“I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. ‘Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation.” – George Carlin
I couldn’t agree more with Carlin, and it’s scary how with every passing year, we seem to lose more and more of our freedom of speech — and yet we haven’t lost of our First Amendment right. No laws can ever be passed that would restrict words or phrases from being spoken, but we become tentative when we use certain words, even in trusted company. We look around, lower our voices and whisper them as if we would be placed in cuffs and hauled off had someone heard us utter them.
The Left is the most guilty offender of hijacking the English lexicon and has of late been putting its politically correct pedal to the metal. There is a term for every issue, be it about firearms, abortion or gender.
It’s not a new tactic. Communists discovered the power of political correctness in the early 1900s, and later Saul Alinsky perfected the execution.
You’ve seen it in the argument for gun control. “Assault weapons” was used to describe any scary looking gun whether it was classified as an assault weapon or not. The facts didn’t matter; the Left just wanted to paint guns with a term that connotes “attack” or “offense.”
Those who promote abortion use the term “pro-choice.” They call it that in order to paint the act as a freedom, and those who defy it as people who want to stifle freedom as a general rule. However, it glosses over the end result where a baby dies.
Sometimes you can watch the control of language unfold in an instant.
At 4:20 p.m., March 24, 2014, the term “homosexual” was a normal term used to talk about a man or woman’s preference to engage in sexual relations with a person of his or her own gender. Then Media Matters released an article about how Fox News still uses the term “homosexual.” No one knew it was a bad word, not even people in the homosexual community. It is even a scientific term. As of 4:21 p.m., March 24, 2014 using the term “homosexual” suddenly became a faux pas. The reason, they said, was that term was used negatively by hateful people, and thus should not be used any more.
Do you see the pattern?
Political correctness is, at its core, a way to paint the world in terms that don’t tell the whole story. It shifts words around to make sure there are victims or dangers depending on the needs of the narrative. PC keeps opponents off balance. To randomly forbid certain words as derogatory makes good-hearted people reluctant to enter a discussion, so they’re effectively silenced through intimidation. A good person is not out to offend, and thus goes along with the change in his or her lexicon in order to remain polite.
The proponents of PC claim that it curtails the negativity directed toward a certain group or action. This is a myth. Like the terms it creates, political correctness isn’t what it claims to be.
PC does not stop hatred. It doesn’t change any minds. Inwardly, people will maintain their opinion. What it does is create sacred cows. It attempts to paint the subject at hand as a topic that needs to be handled with care. It must be discussed with caution, if not reverence.
In the end, political correctness lends help to no group. If we’re changing the terms by which a person, place or thing is defined because there are bad apples out there that wish to use words harmfully, then we’re not so much empowering the hated as we are the hater. The cycle of using words derogatorily will continue no matter the polite language you drag it through, and the term that was created to be “polite” will have to be painted as wrong to make way for a new term.
Freedom of speech is a liberty that the Right often defends vigorously, but if we allow the Left to define what constitutes socially usable words, we’re not defending it well enough.
