Actually, I thought it was quite a good point. I think it rather ironic that the OP claims to be so worried about “engineering the language to suit one’s propaganda” and yet thinks that PC phrases for various ethnic or other groups are the most telling current example of this. If we are talking about engineering the language to suit one’s propaganda, how about “collateral damage,” the “death tax,” “The Healthy Forest Initiative,” “the PATRIOT act,” “the Clear Skies Initiative,” and “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities”?
The damage done by PC goes far deeper than word choice. Witness the furor associated with the Larry Summers case, or the Deberry incident just recently. PC attempts to subvert the language in order to control how we think. What should be statements of obvious fact require deliberate couching and clarifying which makes them seem more uncertain that they really are. George Orwell might have been wrong about newspeak, but not by much.
Yet, neither of your stories represent “obvious facts.” They represent widely held beliefs, but not actual facts.
And, again, I find it interesting that you have come here to rail against “PC” with examples from the Left while ignoring the equally odd examples from the Right. As Pochacco noted earlier, we can discuss the problems generated by euphemistic speech, (or, we could discuss which side is winning the ongoing war to corrupt the language in their favor), but a claim that all the trouibles arise from the bad things done on one side of the political spectrum as though there were not similar evil efforts on the opposite side is disingenuous. Any discussion that blasts the terrible burden that society imposes on a white person by censuring that person’s use of “nigger” or that laments that a person making unsubstantiated generalizations regarding sex or race while not equally condemning the falsely loaded terms of “family values,” “special rights,” “patriot,” “treason,” and others is simply a whiny rant against one’s opposition, not an actual point of discussion.
If the language is being abused (for which position I think a case may be made), then it is being abused by all groups in society and the two best discussions that could come from that observation would be “Who is winning?” and “Does it matter?” However, simply pretending that one’s political or societal opponents are the only ones engaged in that behavior and that only thier efforts are damaging the body politic opens one to justified ridicule.
Do you have a cite? I do believe that etiquette (customs) can be used to exclude other people but I’m not sure if that was their original purpose or even if it was by design. After all, egalitarian societies certainly had their own form of etiquette but I’m not sure they were designed to elevate one group over another. I’d have a lot of trouble fitting in with a lot of ravers or black urban folk because I might not speak with the same code or follow some of their traditions. Did they do that to exclude me?
Marc
As I understand it, the furor over Larry Summers was not because he suggested that men and women might be different in some ways (as there are plenty of academic studies that have looked at differences and not been subject to such furor) but because he seemed to be using this claim to defend Harvard’s poor representation of women in their science faculty. There are good reasons to be offended by this:
(1) The appeal to these differences, like appeals to patriotism, is the first refuge of a scoundrel. While it may be true that there are differences on average between men and women, the skills needed to be a scientist are broad enough that even if men outperform women on average in certain skills, they are likely to underperform women in others. Women over the years have seen similar arguments used to explain their former underrepresentation in the medical and legal professions. The fact that this underrepresentation has disappeared…or largely disappeared…suggests that the excuses used to explain this underrepresentation were just that–excuses. No wonder women are not keen on having the first assumption regarding their underrepresentation in a field be that it is because of a difference in innate abilities, interests, or desires!
(2) Other elite institutions seem to be able to do better in their representation of women in the science faculty.
In regards, to my first point, here is a recent policy forum in Science that has a useful discussion of this point:
I think the whole reaction to the Summers thing is an example of how the conservative echo chamber jumps on a story and yells “PC police” rather than rationally discussing the issues involved. (To be fair, there may have been some irrationality on both sides but certainly claiming that the reaction to Summers was simply some PC thing is to miss some very important points.)
In regards to the Summers thing, it may have been a bit too strong of a statement for me to say that he was defending Harvard’s poor representation in particular, although some may have interpretted it that way given his position as President of the university. At any rate, here is a Science news story on the controversy soon after it erupted, here is a chronicle of the controversy with links to various statements and articles, and here is a statement in response to Summers from the AAUP’s Committee on Women in the Academic Profession .
With regard to the Summers flap, there was also the problem that Summers in his speech simply did a piss-poor job of arguing his case. The most egregious example was his use of an anecdote about his little daughter playing a game with toy trucks where she named them the “mommy” and the “baby” truck, as alleged evidence that women innately think differently from men.
Now, it is quite true that women’s and men’s brains differ physically in some respects, and it may well be true that there are significant gender-based differences in innate scientific ability. And as jshore pointed out, there’s a lot of responsible scientific investigation looking at those very issues.
But any fool ought to know that an individual anecdote about the behavior of one little girl, growing up in a heavily gender-biased society, does not constitute actual scientific evidence in favor of innate gender differences in cognitive abilities. That’s the sort of “reasoning” that gets posters laughed off the boards here at the Straight Dope.
For the president of Harvard University to use such an anecdote seriously, even if casually, to bolster a claim about gender representation in his faculty, is an embarrassment to Harvard and to the scholarly community as a whole.
Thus Summers was not in fact unfairly “lynched” by a hysterical, overreacting “PC police” (not for the most part at least, though I’m sure there were some ill-informed exaggerators on the left as well as on the right at various points in the controversy).
On the contrary, he made a horse’s ass of himself by his silly and feeble arguments, all on his own.
While I think there is a serious and valuable debate going on, I just had to point out that many, many people do that every single day. 
Seriously, I think a lot of the problem isn’t what people say but how they say it; where they’re coming from. It’s pretty subjective, and always will be, so I don’t think we’ll ever reach a clear conclusion on what speech is correct or hateful or even true/false, for that matter.
