41. "Politically correct"

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"Politically correct" is a putdown but how, exactly, does it put down?  I think it's mainly by making a serious human issue a matter of etiquette.  "Correct" is what you are when you avoid criticism by those who have read Emily Post.  Your offenses, as when you use the word "fag," are offenses only against the finicky.  "Considerate" would be a lift-up alternative.  With the word "fag" you aren't considering the feelings of a fellow human being.

Are putdowns ever justified?  Of course.  Every movement has its finicky fringe, discrediting the sensible center, and the more effectively it is mocked the better progress the movement makes.  Liberals can thank James Finn Garner for his Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.  American Protestantism can thank God it had Oliver Wendell Holmes making fun of the moral bully, "yon whey-faced brother,"

Who, though he carries but a doubtful trace
Of angel visits on his hungry face,
From lack of marrow or the coins to pay,
Has dodged some vices in a shabby way,
The right to stick us with his cutthroat terms,
And bait his homilies with his brother worms.

Would that the finicky fringe of every religion could be ripped in this way.

Is down-putting dangerous?  Clearly.  Do it clumsily and you put yourself down.   When a contributor to the Urban Dictionary says that "weak people that don't have the balls to say what they feel and mean are politically correct pussies" he puts himself on the side of he-men standing up to women (like Aunt Polly, and schoolmarms, and everybody's mother) who tyrannically enforce good manners, but in doing that he reveals the sexist basis of his objection, lowering himself and maybe hurting his cause.  He wouldn't have gotten into that if his word "correct" hadn't opened the door.

In some cases the dangers are multiple, and deeper.  Bill Maher said on his show (provocatively titled Politically Incorrect) that the 9/11 hijackers "were not cowards."  The advertisers who dropped his show apparently thought it unforgivably incorrect not to call the hijackers "cowards."  President Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer thought Maher incautious, noting that he had him in mind when he said, "People have to watch what they say."  

You can see red lights flashing all around this one.  I think, looking at Maher's fault, that Fleischer meant, "Choose the words that tell us you stand with your nation (or this administration) against terrorists."  He and the advertisers are judging words by what they signal.  Maher has signaled an incorrect (disloyal) stance.  Their red light flashes, "Danger to the nation!"

People with loyalty to the language judge words by how well they refer to what they see in life.  We've recently (Post #40) observed them, in this blog, judging that "self-appointed" refers to Laurent Gbagbo very well and to organic-food gurus not so well.

Here those language people (you can really scramble the issue by calling them "finicky") will see that "coward" cannot refer to men deliberately giving their lives for a cause.  They know that there's a whole raft of words that can well refer to them ("monsters," "fanatics," "barbarians," and so on) but "coward" is not one of them. Their red light flashes "Danger to the language!"

Dangers to the nation can be short-term or long-term, major or minor.  In World War II the long-term danger to the language was so outweighed by the major danger of Adolf Hitler that you could say anything about him (or show anything, as the British did with movies of him at the French surrender, doing a jig he never did) as long as it promoted solidarity against him.  That, though, was a short-term, and possibly unique, thing.  On the whole I think the long-term drift from reality begun when signals become more important than reference is the greater danger.