Made In America - Bill Bryson [227]
Since 1991, when the term appears to have sprung wholly formed into the language, journals and newspapers have devoted much space to reports that have ranged for the most part from the mildly derisive to the openly antagonistic. Some have treated it as a kind of joke (a typical example: a Newsweek report in 1991 that pondered whether restaurant customers could expect soon to be brought a womenu by a waitron or waitperson), while others see it as something much graver. Under leading headlines like ‘The New Ayatollahs’ (US News & World Report), ’Politically Correct Speech: An Oxymoron’ (Editor & Publisher) and ‘The Word Police’ (Library Journal), many publications have assayed the matter with a mixture of outrage and worry.
Most of the arguments distil down to two beliefs: that the English language is being shanghaied by people of linguistically narrow views, threatening one of America’s most valued constitutional freedoms, and that their verbal creations are burdening the nation with ludicrously sanitized neologisms that are an embarrassment to civilized discourse.
Two authors, Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf, have made much capital (in every sense of the word) out of these absurdities with their satirical and popular Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook, which offers several hundred examples of absurd euphemisms designed to free the language of the slightest taint of bias. Among the examples they cite: differently hirsute for bald, custody suite for a prison cell, chemically inconvenienced for intoxicated, alternative dentation for false teeth, and stolen nonhuman animal carrier for milkman. What becomes evident only when the reader troubles to scan the notes on sources is that almost all of these excessively cautious terminologies, including those just listed, were made up by the authors themselves.
This might be excused as a bit of harmless, if fundamentally pointless, fun except that these entries have often been picked up by others and transmitted as gospel – for example in a 1992 article in the Nation, which referred to the ‘grotesque neologisms’ of the political correctness movement, and included several examples – involuntarily domiciled for homeless, vocally challenged for mute – that in fact never existed before Beard and Cerf concocted them as amusing padding for their curious book.15
Most of the genuine examples of contrived neologisms that the authors cite are in fact either justifiable on grounds of sensitivity (developmentally challenged for mentally retarded), widely accepted (date rape, pro-choice), never intended by the creator to be taken seriously (terminological inexactitude for lie), the creations of jargon-loving bodies like sociologists or the military (temporary cessation of hostilities for peace), drawn from secondary sources of uncertain reliability (personipulate for manipulate, taken from another book on political correctness, but not otherwise verified), or become ridiculous only when given a barbed definition (suggesting that wildlife management is a common euphemism for ‘killing, or permitting the hunting, of animals’).
What remain after all this are no more than a few – a very few – scattered examples of genuine ridiculousness by extremist users of English, mostly from the women’s movement and mostly involving the removal of ‘man’ from a variety of common terms turning manhole into femhole, menstruate into femstruate, and so on.
I don’t deny that there is much that is worthy of ridicule in the PC movement – name me a sphere of human activity where there is not – and I shall cite some questionable uses presently, but it seems to me that this is a matter that deserves rather more in the way of thoughtful debate and less in the way of dismissive harrumphing or feeble jokes about waitrons and womenus.
All too often overlooked in discussions of the