Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

4 The language of political correctness
What is it exactly that people mean when they say something is ‘politically
correct’? Noam Chomsky once described it as a ‘healthy expansion of
moral concern’. 1 Michael Barnard viewed it as a ‘new strain of ideological
virus’. 2 For Morris Dickstein, it was a ‘dictatorship of the well-meaning and
pure of heart’ and for Eugene Goodheart a ‘doctrine of opportunism’. 3
Perhaps the whole thing has been an illusion, as Ruth Perry put it, a ‘willo’-the-wisp
on the murky path of history’. 4 Sometimes political correctness
seems more like an urban myth, with stories of the differently hirsute
(‘hairy’), the specially non-tall (‘short’) and the chronologically gifted
(‘old’) reminiscent of those widely circulated anecdotes about batter-fried
rats, poodles in microwaves, spiders in hairdos and alligators in the sewers of
New York. The term is hopelessly inexact and with so much polemical
baggage on board, its meaning seems to change every time it makes an
appearance.
We consider political correctness as a brainwashing programme and
as simple good manners; and we examine the interaction of PC-inspired
relabelling initiatives with notions of taboo and censoring. Because it is
politically driven, political correctness will obviously attract more attention,
and certainly more hostility, than most acts of linguistic censoring. We
assume that PC language reflects, and also seeks to enforce, social
change. Nonetheless, speakers typically dislike being told to change their
linguistic habits, which they see as an attempt to manipulate their
thinking. And yet political correctness has been extremely successful in
getting people to change their linguistic behaviour. Even many of the deliberate
efforts to shift the meanings and connotations of words have come up
roses.
There is much more to political correctness than language use; but linguistic
behaviour is the most conspicuous expression of the political
correctness ethos, and language issues are key players in the PC arena. We
emphasize from the start that the phrases political correctness and politically
correct, and their abbreviated forms PC or p.c., refer to a set of linguistic
behaviours with no implied criticism, ridicule or abuse.
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