And I thought the OP was going to be trashing Dan Rather.
St. John’s had as its mascot a guy in a red tuxedo? That was supposed to instill fear in the opposing team?
“The zone defense was bad enough…now they’re doing “Putting On The Ritz”!!!”
Can’t believe I’m the first to call bullshit on Ravitch’s book. The book hasn’t been published yet, so we can’t actually take a look at her cites, but I’m just the weest bit skeptical that she’s representing things accurately.
Unmitigated bullshit. That’s my prediction. “Politically Correct” is the right-wing equivalent of the left-wing “fascist”: it’s what the intellectually lazy throw at their opponents when they can’t think of a real argument, when they want to sit around snickering snidely with their intelligence-challenged compatriots.
Daniel
But one must remember that Jabba was not a hut but a Hutt.
Which means that PC-speak would make him Jabba the Smallll Housse.
Visualize him as saying “We hatessss those hobbitses and their smalll housssessss.”*
- This probably deserves a smial-ey of its own.
Rain forest warfare just doesn’t seem to quite fit Vietnam.
Exactly.
In his book “The Blank Slate”, Steven Pinker (professor of psychology at MIT; his research includes the psychology of language) writes:
(italics in the original)
Am I the only one to notice that the OP refers to FoxNews “We distort, you decide”. Or did I miss a :rolleyes: somewhere?
Trusting right wing tabloid entertainers to accurately report on left wing sociology is, perhaps, not the best way to fight ignorance.
I’m with Tapioca Dextrin. I’m skeptical on this report-Fox News for crissakes!
While we are talking about linguistic abuses and euphemisms (slight hijack) - how did real estate salesmen (dammit, salespersons) manage to get themselves promoted to Realtors?
We have police officers, doctors, lawyers, developers and serial killers, but somehow Realtors think they deserve to have their profession capitalized, as if they’re perched on velvet Century 21 thrones.
I wanna see Fox do an expose on this.
OK, I think the whole thing is stupid.
But…fairies and and elves aren’t even the same thing!
Fairy=Tinkerbelle
Elf=Galadriel
I don’t know, all this word word changing sounds fun, to me. If you can’t keep up, you’re an old fart! Off to human biodynamics I go!
This makes no sense. In history, hasn’t it been the men who have almost always been the “founding fathers?” Then why try to include women in that?
That’s easy. About 80 years ago, they got together, coined the word, and then got it trademarked.
Heh. When I went back to college at the age of 37, I was sitting in my Political Sci class when the prof said something about The Framers. It was the first time I had heard it. Me and a couple of the other adult students just had blank looks on our faces until he said something about Constitution and you could see it dawn on us all at the same time. “Ohhh… well, that’s stupid.”
That list looks more like a joke than anything.
One question though: I’ve heard before that calling Asia the “East” or “Far East” is Eurocentric. I forget the exact arguements why that was so, but can anyone fill me in? I’m trying to think why anyone would find that offensive, and I can’t for the life of me figure it out.
I’m not sure if this is universal, but my 12th grade government teacher was careful to differenctiate between the “founding fathers” and the “framers.” The framers are those who put the Constiturion together. The founding fathers are those who were involved in the general founding of this country (this could include such Anti-Federalists as Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams; and Thomas Jefferson, who didn’t really either support or go against the Constitution, and definately didn’t help write it).
She was the only person I ever heard this distinction from, though.
The term Founding Fathers was not mentioned at all throughout the entire semester, nor was it in my American History class the next year. They were always referred to as The Framers.
It was very disconcerting to have something you have known all your life to just poof be gone like that.
Don’t forget Beaver University (or college) which changed it’s name to something like Arcadia University because people were having trouble finding it on PCs that had filtering software. I imagine that Morehead University will be the next one forced to change it’s name for that reason.
Here are some more examples from the Atlantic Monthly article (my comments in [brackets]):
Let me offer a provisional definition of political correctness: substituting word b for word a when offensiveness is suddenly attributed to word a which has no history of offensiveness. Note: I’m limiting this to words or very short phrases.
Now, care to provide a few right-wing examples? Maybe you consider “pro-life” to be the right-wing politically correct term for “anti-choice” or “anti-abortion”. Or perhaps “capitalism” versus “exploitation of the masses”? There’s one I’ll concede: “Creation science”.
What problems does this cynical word-shuffling address? This is a problem in itself, at least in that the effort expended could be directed towards something more productive. Furthermore, any sensible person knows this word-shuffling is bullshit and only decreases respect for the people who do this or see it and do nothing.
<aside>
And frankly, I’m sick of the word “challenge”. Challenging something is, at best, just a beginning. Solutions can be long, hard, and boring. Some people think all they have to do is “challenge” something, and the people who actually do the work to solve the problem are secondary.
</aside>
From the article: “This list of banned words and stereotypes is an abridgment of a lengthy glossary compiled by a historian from bias guidelines issued by major educational publishers and state agencies. The guidelines are used by writers, editors, and illustrators when preparing textbooks and tests for K-12 students.”
And what is so “Right-biased” if someone uses “elderly” as opposed to “older persons”? Where are the long lists enforcing “Right-biased” words?
Please note: most of the offensive terms given are not “Right-biased pap.” They are just out-of-fashion left-biased pap being replaced by new left-biased pap.
To support the reality of PC, I’ll cite the recent flap about New York Regents exams. (NY Times, June 6, 2002, “State Exams Are to Regain Real Wording In Passages.”)
And what do we say about merely declaring something “intellectually lazy”? Does that involve intellectual effort or is it just snide snickering?
Sorry, PC is alive and well no matter how much you try to deny it.
Finally, I’d like to offer the 1957 comedy routine by Stan Freberg about political correctness, Elderly Man River. Now, ironically, it is un-PC.
Well, it’s only “East” relative to the West. Who wants to be defined by their geographic proximity to someone else? Additionally, it encourages people to think of Asia as a unified whole that is utterly and completely different than what we know- they think “eastern thoughts” while practicing “eastern philosophy” and doing “eastern stuff” in general. In reality, Asia is a hugely varied place that blends in gradually and seamlessly with “the West”. It’s not some vast wierd monolithic “other”.
Few of these definitions seem all that outrageous. Textbook writers have to write something. Why not write stuff that isn’t offensive. I mean, we do tend to say that Europeans live in “small houses” while saying that a similer structure in another country is a “hut”. “Busybody” is kind of a bad word, and does instantly bring up a pretty negative stereotype of women. I doubt these textbooks would print “chauvanist pig”, either. The “Regatta” case is a pretty famous one- they were using it on a test, and only the rich kids had any clue what it meant.
BWAHAHA! Lol!
I can see where East and West can be considered wrong. But we do need some terms. A westener seeing an easterner or vice-verca won’t instantly be able to tell which country they’re from, so needs some catch all term.
OK, lumping stuff in as eastern philosophy is wrong.
As for ‘old,’ peope are old, there’s nothing wrong with being old, there’s extraneous in the name - ‘old’, ‘elderly’, ‘senoir citizens’, ‘chronologically advanced’, ‘m/p atriarchs’, ‘coffin dodgers’ all mean old. Some terms might have bad connotations, but if I’m refering to people over 70 (or whatever), any term I use is going to mean 'people over 70 (or whatever) THERE’S NO GETTING AWAY FROM THAT!
*OK, these do have connotations