I know it’s a hijack, but this is not the point Summers made. He was querying research he recalled that suggested that even while the mean academic performance is the same for men and women, men tend to score more heavily at either extreme - i.e., the deviation of their curve is greater. His point, which is perfectly valid, was that if this is true, then selecting for the very highest percentile by academic performance will result in a sample containing more men, despite it still being true that the average man is no more likely to excel than the average woman. At no point did he say that men were innately better than women at any task.
Even his anecdote about (I believe) his daughter, while inadvisable, was not intended to prove (or even illustrate) innate differences, but to illustrate the very point Kimstu accuses him of missing about a gender-biased society. As well as jshore’s links, the Economist have a brief roundup here. To my mind this story has less to do with PC (although it was seized upon gleefully by idiots on both sides of that particular argument), and more to do with whether, in what is supposed to be an environment of scientific enquiry, certain ideas are so taboo that they may never even be expressed, even in a speculative manner.
I think it might be interesting to explore the different ways in which the left and the right try to bend language to their advantage. Because although both sides are doing it, I think their motivations are different.
On the left the primary motivation seems to be to erase all vestiges of oppression within the language. Terms that imply an unfair power relationship between two different segments of society are banned in favor of terms are more neutral or objective. So “nigger” --> “colored” --> “black” --> “African American”. Or “crippled” --> “handicapped” --> “disabled” --> “differently abled”. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t do much to address the underlying power inequalities, so gradually any new term will acquire the same negative connotations as the old.
On the right the primary motivation seems to be obfuscation. I’ve mentioned before in other threads that one measure of how far out of the mainstream the conservative movement has travelled is the degree of euphemism that they use when talking about their positions in public. Terms like “strict constructionist”, “family values”, “personal accounts”, and “constitutional option” provide cover for ideas and policies that would be rejected by voters if they stated baldly and directly.
I leave it to the reader to decide which of these two approaches is the more dangerous.
I can’t access your subscription-only Economist link, but here’s the relevant excerpt from Summers’ own remarks, from one of jshore’s links:
In other words, what I said was quite accurate, and it’s the opposite of what you said. Summers was indeed using the “baby truck” anecdote to contend that these gender differences are probably not due solely or primarily to different socialization in a gender-biased society.
And that claim might in fact turn out to be true (although as jshore points out, the radically changing accomplishment levels of women in recent years don’t inspire a whole lot of confidence in it). But Summers provided no valid argument in support of it; rather, he was basically talking out of his ass.
To my mind, this story has to do with the inadvisability of talking out of one’s ass in a serious academic setting, particularly when discussing controversial subjects.
Not to stop people from weighing in about partisanship, but I’ve also never heard anyone say “differently abled” in a serious situation.
Ever time someone mentions the Summers business I wonder whether it’s me who’s insane or the rest of the planet. So the hyper-PC world is inflicting its militant PC orthodoxy on helpless victims. And when we want to know who the victims are, the name “Larry Summers” is always the first name brought up, and usually the only name.
Well, who is Larry Summers? He’s the president of Harvard University. Harvard is the America’s most prestigous school. President is the highest position at that school. In other words, Summers is the most powerful person in all of academia. He has the position that all of academia covets. How on earth could he be a victim of PC attitudes in the academic world? That’s like saying that Bill Gates is the victim of Microsoft. If those holding in the “PC world” are militantly and unfairly attacking Summers, then what does that tell us? It tells us that the the “PC world” must be a remarkably open-minded and tolerant place, since they’re letting someone they don’t agree with achieve the pinnacle of power and prestige.
Neither have I. And I think the whole issue of terms like “handicapped” or “disabled” for people with physical handicaps or disabilities is almost entirely irrelevant anyway. Public discourse is properly only concerned with the practical issues involved, not with some kind of essentializing label about the persons involved.
Thus, if you’re talking about a bathroom or a ramp that’s accessible to a wheelchair, there’s no need to worry about whether it should be called “handicapped access” or “disabled access” or “differently-abled access”. Just say “wheelchair access”.
Similarly, hand controls to replace pedals in an automobile are not “handicapped controls” or “disabled controls”. They’re just “hand controls”, i.e., controls to be used with the hands.
What we need are terms that accurately and usefully identify the crucial issues relating to the devices that some people are using. Then we don’t have to worry about finding a special label for the particular people who happen to be using those devices.
True
I disagree that etiquette was not used to promote classism. The problem I see here is that I always saw it as so normative to the culture, finding a cite for it is beyond my meager research capabilities.
Certainly, I thought of that afterward.
Yes, my OP was very ill planned.
I have, and I’m embarassed to describe it, but years ago, when Mattel released a new friend for Barbie, Becki, who uses a wheelchair, they called her Barbie’s “differently-abled friend.” I shit you not.
Do ad copywriters for toys count as “serious?” 
Either way, I think it’s clear that “differently abled” has not gained any real traction.
Are you kidding? Summers was almost forced to resign because of his comments. From Wikipedia
To me, it shows the exact opposite, the PC establishment can ring down even the mightiest of mighty when it chooses to set it’s mind to it.
That’s a pretty big “almost,” isn’t it? And your link and quote do not support your case. A failed “lack of confidence” vote and a failed “milder censure” aren’t the same as “almost forced to resign” by a long shot.
But how did the guy get to be President of Harvard without being part of the PC establishment? There’s an element of caricature in ITR Champion’s post, but if the President of Harvard isn’t part of the PC establishment - and the Wikipedia bio proves he wasn’t - then who is?
So your second quote ought to read “The PC establishment can come within a country mile of bring down the mightiest of the mighty when it chooses to set its mind to it.”