What’s Wrong with the World

I also hate political correctness because their particular jargon is meant as a marker, a gang sign -- it is like the slang used by cliques in school, who deliberately exclude the non-cool kids by using code words only the cool kids know.

To me, this is the funniest bit of the "rant." For years and years now, the only people that ever use the phrase "politically correct" are conservatives, and only a certain brand of them at that. The use of the phrase is a marker for someone who is annoyed that only black people are allowed to say nigger. They long for the good old days in which no one looked askance at them for calling a spade a spade.

Really? A rant against politically correctness? The 1980s called, it wants its cliches back.

Maybe if I video-taped myself with a kidnapped and innocent civilian journalist, one to whom I’d falsely promised safe conduct, and battered in his skull with a thurible while dressed in miter and alb all the time singing GLORIA IN EXCELSIS DEO...

Was this guy actually attempting to imitate Allen Ginsberg by employing this kind of verse (whatever this happens to be)?

Mike, my patience with humorless post-modern lefty commentators is at a low ebb. If you are unable to appreciate good writing and good humor at the expense of pompous asses who share your political leanings, you are _more_ than welcome to go enjoy a good laugh with such people at whatever you guys are capable of laughing at. Somewhere else.

Hilarious, I enjoyed every line of it.

To me, this is the funniest bit of the "rant." For years and years now, the only people that ever use the phrase "politically correct" are conservatives, and only a certain brand of them at that.

Ah, so I guess all of those times when papers I've written were returned with 'mankind' having been crossed out and replaced with 'humankind' were really just instances of racist conservatives stamping their feet. Leftists might not use the phrase 'Political Correctness', but they do enforce it.

If you are unable to appreciate good writing and good humor

Really? A cliche rant that has been picked over by Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity et al for twenty years now counts as "good" writing and humor? Ok.

Ah, so I guess all of those times when papers I've written were returned with 'mankind' having been crossed out and replaced with 'humankind'...

The oppression, it burns!

The oppression, it burns!

When out of arguments, resort to mockery.

No, Mike's just frustrated because Lydia politely told him to go somewhere else and laugh, and as it turns out he's incapable of rising above a smirk. So he's decided to ignore her and go troll.

Mike, for God's sake, go away. You appear to be incapable of appreciating either the humor or the important contentful points (concerning the fact that PC-speak is worse than lying, the separation between readers of the present and writers of the past, etc.) in Wright's post. And O'Rourke's piece is even funnier and better written, though (surprisingly) somewhat less seriously contentful, than Wright's.

You, on the other hand, are full of the humorless, left-wing, juvenile shallowness that they are critiquing. Which is why you are incapable of appreciating them.

I get that. But do we need to _listen_ to it? Bag it.

I do not understand Mike. How can you belittle the censorship of language? Language is that by which we construe reality, and if it is subject to the whims of those who would sacrifice honesty and truth for acceptance and inclusiveness then I can call that nothing other than oppression, and rightly so. Just because your sympathies are with the censors does not mean that you are unable to understand that persistent and systematic control of language by liberals in the media and universities. Indeed, it is not trivial to argue over whether we should use B.C. or B.C.E., you could even say our whole civilization depends on it. If not, then you can at least admit the motivations that lie behind it.

Also, do you really believe that all of this is an attempt to make blatant racism acceptable? If so, then you are an idiot. People will stop bemoaning political correctness when you start believing that it exists. Until then, there is no point mocking others for their opinions.

When out of arguments, resort to mockery.

It's Underpants Gnome-style argumentation:

Phase 1: Mock your opponent.

Phase 2: ???

Phase 3: Victory!

When out of arguments, resort to mockery.

The decades old cliches of men of resentment don't merit argument.

Yes, the document O'Rourke points to is comical. So what? It is one outlier. Even O'Rourke says its goals are laudable - and at bottom, what are those goals? A code of discretion. Just because it confuses virtually Talmudic tables of law with discretion does not mean you'll win any grand cultural victory by calling a feminist "Mrs."

Indeed, it is not trivial to argue over whether we should use B.C. or B.C.E., you could even say our whole civilization depends on it.

Right, and the "PC police" believe our civilization depends on using BCE. Coin, meet your other side.

No, you do not understand. The idea is that words actually express something. Therefore it is perfectly acceptable to debate whether or not words should be filtered through governments and educrats. He who controls language controls history, thought, and reality. Thus, political correctness is more than mere sensitivity through language, it is a battle for the future. If you think it is unimportant, that it because you have already implicitly decided where you fall.

It is not mere resentment, and until you are able to at least understand the broader implications of handing our speech over to men who will prune it of "inappropriateness," the situation will probably continue to look trivial to you, which is why you can assume a mocking tone so easily.

"The decades old cliches of men of resentment don't merit argument."

Translation: duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh.

The decades old cliches of men of resentment don't merit argument.

See?

Phase 1: Mock your opponent.

Phase 2: ???

Phase 3: Victory!

It's a standard template. Remember it and you, too, can win arguments without actually arguing, all while continuing to feel secure in your own intellectual superiority.

Actually, Edward, I fully agree with you. The reason I consider these matters trivial is that the idea that a handbook of speech could possibly win some hegemonic battle over language is utterly laughable.

The book O'Rourke is so concerned about is a comical charge of cavalry against tanks.

That is why this is trivial. The book - insofar as it seems to believe that it is possible to hand down a series of rules for the use of language - is a joke.

Insofar as the book will be effective in anyway, it will be because it is just repeating cultural norms. I've already used the example of calling a feminist Mrs. Do any of you insist on doing this?

Wright's point about PC encouraging lies and contempt for the past is one I hadn't thought of before, though I've witnessed it in action.

The anti-bias efforts commonly known as PC allow anybody to think they're participating in intellectual discourse simply by categorizing.

This illusion is advanced by its use of Greek-derived scientific-sounding words like "ethnocentric."

In fact, such efforts just keep substantive discourse from happening. Every complaint about the gender-neutral use of the word "man" takes time that would be better spent elsewhere.

And there are many who spend more time complaining about the alleged bias and flaws of present and past great thinkers than they spend engaging them.

In the past, would energies spent in PC self-policing have gone into countering obscenity or vulgarity? That strikes me as an explanation of why the triumph of the F-bomb happy "Free Speech Movement" preceded or coincided with the rise of PC customs. Perhaps outrage cannot be created or destroyed, but is merely transferred.

I was just watching the news in New Zealand and one of the lead stories was on this tourist Inuit woman who, whilst visiting my country, contacted the media to complain about two New Zealand products: eskimo lollies and eskimo pies (chocolate coated ice cream bars). See the story here: Eskimo lollies slammed as racist by Canadian tourist

I was so frustrated I wanted to rant but no one was home and then I came here and read this and laughed my head off!

"Unless you can tell me, off the top of your head and without looking it up, the name in any Eskimo dialect for a Virginian, I suggest your concern for their concern for our names for them is illegitimate..."

Thanks for sharing :-)

PS. I hadn't heard of John C. Wright either so I'm either your cave-mate or it's not that rare a phenomena.

The use of the phrase is a marker for someone who is annoyed that only black people are allowed to say nigger.

Lydia, did you just get called a racist?

Bill, "racist" is the N-word of the Left. It's one of those mindless insults that is meant to shut down debate. You may recall that one of our commentators on another thread met concerns about the homosexual agenda and the punishment of businessmen by saying that any such complaints come from "whiny white would-be martyrs." Same phenomenon.

Kevin, I'm glad that the Wright column brought that point out into the open, because it's an incredibly important one. Most conservative professors have at one point or another had a young woman student tell them that you can tell the Founding Fathers didn't think women had rights because of the phrase "all men are created equal." That's an extreme example, and it's almost better that it is stated outright, where it can be answered. More insidious is the constant drumbeat of revised language on young minds. If a young person constantly reads works that use "he or she" and never use "man" to refer to the human race, he will find it much harder to have a natural appreciation for works written prior to, say, 1970 and is in fact likely to begin immediately worrying about the politics of all such writers instead of concentrating on their content. It's gotten so bad that in an "edition" of a work by Bertrand Russell, they actually changed his language to "gender-neutral." Russell was a bad man but a good writer. Such changes are literary vandalism.

Indeed, it is not trivial to argue over whether we should use B.C. or B.C.E., you could even say our whole civilization depends on it.

