Made In America - Bill Bryson [228]
In 1992 US News & World Report, in an article headlined ‘A Political Correctness Roundup’, noted that ‘an anti-PC backlash is underway, but there are still plenty of cases of institutionalized silliness’. Among the ‘silliness’ that attracted the magazine’s attention was the case of students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee being encouraged ‘to go to a toy store and investigate the availability of racially diverse dolls’, and of a New York lawyer being censured for calling an adversary in court ‘a little lady’ and ‘little mouse’.16
That students should be encouraged to investigate the availability of racially diverse dolls in a racially diverse society seems to me not the least bit silly. Nor does it seem to me unreasonable that a lawyer should be compelled to treat his courtroom adversaries with a certain measure of respect. (I wonder whether the parties at US News & World Report might have perceived a need for courtesy had the opposing counsel been a male and the words employed been ‘bub’ or ‘dick-head’.) But that of course is no more than my opinion. And that in turn is the overweening problem with any discussion of bias-free usage, that it is fearfully subjective, a minefield of opinions. What follows are, necessarily and inescapably, mine.
That a subtle and pervasive sexual bias exists in English seems to me unarguable. Consider any number of paired sets of words master/ mistress, bachelor/spinster, governor/governess, courtier/courtesan – and you can see in an instant that male words generally denote power and eminence, and that their female counterparts just as generally convey a sense of sub-missiveness or inconsequence. That many of the conventions of English usage referring to all humans as mankind, using a male pronoun in constructions like ‘to each his own’ and ‘everyone has his own view on the matter’ – show a similar tilt towards the male is also, I think, beyond question. The extent of this is not to be underestimated. As Rosalie Maggio points out in her thoughtful Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage, when Minnesota expunged gender-specific language from its law-books, it removed 301 feminine references from state statutes, but almost 20,000 references to men.17 There is no question that English is historically a male-oriented language.
The difficulty, as many critics of political correctness have pointed out, is that the avoidance of gender-specific constructions contorts the language, flouts historical precedent, and deprives us of terms of long-standing utility. People have been using man, mankind, forefathers, founding fathers, a man’s home is his castle, and other such expressions for centuries. Why should we stop now?
For two reasons. First, because venerability is no defence. Ninety years ago moron was an unexceptionable term – indeed, it was a medically precise designation for a particular level of mental acuity. Its loose, and eventually cruel, application banished it from polite society in respect of the subnormal. Dozens of other words that were once unselfconsciously bandied about – piss, cretin, nigger – no longer meet the measure of respectability. Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity.
Moreover, such words are often easily replaced. People, humanity, human beings, society, civilization and many others provide the same service as mankind without ignoring half the populace. Since 1987 the Roman Catholic Church in the United States has used a text,