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Fried chicken

Burly

Buxom

Warpath

Gyp

Matronly

Dutch treat

Illegal alien

Shiftless

Elderly

Crippled

Feminine

Ghetto

Jocks

Commenting on this “bad word dictionary,” the late columnist Mike Royko wrote that “the age of super-sensitivity is crushing me.” By the end of his column, though, Royko had become uncrushed enough to assert that “when I put together a softball team, I’ll recruit real jocks, not a bunch of wimps, nerds, dweebs or weenies” and “I’ll continue to go have Dutch-treat lunches with my friends and check the bill to make sure the waiter didn’t gyp me.”

Perhaps the most remarkable entry on the list is “without rhythm,” objectionable, the journalism school’s compilers explain, as “a stereotype about whites. Implies that others have rhythm, also a stereotype.”

In an editorial bemoaning the proliferation of offended groups, the Wall Street Journal said: “Today, alas, we have created whole classes of the perpetually aggrieved, built on the notion that if someone takes offense, then an image or name is ipso facto offensive.”

What is one to make of the sad case of the aide to the mayor of Washington, D.C., who lost his job because, discussing budget matters, he used the word “niggardly”? He used it in its correct meaning — miserly, stingy — which bears no connection, either in common usage or lexicography, to the offensive term for African Americans that it resembles. Nonetheless he was misunderstood. He regarded his own failure to anticipate the misunderstanding, and the distress it caused, as awful enough to require him to resign. The mayor agreed, and accepted his resignation. Such an event brings into pointed opposition the standards of political correctness and those of freedom of speech.

“Can speech ever be both correct and free?” asks the headline of a recent article in the “Ethics Today” column of the Financial Times. “The line we seek to draw is elusive,” writes the columnist, Joe Rogaly. We should “debar public use of language that foments antipathy towards others, but … should also allow everyone to speak his or her mind. It is one of those things none of us will ever get quite right. When in doubt, I say favour free speech.”

In principle we agree with Rogaly and come down on the side of free speech. We admire writers, editors, and public figures who keep their eye on the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and we deplore the preposterous fate of the literate bureaucrat who spoke rightly but not freely with “niggardly.” In business writing, however, we would move Rogaly’s “elusive line” a few inches in the direction of what’s purely practical, encouraging you to place a lot of emphasis on the probable consequences of your choice of words. If you know that writing “niggardly” is likely to be misunderstood and to cause anger or pain, what’s wrong with writing “stingy” instead?

In other chapters you will find lists of do’s and don’ts, firm opinions on what’s good and what’s bad. In the matters under consideration here no such specific guidance is desirable. Sensitivities vary from audience to audience. An expression that ruffles feathers in one context will breeze by uneventfully in another. Words that one person can safely write may be anathema coming from somebody else. Just do your best to be as considerate of the feelings of others in writing as you would be in person. That will take you a long way toward achieving the underlying purposes of political correctness while avoiding its excesses.

He, she, and everybody

We do, however, have specific suggestions on how to handle one common writing problem. That is the convention of male-oriented language used in reference to all people — for example, “he” as a collective pronoun referring to women as well as men. This convention is pretty much obsolete, but what replaces it can be awkward or grating.

“He or she,” for example, as in “Every novelist hopes that he or she will win the Pulitzer Prize,” is okay once in a while but becomes tedious and self-conscious with repetition, and in some