I don't see what the big deal is - Before Christ vs. Before Christ's Era. Seems about the same.

I suspect Mike's statements in this thread are related to his opinions expressed in Ed Feser's Spinoza thread. There he seems to indicate that he thinks efficient causes wouldn't exist if humans didn't exist. This would seem to indicate a sort of constructivism or post-modernism on his part: that he doesn't really believe in objective truth and objective reality, independent of what humans say or think about them. If that's the case, it would explain why he isn't bothered by the attempts of PCers to obscure objective reality by corrupting the language and making it impossible to accurately communicate "inappropriate" truths.

It would also explain his dismissive attitude towards reasoned debate, and why he thinks that opposing viewpoints can be defeated by mere handwaving and mockery. If you believe that truth is subjective and defined by people, then of course you reject the practice of using logic and reasoned argument to search for independent and objective truth. Instead, you will merely try to create "truth" by consensus, using mockery, PC corruption of the language, and any other method you can come up with to stop people from thinking and saying things that you don't want to be true.

PC language impositions are a form of propaganda, and a form that is particularly hard to combat. That's why Wright says they are worse than lying. If you tell everyone to say "Native American," the implication is that there is something objectively objectionable about "Indian" and that people who use it are, at a minimum, bumblers. This insinuation then makes its way through language generally. If you tell people that they must say "he or she," this implies that the generic "he" is insulting to women, which changes the reader's perception of writers who do use the generic "he." It also means that every time a student is writing and starts wrestling with what to do when he needs a pronoun, he is trying in the very act of writing about *any subject under the sun* to defer to feminism. Thus feminism becomes part of our lives even when we are trying to talk about other subjects. Or take the fact that PC language requirements are constantly changing. One has to find out what this year's word is for some group, and one gets rapped over the knuckles when trying to defer by innocently using _last year's_ word or using a word that was, at least, not condemned as of last year. This aspect of PC-speak, like all arbitrary uses of power, keeps people off-balance and teaches the constant habit of deference, a cringing attitude of constant apology.

Naturally, someone who believes in the idea that it's all about power and who approves of the social agenda being advanced will not be bothered by these facts.

The reason I consider these matters trivial is that the idea that a handbook of speech could possibly win some hegemonic battle over language is utterly laughable.

I ceased to find the linguistic revision movement amusing when I discovered that a young scholar could lose his shot at an $80,000 scholarship to graduate school for using traditional pronouns in an interview.

Facts are inconvenient things for liberals, aren't they?

Mike:

The reason I consider these matters trivial is that the idea that a handbook of speech could possibly win some hegemonic battle over language is utterly laughable.

"The reason I consider these matters trivial is that the idea that a handbook of speech could possibly win some hegemonic battle over language is utterly laughable."

I'm glad you put "utterly" in front of "laughable," since without that adjective I would have mistakenly thought you just meant "laughable."

If language is so unimportant in the shaping and presentation of ideas and arguments, then why not try an alternative means by which to make your case? (Or at least use fewer modifiers in your posts. It is really deeply and utterly annoying in a sort of post-colonial hegemonic post-modern way.). :-)

Moreover, what's wrong with offering a trivial and laughable case? Are you suggesting that there are rules for good reasoning that may be violated by the employment of untrue reasons and/or unsound arguments? And why should we care? Is there some truth about the world that is not gained by the person whose mind is not functionally properly?

What people don't quite understand is the fact that opponents of Life itself have often advanced their cause through deceptively clever use of euphemisms in place of what horrendous acts such as abortion do actually entail and that is the very murder of innocent human life.

Instead of their cause being called exactly for what it is (i.e., "Pro-Murder), they label it with such euphemistic phrasing like "Pro-Choice", ever endearing various peoples to their agenda (since why would anybody oppose things like "choice" & "freedom" -- only narrow minded bigots like Dr. Beckwith & those bent on tyranny as clearly Dr. McGrew most certainly is given her past history on the matter would oppose such things as noble as this!)?

Thus, so-called 'Christians' here would do well to heed something that George Orwell himself once uttered about this wickedly clever use of language:

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

'While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.'

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better."

– George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” in Why I Write

aristocles, that's just beautiful.

We are amused, angered, fired up by the rants. Now, what do we do?

