Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

The language of political correctness 93
fine into a kind of swear box for using ‘dirty words’. This is a true story; but
many stories that appeared in print were, we suspect, invented. Real or
invented, the most absurd and extreme positions were depicted as mainstream
political correctness. They pressed the moral panic button to resonate
with existing anxieties within the community: 10 if it is reported that a
Dobermann pinscher mauled a person in Port Hedland, Western Australia,
suddenly dog attacks are reported from all round the country, giving
the appearance of a collective canine onslaught on humanity. Press-fed
hysteria has apocryphal bands of stony-faced abusers and corrupters of the
language (‘PC-niks’) at the forefront of an assault on free speech and
common sense.
It was an Orwellian view of euphemism that came to dominate public
discussion, with parallels drawn between political correctness and the fictional
language Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-four. The aim of Newspeak
was to reduce the number of words in the English language to eliminate
ideas deemed dangerous to Big Brother and the Party; if there were
no words available, ‘thoughtcrime’ (subversion) would be impossible.
1990s castigations of political correctness include terms like ‘evil’, ‘fascist’,
‘totalitarianism’, ‘a witch-hunt’, ‘the Plague’, ‘Stalinism’, ‘McCarthyism’,
‘thought police’, ‘a few goose-steps shy of Nazism’, and, of course, ‘Big
Brother’. On the one hand, political correctness was being described as
responsible for corruption of our language ‘on a truly Orwellian scale’; 11
and on the other, it was criticized for trivializing important issues precisely
because it focused on insignificant language matters, and not on important
political ones. It is puzzling how something can be seen as so egregiously
bad and yet at the same time so very piffling; but when it comes to opinions
about language, speakers have a remarkable ability to hold contradictory
points of view, especially with respect to prescriptive observations.
There are always people with a vested interest in keeping controversy
whipped up. Assorted right-wing critics were quick to take advantage of
the more wacky PC-inspired coinages in order to discredit liberal initiatives,
possibly even coining some of the more outrageous examples themselves.
It is doubtful whether expressions like person with hard to meet needs
(‘serial killers’) or the differently pleasured (‘sado-masochists’) were ever
more than satirical inventions. And it all made great lampooning fodder for
comedians, too. Cleft-palate afflicted comedian Wendy Harmer, for
example, confronted her own ‘unthinking lookism’ and called for an ‘Appearance
Vilification Bill’ and affirmative action within the modelling
industry, so that within five years, 20 per cent of all models were to have
big noses and flabby stomachs. 12 Many people will remember James
Finn Garner’s two books of politically correct bedtime stories for more
enlightened times: