PC speak

I had an interesting discussion with two friends about the use of such un-PC words and phrases as “the wife” and “retarded.” The conversation took an interesting turn near the end as to whether it’s effective to actively confront racially/gender/homosexually-insensitive people or whether such confrontation is futile. There were two points in the conversation that caught my interest. The first was how such sanitized, PC language is impinging on modes of expression. The second point was about the oversensitivity of people who, like myself, have very little to be sensitive about. I shall tackle the second point first.

As a middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon protestant, I have very little to complain about. Demographically speaking, everyone listens to me and, unless you count last week when someone cut in front of me in the McDonald’s line, I have very little to complain about. Contrast that with the slavery in Africa and Brazil, the violence and suppression of women in the Middle East and my picture gets even rosier, if not guilty. But it does no good to get offended on behalf of another group. If someone says something racially insensitive, I don’t need to act like the gatekeeper of political correctness, saying, “listen, mulatto isn’t right; the correct term is bi-racial,” as if somehow I have a right to impose society’s new standards on an unknowing bystander. People love to play this role, like some leftover school hallway monitor and it’s completely ineffective at stunting racism. The only thing this type of confrontation will do is to put up walls. Of course, this doesn’t cover extremes and it doesn’t cover people who belong to the race or category of the offending comment but there are enough things out there to be offended by; we middle-classers don’t all need to be so easily offended. --Side note: Just to be sure, I find racial slurs and those who propogate racism and hate crimes morally reprehensible.

Now, what I do find truly offensive is the sanitation of language. English draws upon many etymological sources, and we still rely on pop culture and the literati to coin new words and phrases for us. It’s a beautiful language and although its ambiguities often frustrate new learners of the language, these ambiguities provide richness and subtext to many stories, poems and song lyrics. That said, we don’t need to dumb our language down by imposing ridiculous standards, by succumbing to robotic language parameters designed not to offend and by constantly second-guessing ourselves. As Steve Carell’s character on The Office learned, we don’t want to ignore racial differences, we want to celebrate diversity.

I could go into detailed examples, but no doubt I’ll offend someone. This is my point: unless you belong to the group being offended, don’t take offence. My second point: unless it helps language in some fundamental way, or unless it actually protects and prevents against the furtherance of prejudice (and we have to be honest with ourselves here), we should curb our PC speech. In it, we find the bastardization of a language I’m just barely getting to know. I could go so much deeper than this, but I’ll leave it at that.