Lydia, you may enjoy this bit from an interview with Theodore Dalrymple:

"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to cooperate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."

Gintas, if I tell you what I think we should do, I will be open to the perfectly legitimate charge that I am sitting in a place of safety and advising people who are sitting in a place of danger. But this is what I think we should do: We should defy them. Use the generic "he" and "man" and take what comes. Sure, try to talk to your professors or your editor. Try to explain that this is a matter of principle on your part, that you believe that to acquiesce in the elimination of generic "he" and "man" and use clunky substitutes is not only to harm the language but also to endorse an agenda you do not wish to endorse. You might be surprised how often they back down. I've known of two academic publishers whose official rules of style say you have to eliminate traditional pronouns but who have not enforced this rule when faced by a determined author. In all my publications in philosophy journals, I've never had a _single_ editor ask me to change this. Yet all the philosophy graduate students I know acquiesce in it because they are afraid of not getting published if they defy it. And even if a professor regards generic "he" as an error, if the paper is excellent in other respects, he can hardly give it a bad grade without giving good cause for complaint on the grounds of ideological bias.

I suggest we see where we are being deferential to liberal thought-control in other areas of our speech. If you are in a position where you call upon people to support our troops, for example, you might consider not saying "We should support [or pray for] our men and women in uniform," which _pretends_ to be a merely factual recognition of the (deplorable) fact that women are now treated as warriors but which _in fact_ acts as an endorsement of that state of affairs.

Tell your kids about PC-speak. Best of all, home school them and inoculate them. Teach them the generic "he" in their own writing. (A Beka Books is a fundamentalist textbook company--I mean this quite literally--with a good math and English curriculum. They teach generic "he" in their language curriculum on sale to this day. Catholics may understandably not like their history curriculum, but then, I'm not advertising their history curriculum.) Help your kids to stand up to their teachers if they do go to school. Give them old books that are free of emasculated, self-conscious writing.

In racial areas, I suggest finding terminology that is not derogatory but also not deferential. I consider "black" to fall into this category, and it is the term I always use. I only just learned from Mr. Wright's column about the new attempt to get rid of "Eskimo"; I intend to go on using "Eskimo" until the day I die, and people can lump it. Likewise "Indian" or sometimes "American Indian" where there is a possibility of confusion with Asian Indians (or "Indian Indians," as my mother used to say).

In general, I think that it's good to follow Strunk & White's rule: "Omit needless words." It has a corollary (of my own making): "Omit needless syllables." Notice how nearly always the PC substitutes have far more syllables than the words they are meant to replace. That's a sign that something is wrong and that language is being uglified for thought-control purposes.

Sage, boy, is that Dalrymple quotation spot-on. And think of what a new version of this is going to be in our own time: Forcing us to call biological males "women," because that is how they "identify."

But this is what I think we should do: We should defy them. Use the generic "he" and "man" and take what comes. Sure, try to talk to your professors or your editor. Try to explain that this is a matter of principle on your part, that you believe that to acquiesce in the elimination of generic "he" and "man" and use clunky substitutes is not only to harm the language but also to endorse an agenda you do not wish to endorse. You might be surprised how often they back down. I've known of two academic publishers whose official rules of style say you have to eliminate traditional pronouns but who have not enforced this rule when faced by a determined author. In all my publications in philosophy journals, I've never had a _single_ editor ask me to change this. Yet all the philosophy graduate students I know acquiesce in it because they are afraid of not getting published if they defy it.

Would you kindly advise those who actually have the gall to fashion Scripture after the image of this politically-correct world by deliberately employing certain gender-neutral terms within its very text, that ultimately (and rather quite atrociously) disfigures the very Word of God?

They wouldn't be interested in listening to me, Aristocles. But I do think that the people in the pew should take that into account in deciding what church to attend. I would certainly refuse to attend any church that refused to refer to God as "He"--you know how they do it, now: They just keep saying "God" over and over again, as if pronouns had never been invented. Or they say (shudder) "Godself." Or they eliminate "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost."

I've always thought it kind of interesting to see where wimpy liberal-ish guys try suddenly to turn at bay and be conservative. You'll find seminarians, professors, etc., now who gave in long ago on gender-neutralizing when referring to humans, and suddenly when it comes to God, they try to draw a line in the sand. They don't realize they sold the store twenty years ago.

