A rant on the term political correctness, because I think it is a lousy, rotten, mean, nasty term in its contemporary sense, devised by mean, lousy, nasty, rotten people... and I think folks who should know better use it far too often. And also because I am working on a thing about redundant rings for network fault-tolerance and I am just not feeling it right now. Back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth and Your FB Friend was a young radical, we used politically correct ironically, as in whoa, Comrade! is that a styrofoam cup I see? well THATs not very politically correct! But then it was co-opted by the AM talk-radio set, who very successfully created a bogeyman out of the same (totally imaginary) humorless Old Left cadre THAT WE WERE LAMPOONING WITH THE TERM. Nowadays, any time there is a discussion in mass media about the words we choose and the language we use, it is typically dismissed as political correctness. This does two things: it marginalizes the discussion by making it about POLITICS (which is considered inherently dishonest and cynical) rather than about people and relationships. Secondly, it perpetuates the untruth that its only the left that cares about words. We are just entering the War on Christmas season, which means well soon be able to enjoy yet another round of outrage at any business which dares to use the greeting Happy Holidays to welcome customers who may be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist or agnostic. I am not a linguist, so I dont know whether the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (language determines thought) is literally true or not. I do know that choosing my own words carefully has a strong effect on the way I experience things and the way I impact other people. And The Buddha himself said (reputedly) that if you speak with an impure mind, then suffering follows you as sure as the cart follows the foot of the ox (Dhp 1:1). So this is not some weird liberal idea. The old sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me thing is a dirty lie. Words can hurt. They can wound and they can demean. Folks who know me are familiar with my tendency to use dirty words probably too often. But political correctness, to me, is just plain vulgar. And it makes us ugly when we use it. So there. (this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License)
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 20:23:39 +0000