'Sexist' and 'racist'.

ONE KNOWS instinctively that anyone using the neologisms "sexist" and "racist," and other similar terms, is up to no good, but that instinctive sense of revulsion needs to be analyzed.

Recently, a federal civil-rights official, Paul D. Grossman, a regional attorney for the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, dispatched a missive to Lola H. Harris, assistant chancellor at Berkeley. He enclosed items from the university course catalogue that might be considered "sexist." He proposed that "synthetic" be substituted for "man-made" in one course description, that "mankind" become "human-kind" in another; "fossil man," he thought, ought to be changed to "fossil humanity" and "manpower" to "staff" or "personnel."

David A. Littlejohn, a professor of journalism, replied for the university. It would be best, except in rare cases, he said, to allow language to evolve according to normal daily usage; the imposition of new words leads to atrocities such as "freshperson" and "ombudsperson," and even the present adoption of "chair" or "chairperson" for "chairman" has gone too far. Professor Littlejohn denied that the syllable "man" refers exclusively to males, and concluded that "In no case should good English words, which are part of our common history and heritage, simply be legislated in and out of usage according to the whims of persons or groups who suddenly declare themselves 'offended.'"

Bravo, Littlejohn. And, yes, there are comic aspects here. One imagines a "civil rights" office full of Grossmans (no comment on last syllable) sitting at their desks reading college catalogues and vetting them for "sexism," a veritable Academy at Lagado. But, then, Grossman is a federal official and does not have to make an explicit threat to exercise power. Berkeley is secure enough to risk Littlejohn's reply--but how about Lesser University? And, migod, Grossman is an official in the Reagan Administration, and, not only that, he is an employee of William Bennett's Department of Education. If they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?

In charity, we choose to think that Mr. Grossman's own intentions are not vicious, but rather that he has willingly transformed himself into a cultural cliche.

Still: "sexist." The word itself represents rhetorical terrorism. It intends to collapse a variety of positions and modes into a single proscribed category. Anyone who disagrees with the feminist line, no matter how complex or how derived the disagreement may be--the disagreement, say, of George Gilder or, now, of David Littlejohn--can be read out of the discussion by being anathematized as "sexist." The term is more sinister than mere junk-thought. It means to foreclose argument on ideological grounds.

Viewed in that way, the term "sexist" is totalitarian. It resembles the earlier term "Trotskyist," which was not limited in its application to followers of Leon Trotsky, but was applied as an anathema to anyone who differed from the line as laid down by Stalin.

Now too we have had Mr. William F. Gibson, chairman of the board of the NAACP, who recently discovered that President Reagan is "racist."

Martin Bormann might reasonably be said to have held special theories about race. But what Mr. Gibson means is that the Reagan Administration has been opposing racial quotas and reverse discrimination, urging a "color blind" and therefore explicitly non-racial approach to hiring, etc. Mr. Gibson's dialectic renders this non-racial position "racist." He applies the term, of course, in order to silence all arguments in opposition to reverse discrimination. Again we see cultural Stalinism.

Resistance to these rhetorical totalitarians is high on the agenda of civilization today. When you hear someone use such terms as "sexist," and "racist," you can be moderately sure that you are listening to a fool or a dupe of totalitarianism, or to a totalitarian.