"People are not fat. They HAVE fat."

I get the idea of not shaming people for their weight.

I get the idea of valuing people for who they are, what they do, not what they look like.

Absurd language games offend me, however. "Fat" is both an adjective and a noun. It is perfectly valid English to use the word both to denote the substance that is fat and the condition of bearing excess fat.

I hadn't heard the phrase "People are not fat. They HAVE fat." until I saw a Facebook posting of an Upworthy video featuring obese people dancing, showing they weren't ashamed of their bodies. The phrase appeared several times in the comments, making me wonder if this was some new trend I'd somehow missed.

All the more power to the dancers in the video, and anyone else content with their body as it is, so long as they're healthy. Hell, more power to them even if they've made a conscious decision that losing weight, whether necessary for their health or not, isn't their most pressing concern. That's their right.

But they are fat. They both have fat and are fat. This Newspeak attempt to deny the adjectival use of the word "fat" doesn't strike me as a useful consciousness raising tool, but as something more likely to produce an eye-rolling reaction to the absurd denial built into the phrase.

For what it's worth, I've been overweight most of my adult life. I lost weight for one span of about 7-8 years, fell out of my fitness regime for over a decade, and I've been fit and trim again for the past two years now.

I was fat. I actually wish more people had described me as fat because I had too easily convinced myself "I'm just a little overweight" until I'd gained so much that it seemed like a very daunting challenge to do anything about it.