Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

The language of political correctness 91
Political correctness – the early years
political correctness noun conformity to current beliefs about correctness in language
and behaviour with regard to policies on sexism, racism, ageism etc. – politically
correct, adj. (Macquarie Dictionary 2003)
In the 1990s, it seemed that just about wherever you looked there was
something to read on the political correctness debate – ‘Cliché of the Decade’,
‘University Faces Struggle in Political Correctness Debate’, ‘It’s a Sexist,
Racist, Fatist, Ageist World’, ‘Correct Thinking on Campus’, ‘No Free
Speech Please, We’re Students’, ‘Will Political Correctness Kill Free Speech
Here Too?’, ‘Gay and Jew Get New Deaf Signs in NZ’, etc. The expressions
political correctness, politically correct, PC or p.c. became buzz words. For
some time, the blend polcor also enjoyed some popularity, at least in Australia,
but the term never really took off. Like PC, it turned into a media sneer
phrase. Robin Lakoff’s search of these terms in news databases in America
throughout the 1980s and 1990s confirms that their use peaked between 1991
and 1995; by the late 1990s, media attention had died down. 5 Nonetheless, the
PC controversies continue to bubble away, and every now and again familiar
stories reappear.
Many people would have first encountered the term political correctness in
the early 1980s, in the context of affirmative action hiring policies, curriculum
revision, speech codes and general guidelines for non-discriminatory
language. In Britain and Australia, politically correct quietly took over from
the earlier expression ideologically sound. How did something that appeared
to be so good, something supportive of equal opportunity, tolerance, sensitivity,
open-mindedness, courtesy and decency, become so disparaged?
The practice of labelling certain behaviours and certain attitudes as either
correct or incorrect has been around for a long time. 6 The phrase politically
correct is not as recent as the media makes out. An early appearance is the
1793 US Supreme Court decision Chisholm v. Georgia. In the following
extract, Justice James Wilson argues that, because it is the people who hold
the true authority in the United States and not the state legislatures, a toast
given ‘to the United States’ is literally ‘not politically correct’: 7
The States, rather than the People, for whose sakes the States exist, are frequently the
objects which attract and arrest our principal attention . . . sentiments and expressions
of this inaccurate kind prevail in our common, even in our convivial, language. Is a
toast asked? ‘The United States,’ instead of the ‘People of the United States,’ is the
toast given. This is not politically correct.
Despite a few early appearances, the expression did not really take off
until the emergence of the American New Left in the later 1960s. English
translations of Maoist literature seem to have been the main influence. It is