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.
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| 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 |
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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,
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| 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
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Negroes
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Colored persons
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Afro-Americans
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Blacks
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African-Americans
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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.
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| 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.
