Work Force Diversity : Are There Words That Neither Offend Nor Bore? : In the battle to do right, we must choose our words wisely. But let’s not junk up the language in the process.

The question the Reno Gazette-Journal’s diversity committee put to a group of that city’s leading gay and lesbian activists was fairly simple and innocuous: What do you want to be called? The answer was emotionally, politically and culturally charged--and as diverse as the people in the room.

Dyke and queer , both insults reclaimed from the lips of the jeering, were favorites among the young. Homosexual was shunned by most; it sounded too clinical, they said, like something transported via forceps and surgical gloves.

Now, take that hypercharged question out of the diversity committee and into the workplace--out of our latest laboratory for modern behavior and into the real world--and finding appropriate, sensitive, mutually acceptable answers becomes even more difficult and fraught with danger, confusion and resentment.

What do you call the woman who sits beside you if her skin is a different color than yours? What words do you use when addressing a customer if his sexual orientation is not your own? How do you communicate with a brand-new client who is not like you?

The right answers can mean the difference between losing a market, a client, an employee, a lawsuit, a harassment claim or a job and navigating safely in the New Business Order, a place where words are weapons and their owners misfire on a regular basis. A place where it’s often hard to be understood, no matter what your language is. “It is very clear that the traditional dominance of white males in the work force will continue to decline,” says David Lewin, director of the UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations. “The demographics are too strong to reach any other conclusions.”

Between 1983 and 1993 alone, the percentage of white men in management declined from 63.5% to 53.1%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of white women in the management ranks--the greatest winners so far--grew from 29.5% to 37.2%. Minority women and men rose more slowly in management, although their numbers did increase.

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The results are far more sweeping than the numbers alone would indicate. As the “traditional dominance” of the old homogeneous order declines, the age-old set of rules governing language and behavior in the workplace splinters into a myriad of new and often conflicting ways of interacting with one another.

Diversity training, corporate America’s hoped-for silver bullet, has done some good in bringing us face to face with each other, but it has caused some damage as well.

In the Washington State Ferry System, for example, where terms as innocuous as lady , yuppie and geriatric have been banned, “it’s gotten so bad around here that we refer to black garbage bags as bags of color,” one white quartermaster told the New York Times in one of those now-ubiquitous articles on how we do and do not get along--with an emphasis on the do not.

Whom do you take as a role model in the fight not to offend? That’s just as hard as picking the right word these days. On one end of the spectrum is a guy like rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg, proud producer of a “gangsta rap” CD whose title mainly consists of one insult to African Americans and another to women of all colors.

At the other end, are institutions, such as Marquette University, that are pushing the blandness envelope too far. Marquette is the latest school to change the name of its sports teams so as not to offend Native Americans. A fine goal. The only problem is that their teams were called the Warriors--a pretty generic term for guys with non-automatic weapons and frowns.

You could go for help to the raft of new dictionaries, books like “The Bias-Free Word Finder--A Dictionary of Nondiscriminatory Language,” or “The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook.”

In the former, you get such offerings as half a dozen gender-free alternatives to the word mailman . Mail carrier is there; femailman is not. In the latter, you get words like ambigenic , an alternative to non-sexist , and Animalcatraz , another word for zoo .

Which is where I personally draw the line. Yes, sensitivity is of the utmost importance. No, you don’t have to junk up the language to do it. His/hers? Forget it. Poetess? Stick to poet.

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But why is this all so hard anyway? Why are we still even having this discussion? In my darker moments, I think that we are all making this transition to basic human decency harder than it has to be. Is it really that difficult to treat our colleagues and customers with the respect that they deserve?

In the 1980s, when global trade offered promises of riches for all, we spent big bucks learning to understand people who live a hemisphere away. There were classes on when to give gifts and hand out business cards, when to belch after a meal and how much food to leave on your plate. And we learned all that stuff to get along with people we would never see more than once or twice. Why, we could barely recognize the language then, and we still sold goods and made new contacts.

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But somehow, this battle is much more difficult, perhaps because we face it every day, possibly because these are far more precarious times. So to those companies big and small making an effort, now struggling with the language of the New Social Climate, congratulations.

To those who have yet to begin such discussions, you have my sympathy, for they are very painful things. Still, it is better to have them under way; no matter how good we get at this, the talking will never be over.