(FORTUNE Magazine) – It was another bad year for media folks engaged in the unending game -- at least, nobody knows how to stop it -- of trying to figure out which labels are currently considered socially acceptable by the groups being labeled. Editors have a lot of trouble with this game, as the arbiters of acceptability are typically activists who get their kicks out of changing the rules quite abruptly, e.g., suddenly discovering that it is outrageous to call home-based married ladies ''housewives.'' (Permissible alternative nowadays: ''women at home.'') Making matters especially maddening for presspersons, one seldom knows exactly which activists are issuing the edicts and on what authority, and one often suspects these grievance collectors would lose in a vote. Easily the most vexatious row of the past year concerned the Latin-American question. What are scriveners now supposed to call people of Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, South and Central American, and Spanish extraction -- the group categorized by the U.S. Census Bureau as ''Hispanics''? In most of the articles we have assimilated, the choice narrows down to (a) sticking with that term and (b) moving on to the putatively more progressive ''Latinos.'' Pumped up by the New York Times, whose editorial page recently ran two articles favoring the (b) solution -- one of them deemed the ''very pronunciation ((lah-TEEN-oh)) an affirmation of identity'' -- the L word is certainly coming on strong, despite the poll data. It turns out that this time there actually are some data, and they show no yearning to affirm a Latino identity pronunciationwise or any other way. A survey taken by professor Rodolfo O. de la Garza of the University of Texas at Austin shows that Mexican Americans (who represent two-thirds of the Census Hispanics) do not like ''Latino.'' To be sure, they are not wild about ''Hispanic'' either. The data show that among Mexican Americans born in the U.S., over 60% disdain both terms and prefer to be called just ''Mexican.'' The prediction here is that none of this matters a whole lot, as the activists seem to be set on ''Latinos'' and usually get what they want. Also in the saddle is ''African American,'' increasingly the preferred alternative to ''black.'' The new term was launched in a December 1988 news conference presided over by Jesse Jackson, who had twice run for President without mentioning any problems about his core constituency's being identified as black, but who at this point was suddenly arguing that blacks needed a label linking them to their African ancestry. Early survey data showed that blacks themselves were not especially taken by the idea -- a 1989 Chicago-area poll showed only 26% support among blacks -- but it seems to be slowly catching on in the media, even as its possible successor is discernible over the horizon. We learn from a recent Chicago Tribune article that many among the most militant young blacks now prefer ''Africans in America,'' a term intended, says senior writer Charles Leroux, to convey a sense of ''a population in exile.'' Also wending its way onstage is a likely successor to ''Native American,'' a term that still grates on many non-Indians who think of themselves as native Americans, but was still widely accepted before Columbus Day. Now, fortified by the argument that the Indians were called Indians only because of Columbus's confusion about geography, and called Americans only because of Amerigo Vespucci, the activists want to identify this constituency as ''indigenous,'' an idea that proved instantly acceptable in Berkeley, California, which renamed Columbus Day ''indigenous people's day.'' Only in Vespucciland, eh? The toughest situations of all concern nomenclature bearing on the handicapped. The cases are hard to address because nobody wants to be seen as talking back to disabled individuals, yet many of the demands made on their behalf seem increasingly loony. A magazine writer of our acquaintance was upbraided a while back for referring to a paraplegic as ''confined to a wheelchair'' -- the objection being that talk of confinement implied the man was somehow less capable of working than others. Similar objections envelop any references to ''victims of AIDS,'' or, indeed, victims of anything. One hopes an exception will be allowed for victims of brainwashing.