Think More, Speak More

I just want to take a moment ahead of today’s post to honor veterans on this Veterans Day! In my family we honor my grandfather, who fought in WWI; my father, who fought in WWII; and our son, who was twice deployed to Korea just a few years ago.

The wall in the building where our son was
inducted into the US Army, featuring the seal of 
each branch of the military, February 2012

_____________________

Now, on to today’s topic: political correctness. I’ve been reading Michael Knowles’ book Speechless, and I’ve been marking more passages than I could ever quote. One thing that caught my eye was the grammatical part of political correctness. Knowles says,

cover image found on Amazon

Political correctness relies on euphemism, soft words used to sugarcoat harsh realities. We all use euphemisms some of the time as a matter of good manners. We refer to old women as “women of a certain age.” We mourn those who have “passed away” rather than those who have died. In prior ages, a lady went to “powder her nose,” and she still uses the “bathroom” or the “restroom” rather than the toilet. We use euphemisms—literally, “well-speaking” or auspicious words—to be polite.

I all those cases, the polite euphemism softens the reality it describes, but it doesn’t contradict that reality. The old woman is indeed a woman of a certain age. The poetical “passing away” describes the spiritual fact of death. Women may indeed powder their noses after they’ve done whatever else they do in rooms that often include a bath and in which anyone might rest. Polite euphemisms soften the truth, but they do not lie.

So, that’s our starting place—polite words to soften harsh realities but that do not lie: that’s euphemism.

Then we get to something else altogether: the manipulation of language that is political correctness. Knowles describes it this way:

Leftists tend to manipulate language by using vague terms and jargon not just to soften but to conceal and even contradict the realities to which they refer. Killing babies in the womb becomes “women’s healthcare” and “reproductive rights,” even though abortion results in precisely the opposite of health and reproduction. After a Muslim terror attack on a church in Sri Lanka, Hillary Clinton tweeted her support for “Easter worshippers,” a bizarre moniker designed to hide the victims’ Christian identity. In fact, the sole instance in which Hillary used clear language in 2016—when she referred to Americans who refused to support her as “deplorable” and “irredeemable”—proved to be the most disastrous moment of her campaign. Clinton had made a critical error for a radical politician: she told people what she really thought.

Political correctness, then, is not politeness: it is using inaccurate words intended to conceal. It’s lying.

Then Knowles takes a look at the structure of the phrase itself. You take the noun correctness, and you put a modifier in front of it, and it changes it entirely. He credits the late presidential speechwriter and conservative columnist William Safire with using the description “adverbially premodified adjectival lexical unit,” the description itself a play on PC jargon. It’s easy to mock: for example, “short” becomes “vertically challenged.” PC itself, you might want to call “truth challenged.” Knowles describes further:

In this formula, the adjective or adverb usually serves to negate the noun or adjective it modifies. The term “politically correct” itself follows this politically correct formula by using an adverb to negate the adjective it precedes. That is, “correct” means true. But “politically correct” means not true. “Justice” means getting what one deserves without favor. The politically correct “social justice” is a form of injustice because it means getting what one does not deserve because one is favored. “Marriage” in every culture throughout history has meant the union of husbands and wives. “Same-sex marriage,” however favorably one views the concept, is not marriage.

We could list a number of other PC terms that follow this structure:

·       Transgender woman = not a real woman.

·       Justice-involved youth = a juvenile involved in something that is not justice, but criminality.

·       Overseas contingency operation = Obama-speak for something other than an operation, something like fighting a war.

How about this one:

·       Compassionate conservative.

It means something other than conservative—leftist/liberal lite. But it also implies that conservatism—the God-given rights preserved in our Constitution—is not compassionate. If it were the other side being so maligned, they’d take offense.

There are also PC terms that obscure meaning even without this particular structure:

·       Handicapable = not capable in the normal sense.

·       Woke = not awake and aware of reality.

·       Diversity = absolute lock-step agreement in thought, preferably with non-white or non-male genetics.

·       Fetus (or clump of cells) = baby, but taking away the human and live meanings so the mother who wants to rid herself of it will not feel the tinge of guilt that baby killing causes.

You can’t win—or even debate—when you agree to the enemy’s definitions of terms. Not even if you’re trying to be agreeable to find common ground. They have a tendency to change the lexicon as soon as people agree to it. In my lifetime, we have been told to call blacks

·         Negroes

·         Colored persons

·         Afro-Americans

·         Blacks

·         African-Americans

·         Blacks (again)

·         Persons of Color

After trying to keep up, out of politeness, for some time, I got to a point where I now just use the simplest term, the one most likely to convey meaning, not offense: black. Usually I do not capitalize, just as I would not capitalize white in the description of someone’s skin. Neither white nor black is very accurate, because most blacks are some level of brown; most whites are some level of peach or tan. Many many people of most ethnic and racial backgrounds are in the middle (as I am). Negro is from the Latin, meaning “black.” I understand why the unutterable N-word is not to be used, since it pretty much always meant a derogatory version of Negro. But I don’t really understand why the actual term became no longer usable.

Biden, speaking November 11, 2021
screenshot from video tweet within this article

Incidentally, while I was writing today, Biden managed to talk about “Negroes,” as though he’d never stopped using the term, even though Obama had outlawed its use in government. But it is mainly conservatives calling him out—for the inconsistency and duplicity of the Biden supporters. He was referring to a baseball player, from the times there was a Negro league (as it was called at the time). He refers to that awkwardly, but I don’t think he actually forgot what to call blacks today. Still, his gaffe is amusing, as is the media’s covering for him.

