With buildings ablaze and looters rampaging through city streets, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake faced television cameras Monday night and sternly denounced the rioters as “thugs.” The next day, with some black residents in an uproar over a word they call racially charged, she walked it back. “There are no thugs in Baltimore,” the mayor, who is African-American, said at a church, where she met with members of the clergy.

Our culture keeps ruling words racist so fast that even the poor black mayoress of Baltimore can’t keep up. From the NYT You always hear about how the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has been exploded, but people sure act like the vocabulary version of that, as most memorably outlined in the appendix of 1984, is true.