Poly, You must be a sci-fi “socially challenged individual” to spit out a factoid such as this. 
Well god damnit, there goes the Pittsburgh Three Rivers Regatta. We can’t have that festival and boat race anymore because some poor kid from the Hill District might not know what it is, even though it’s all over TV, radio and flyers on telephone poles for months before the actual event.
Exactly my point. What makes you think that it’s “politically correct” to remove references to sex, nudity, alcohol, and modest profanity? That sounds to me like good old-fashioned patronizing of children to me.
But it “patronizing” an offensive term? Is that why you’ve replaced it with “politically correct”? Or is it that you don’t score any smug right-wing points by calling it patronizing?
Nobody is denying that officious officials have a long history of bowdlerizing literature in an attempt to sanitize it for children. I’m not even denying that some insane creep of a principal in Eugene, OR has asked teacher to refer to “older people” rather than “the elderly”. What I’m calling bullshit on is the implication that the list in the OP represents some sort of mainstream educational agenda.
Daniel
Bungle in the Rain Forest…
Welcome to the Rain Forest…
George, George, George of the Rain Forest…
Tarzan, King of the…
Naw, it just does’t work.
I’m just waiting for Miss Bain Forest to come in here and get snarky.
Daniel
I grew up a poor inlander, and I never knew what a regatta was until I was 21. Before then I had a vague notion that it was some kind of parade with boats in it, but I also though it might be some kind of place related to boats- like a place where you show them of or something. So if I were given a test question like:
I’d have trouble with the answer, not because I don’t know what ‘entered’ means, but because I don’t have any clue what a ‘regatta’ is. Let’s face it, boating culture is for the most part the realm of the rich. There are some poor people who do the boat thing, but largly it is rich people who are exposed to the specific vocabulary of boating. So it’s not appropriate to test people on 'regattas (unless the test is specifically about regattas, and the kids learned about regattas in class) just like it’s not appropriate to test people on Spanish words, or slang words that only certain groups regularly use, or on say, terms related to government services that only poor children are likely to be familier with.
What escapes the language police when they replace temrs with euphemisms, is that they water down the language. Specificity is lost.
Sometimes you just gotta call a spade a “spade” - or even a “fuckin’ shovel”.
What the hell is wrong with “Doctor”? Does this have connotations of maleness? Do we really need “health care provider”? Is this to avoid excluding shamans, witch doctors, voodo practitioners…?
This stuff makes me nuts!
Again, people are looking at the wrong culprit here. My guess is that this has nothing to do with “politically correct” anything: this has to do with a diversification in the industry. “Health Care Provider” can refer to a hospital, a nursing home, a hospice, a registered nurse, a dietitian, a medical doctor, a physical therapist, an insurance company, or another entity.
Obviously, it’s sometimes useful to talk about these entities in the aggregate; do you have a suggestion for a better term?
Daniel
Apparently, even sven, you’ve never heard of vocabulary textbooks?
The article the OP cited, if true, is utterly and completely ridiculous.
Ya gotta regatta!
I doubt you’ll find many rich snobs down there anyways.
Drunken SLOBS, maybe. (Just kidding).
Refering to an insurance company as a health care provider is offensive to all health care providers. Insurance companies are blood sucking leeches. Wait an minute. Blood sucking leeches have been used in health care. I’ll have to think about that.
BTW, Politically Correct, or, PC is offensive to politisians because it implies they are doing their job.
I also grew up a poor inlander, but I knew what a regatta was in elementary school because. . . I read books. Try it sometime.
Nonsense. I learned nautical language from reading Robert Lewis Stevenson and Herman Melville.
You might as well say that only rural kids can tell the names of farm animals, or that only poor kids can figure out what how “stickball” is played.
Hey, I resent being called an “old fart”.
Henceforth, please have the courtesy to refer to me as “aged flatulence”…
Oh, screw that. I read two to four books a week when I was a kid, and I didn’t know what a regatta was until this thread.
If the same test asked kids about entering an “arroyo,” I betcha more Texas Latino kids would get the correct answer than would kids from the Hamptons.
It baffles me that people would deny that such tests have cultural influences and biases. Whether we should take such biases into account when testing, or just trust that they’ll balance out, is a legitimate argument. But to deny that they’re there is just bizarre.
Daniel
<sigh> More and more, I am convinced there is a living to be made as a Scrabble hustler.
Am I the only person here who looks up unfamiliar words in a dictionary or figures out meaning from context?
“Euphemism Treadmill” is a damned useful phrase, and I’d like to thank BlackKnight for posting the excerpt.
