Emptying the Dictionary

Our dictionarys are about to become empty! Every day a new word is tagged as being politically incorrect, rendering them useless and effectively putting a ban on them.

Main Entry: political correctness Function: noun Date: 1990 : conformity to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities should be eliminated.

It is really a strange phenomenon, a process in which perfectly sound words slowly get some sort of negative connotation to them, and then is slowly rendered 'politically incorrect', a point at which one will have to stop using the word, effectively just moving onto another word, which will slowly erode.

The reason I caught up with this is Anders' comment American Political Correctness & the word "Niggardly" , posted yesterday, and the two trackbacks to his post. (Niggardly? by dfc and Niggardly! by Harald.)

So what more do I have to say about this issue? Let me be blunt; political correctness is s**t. Generally it is a) a way for successful people to talk badly about someone else without getting a bad feeling about it, or b) a way out for pigeon-hearted people scared of pissing someone off.

There are some words that are definetively not possible to use, try for example to ask someone 'are you gay?' when they look extremely happy. Chances are that they won't stay that way for very long. Ask the wrong person and you will most probably be sued in the process. (And hey, you might even be convicted.) Let's go back to the dictionary:

Main Entry: ¹gay
Pronunciation: 'gA
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French gai
Date: 14th century
1 a : happily excited : MERRY
b : keenly alive and exuberant : having or inducing high spirits
2 a : BRIGHT, LIVELY
b : brilliant in color
3 : given to social pleasures; also : LICENTIOUS
4 a : HOMOSEXUAL
b : of, relating to, or used by homosexuals synonym see LIVELY

So, according to the dictionary you are allright, but according to the politically correctness movement you are most likely guilty as h**l. Or maybe more correctly; guilty as someone coming from a most unpleasant warm place.

All of this bring along some associations to diplomacy;

Diplomacy is the ability to tell a man to go to hell so that he will look forward to making the trip.

- unknown

Isn't this what it is all about? Trying to comfort people into some dreamworld where nothing is bad simply because it sounds so much less bad? Well, two miles down the road all the fancy politically correct words of today (which probably will increase the average length of any written text by a factor of 2-3 simply because all simple short words now are replaced with advanced words or combinations of such) will be incorrect tomorrow.

At the end of the day it is all like pissing in ones pants to keep warm. It works for a short while, and then you'll either have to piss some more or prepare to get cold.

The main question is really; how fast are we depleting the set of usable single words? Will every word eventually evolve into some 10-15 words, just to still keep them politically correct?

What about political soundness?

Links:
- Politically Incorrect Dictionary

Posted by ludvig at September 4, 2002 12:54 PM | TrackBack