Welcome to the summer of exaggerated news stories and political correctness on overdrive! The Run for the White House is as interesting as the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Lots of drama, lots of excitement, and sometimes, one or two bloody endings.
This is the summer when candidates decide whether or not to announce their candidacy or just do stealth campaigns in Iowa, New Hampshire and Michigan.
Politicians with presidential ambitions are now huddled with senior staff plotting every move. Volunteers are busy with their fundraising. And every Face the Nation and Meet the Press appearance becomes a platform for policy and an opportunity to attack the sitting President. Whoever he is.
Political correctness, or not saying anything true, dumb or stupid, goes on overdrive. Everybody reads from a script that’s been blessed by expensive pollsters. To be politically correct is not to rock the boat, upset the cart or go up against the status quo. Now it means anything against liberal-speak.
So, here we are, trying to make sense of the news and the political coverage from the mainstream media. It really looks like a circus out there, and it will only get worse.
Wikipedia helps us trace the orgins of political correctness back to the liberals, noting that:
By 1970, New Left proponents had adopted the term political correctness. In the essay The Black Woman, Toni Cade Bambara says: “. . . a man cannot be politically correct and a [male] chauvinist too.” …Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and progressives . . . used their term politically correct ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts…Widespread use of the term politically correct and its derivatives began when it was adopted as a pejorative term by the political right in the 1990s, in the context of the Culture Wars. Writing in the New York Times in 1990, Richard Bernstein noted “The term ‘politically correct,’ with its suggestion of Stalinist orthodoxy, is spoken more with irony and disapproval than with reverence. But across the country the term p.c., as it is commonly abbreviated, is being heard more and more in debates over what should be taught at the universities.”
Some terms are innocuous. Here are some early examples of language commonly referred to aspolitically correct:
“Mentally challenged” in place of “Retard” and other terms
“African American” in place of “Black,” “Negro” and other terms
“Native American” (or “First Nations” in Canada) in place of “Indian”
“Caucasian” in place of “White”, and other terms
“Gender-neutral” terms such as “firefighter” in place of “fireman”
The use of the word “gender” instead of the word “sex” to distinguish males and females
Terms relating to disability, such as “visually challenged” or “hearing impaired” in place of “blind” or “deaf”
But then, it become ridkiclous… some more examples:
Bag boy: agricultural product organizer
Cafeteria: dining facility
Car: earth-unfriendly, vertically-challenged mode of transport
Car Wash Worker: vehicle-appearance specialist
Cat: quadruped non-human associate
Cheating: cooperative assignment
Fat: horizontally challenged: person of substance
Garbage collector: sanitation engineer
Gas Station Attendant: petroleum transfer technician
Girl: pre-woman
Political: amorally gifted
Poor: economically marginalized
Prisoner: client of the correctional system
Prostitute: body entrepreneur
Ugly: under-attractive
Unemployed: non-waged
This is what we are exposing. Help us. Add your examples under comments.