I don’t understand why Afro-American fell out of favor, but African-American shortly thereafter (a decade or two) fell into favor, when they are nearly identical. Neither is very useful to describe skin color, because not all Africans are black (the very blonde Charlize Theron comes to mind, as well as a number of Middle-eastern-looking people along the Mediterranean in northern Africa). And certainly not all blacks are American. Are you supposed to learn their lineage before you can refer to their skin color? What do you call blacks in Britain? What about those from Jamaica, not Africa? Are they Jamaican-Americans when you refer to where they immigrated from, but African-Americans when you refer to their skin color? What if they’re still Jamaican nationals who happen to be residing here? African-Jamaicans-in-America?

I have a friend from Honduras. She is clearly black looking, as are all the members of her family. Spanish is the native language. She has been here for about 20 years, and her English is good, but she still has an accent that is challenging for our communication (as my Spanish probably is for her). I asked her, quite sincerely just curious, about the history where she is from, because it was something I did not know. She says everyone from her homeland looks like them, but she is unaware of any origin story of people coming from Africa. I imagine if you go back far enough, you might find a connection from Africa. But it’s so far back, these Honduran people aren’t even aware of it. So, under what circumstance would it make sense to call her and her family African-American, when they clearly are not?

I don’t understand why “colored person” became taboo, but “person of color” is considered polite. The only explanation is that it’s a trap: if you try to follow their speech code, they will change it—because the goal is to be able to shame you for being racist, and this is how they come up with evidence against you.

Knowles points out that “this constant flux is a feature, not a bug, of political correctness.”

There’s a quote Knowles uses to begin Chapter 1 of his book, from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

illustration by John Tenniel, circa late 1800s
found here

The one who controls the meaning of words has power over the one who is not controlling the meaning. That describes the mostly lost culture war. As Knowles says in reference to the debate over the definition of marriage,

The cultural revolutionaries found it far easier to redefine the terms according to the conclusions they hoped to reach. When conservatives acquiesced to the verbal trickery, the radicals won the debate before it had even begun.

And I like this line: “What begins with semantic quibbles ends with refashioning the entire political order.” One thing I have to say for Knowles, whose first published book was wordless: he has quite a way with words.

He points out that conservatives tend to agree, along with John Stuart Mill and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and others: The answer to bad speech is more speech. But those trying to take over the culture believe: The answer to bad speech is censorship.

In such a discussion, one could hardly leave out Orwell’s 1984. Knowles says this:

Big Brother’s government relies on the control of language to maintain power. “Newspeak,” the novel’s most direct prophesy of political correctness, controls its subjects’ minds by changing and limiting their lexicon. Through this curtailing of language, “thoughtcrime”—that is, dissent from party orthodoxy—becomes impossible.

When you control the words, you control the thoughts. Newspeak was designed to take away the ability to refer to certain ideas; it removed the words necessary to conceptualize them. Imagine if you were to take away a common idea, for instance, friendliness. For a while you could use multiple other words, like “goodwill among people who are well acquainted.” But how often would you be willing to refer to someone by saying, “He seems like a person of goodwill among people who are well acquainted, even though I am not well acquainted with him yet”? Before long, you’d simply let the concept go.

In real time we can see this kind of destruction of the words marriage and family. The PC dictators accuse us of disrespect if we do not acquiesce to redefine these words to mean something they are not. For marriage, that would be something that does not involve the sexual procreative act between people who are permanently committed to only each other, and who plan to remain together for the rest of their lives. It has—only in this century, which is only two decades old—come to mean “any two adult persons currently in a sexual relationship.” That’s a very different concept, leaving out creating offspring, exclusivity, and permanence. How can you wonder that the purpose was to destroy to institution of marriage by changing what is thought about it?

And family? We have all the social science data that shows children are most likely to have the best outcomes when they are raised by their own married mother and father. But now we are told it’s impolite—politically incorrect—to assume that two men with a random child, or two women who certainly no more than one of whom is genetically related to a child are “family.” Or single parents who never marry a string of live-in men. Or whatever other arrangement you might think of. Family changes from "parents raising their children" to "any combination of adults with any children or no children." When you change what it means, you erase the idea of its original purpose. If you look at China, where they long enforced a one-child policy, they have raised a generation or two who have no concept of sister, brother, aunt, uncle, or cousin. One hopeful sign is the culture ware is that, in Virginia, where the now-former governor accidentally said what he thought out loud, that parents shouldn't have the right to decide what their children are taught in schools, he got booted out of office.

I haven’t reached the end of the book yet. I don’t know whether Knowles provides us a solution. I suspect not. He ends his preface with,

Political correctness has left us speechless, but the right to speak means nothing to those who have nothing to say.

I suspect his book is a call to speak, to have courage, to keep a grasp on our words and their meanings, the way I keep an old dictionary to remind me of what words meant some 40 years ago. And we should keep using the words that mean what we want to convey. We should keep thinking the concepts of those words. The more words are forbidden for our use, the more we should explore the true meanings that are being snuffed out before our eyes.

We need to think more—and we need to speak more of what we think.