One other thing to consider. Although this story is being broken on the conservative Fox News site (and earlier in the conservative cartoon Mallard Fillmore), the original excerpt from the book ran in the not-necessarily-conservative-at-all Atlantic Monthly. I scanned the article in Barnes and Noble last week, but I don’t remember what the author of the book’s thesis was. It’ll be interesting to see which direction she’s coming from.
-M
Looking up words in the middle of a vocabulary test? Isn’t that called cheating?
My vocabulary is pretty damned good, I daresay. Everyone has words they’ve not heard of, whether it’s matsutake, peripatetic, oleaginous, arroyo, or regatta. Some words will be more familiar to members of specific social groups. This is unremarkable.
Daniel
Hmm. Were they specific books you read, or would just reading books in general tell you what a regatta is?
On-topic, if you want a very clear example of politically-correct bullshit in our country, check out Freedom Fries. Good God! I wonder when Fox News will cover this absurdity?
Daniel
hopefully not double-posting
Or more familiar in certain geographical areas – I dare say that regatta is more likely to be known in coastal areas than inland.
Heh. This one immediately raised my hackles when I saw it in the OP. In the city I live, our anniversay day is also often called “Regatta Day” and as a kid we used to go to a hill overlooking the harbour and watch the thousands of colourful boats. I’d expect most kids in Auckland would know the word… that said, if you went a couple of hours drive south to inland Hamilton the percentages might well be different.
NZ is very small compared to the US – it must be hell…err… I mean heck trying to formulate unbiased prose questions that can be used across that great area and numerous sub-cultural groups.
Or are the contents of tests like the SATs not the same across the country? Are there regional variations?
Reading comprehension problems, today? Read my first comment in my earlier post. (And regarding the word “challenge,” if Ravitch is simply describing problems, than she is not proposing solutions, so my use of the word is, indeed, the beginning of the issue.)
As to
You will note that I expressly did not claim that the Right is involved with phrases (although they are quite capable of throwing out words as if they were epithets and branding anything that they do not like as “PC” even when there is nothing political or “correct” about the issue. (I heard one Right-wing nutcase claim that “previously owned” was an example of “PC” when applied to cars.) What do you think the odds are of finding a reference to Ho Chi Minh or Fidel Castro using the phrase “freedom fighter”? Yet, whatever some may think of their use of power once they achieved it, they were very clearly freedom fighters in their early struggles.
I can, however, provide a list (initially short, more on demand) of cases where the Right has applied pressure to ensure censorship, which was the statement I actually made:
In textbooks:
Pushing Creation Science (or intimidating publishers to downplay or ignore evolution).
In history texts, fear of being denied access to Right-wing veto in most markets (with special note of Texas) has caused most publishers to:
Portray the conquest of North America as a struggle between hardy settlers and “uncivilized savages,” thus minimizing the amount of culture and civilization that the indians actually had while downplaying the violation of white laws used to further the expansion.
Ignore multiple slave revolts, presenting the image that, if not happy with their lot, blacks were resigned to slavery.
Ignore the white-on-black riots of the first half of the 20th century, so that there is no context in which to recognize the perceived “fear of success” in the black community.
Ignore that blacks participated in Civil Service administration from its creation until they were removed during the Wilson administration, giving the appearance that they were never involved in management (leaving the impression that they were probably not “suited” for it).
Portray the war with Spain as a liberating exercise for Cuba, the Philipines, and the other territories we confiscated, rather than recognizing that it was raw empire building in which we immediately suppressed the independence movements that were already active (and that we ostensibly got involved to help).
Ignore the multiple “interventions” throughout most of Latin America and the Caribbean–several of which led directly to current situations in that region.
Pretend that Joe McCarthy was an aberration rather than recognizing that he was a symptom of an effort to suppress free speech and free association that lasted well over 20 years and destroyed many lives–and that even that effort was simply the tail end of a broader effort to reduce freedoms extending back to the 19th century.
Beyond textbooks, there is the issue of banning and bowdlerizing non-texts from or in the classroom for reasons of not upholding “American” or “Christian” values. Complaints from the Right have recently caused the banning of Shakespeare and the Harry Potter books. A look at the the most frrequently banned books of the 1990s shows an overwhelming majority thrown out by protests from the Right–only the two Twain books are generally opposed by misguided folks on the Left.
Now, it is possible that Ms. Ravitch addresses these and similar issues in her book. I have not condemned the book, outright, merely noting that if her work is simply a polemic against Left-wing stupidity and ignoring Right-wing stupidity, then it will not help the students.
One example of the methods of censorship:
http://www.udel.edu/PR/UpDate/93/7/20.html
(The Left is also guilty, but there is enough blame to go around, which was my point.)