomania [has] repercussions for society as a whole,” read draft text of the legislation. (But not in English, obviously.)

It’s happening elsewhere, too. Last year, Quebec passed a law requiring new immigrants to use only French — not English — in their interactions with the government within six months of arrival.

The Italian bill includes some laudable goals; for example, it requires officeholders to have “written and oral knowledge and mastery of the Italian language,” a mandate whose English-language counterpart would disqualify any number of American politicians and living former presidents.

But such a law is also silly, not least because every language inherits and adapts words from other languages. In fact, more so than any other language, English owes its existence to words borrowed from others.

Or at least it would be silly if the nativist, xenophobic impulses driving it weren’t so dangerous. Look at Quebec, where some advocates have worried about immigrants losing access to health care, education, and other government services if they are unable to learn French in time.

As I’ve admonished American politicians before, 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. This is nothing more than Italian-branded performative anti-wokeism. And even if it might sound better in Italian, it certainly doesn’t look any better.

» READ MORE: Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ ‘Latinx’ ban is ‘performative anti-wokeness’ | The Grammarian

Speaking of performative, measures seemingly coming from the opposite end of the political spectrum can be just as faulty. Earlier this year, the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work removed the word field from its curriculum — as in, fieldwork or going into the field — due to its slavery connotations. “This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language,” the school wrote.

What it doesn’t support, however, is actual evidence of how language evolves.

Language doesn’t exist from the top down.

The term fieldwork, when used in reference to people working in fields, dates back to at least 1441, 51 years before Europeans set foot in the Americas, and almost 180 years before the first enslaved Africans arrived. Moreover, the academic definition of fieldwork — “Practical work, esp. as conducted by a researcher in the natural environment, rather than in a laboratory or office,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary — didn’t emerge till the late 1880s, after slavery and Reconstruction were already through. Yoking fieldwork to anti-Blackness ignores history and the diverse roads that our words travel.

Usage of the term fieldwork gradually increased after World War II and shows no sign of abating. For an academic institution to decide unilaterally that the term is problematic? That kind of mandate from above isn’t how language works, either. It doesn’t create real change, like diversifying USC’s student body or providing reparations to the Gabrielino-Tongva people on whose historic land USC’s School of Social Work currently sits. Instead, it’s just — like the word banning by the Brothers of Italy — performative.

What if the USC social workers and the Italian Parliament could come together and agree to understand language rather than legislate it?

Now that would be hot.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and virgole to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.