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fence sieve

Apparently A word or phrase considered in general to be bigoted, but claimed by its user to be a descriptive truth that is suppressed by political correctness. Sometimes used to just mean bigoted language in general.

I'm not exactly sure (because I cannot find a free copy of the entire originating article), but it seems to originally be an inside joke shared among people who have studied semantics, a phrase coined by then Institute of General Semantics executive director Steve Stockdale in a 2007 article entitled, "A Fence Sieve Language," which appears in the publication by the General Semantics Institute called, Calling Out the Symbol Rulers.

"Fence sieve" appears to be an ironic take on a quote from Aldous Huxley's 1963 article, "Culture and the Individual":

"A culture cannot be discriminatingly accepted, much less be modified, except by persons who have seen through it─by persons who have cut holes in the confining stockade of verbalized symbols and so are able to look at the world and, by reflection at themselves, in a relatively new and unprejudiced way."

"The post was deleted because it used fence sieve language."

by Genepoz March 29, 2024