There is a very good article on inclusive-language translation, of Scripture in particular, here:

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=14-08-033-f

Just to go back to the original post for a moment, John C. Wright is a sf/fantasy writer who just started being published recently. His first work, the sf "Golden Age Trilogy," is a very impressive debut but any non-sf-fan who tries it will probably bounce hard off the first chapter. There's no particular reason for a non f/sf fan to have heard of him.

Every long work he has published so far was written while he was an atheist, apparently rather militant. He has since converted, ending up in the Catholic Church last year. His conversion story starts out with reason and evidence leading to a re-evaluation and then takes a sharp turn into the blatantly supernatural -- summary here
http://www.conversiondiary.com/2007/03/like-feeling-heartbeat.html
He now finds it humiliating that God used such extreme measures to effect his conversion, which I find rather to his credit.

And he does do a good rant, doesn't he?

Thanks, craig, I didn't know any of that. Fascinating conversion story. As a lifelong Christian, I always read stories like that with a head-scratching feeling, almost a feeling of annoyance: "Darn it, nothing like that ever happens to me!" But that's okay (I hastily add). I'm not asking for a heart attack.

Here's a fine example of an anti-PC statement, and should provoke all the correct people:

http://mildcolonialboy.wordpress.com/about-the-author/

The Editor of The Boy’s Own Paper is the Mild Colonial Boy, Esq.

He is a Reactionary Queenslander, a Fervent Monarchist, an Anglophile, a Pessimist, a Sectarian Protestant (Lutheran), an Anti-Egalitarian Elitist, a Traditional Conservative, a Male Chauvinist, a Modern-day Luddite, an Intolerant Prig, a Terrible Snob and, on occasion, a Pompous Oaf with the unfortunate habit of speaking about himself in the third person.

His interests include: Fearing God and Honouring the King, Being Intolerant and Judgemental, Keeping a Stiff Upper Lip, Playing the Game (and with a Straight Bat), Setting High Standards, Having Fine Discriminating Tastes, Knowing One’s Place, Giving Foreign Johnnies Some Stick, Looking Down One’s Nose at the Hoi polloi (οἱ πολλοί), Deferring to One’s Betters, Noblesse Oblige, Declaiming “O Tempora! O Mores!”, Bemoaning the Decline of The West, Defending the British Empire, No Popery, Muscular Christianity, The Permanent Things, Repealing Female Suffrage, Repealing Universal Male Suffrage, Condescending to the Fair Sex, Fighting the Red Menace, Applauding Privilige & Elitism & Inequality, and Restoring the Gallows & the Gibbet & the Lash.

His prefered reading matter for spiritual sustenance are The King James Bible and The Book of Concord. For entertainment, his preferred authors are: P.G. Wodehouse, John Buchan, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sapper, Saki, Ernest Bramah, Richard Marsh, Guy Boothby, Edgar Wallace, H.G. Wells, P.C. Wren, Sax Rohmer, H. Rider Haggard, Captain W.E. Johns, Sir Walter Scott, Rafael Sabatini, Jules Verne, Robert W. Chambers, E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, Dan Simmons, David Gemmell, Cordwainer Smith, Leigh Brackett, C. L. Moore and Clark Ashton Smith. For political reading, the Mild Colonial Boy prefers the works of Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke and Paul Gottfried.

He is presently rusticating in genteel poverty on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast Hinterland, far from the decadent fleshpots of Brisbane and the Coastal Cities.

I'm not saying we should go out of our way to provoke people, but the opportunities find us easily enough.

Forgot to correct Wright for spreading a PC error about "Eskimo":

Steven A. Jacobson, a professor at the Alaska Native Language Center (of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks), told United Press International, "Yup'ik speakers say, 'We're Yup'ik Eskimos; our relatives in northern Alaska, Canada and Greenland are Inuit Eskimos; they aren't Yup'ik, and we aren't Inuit, but we're all Eskimos.' Yup'ik speakers prefer to be called 'Yup'iks' ... and -- in contrast to Inuit in Canada -- don't mind the word 'Eskimo,' but they do not like to be called 'Inuit.'"
"Eskimo" remains the only word that describes all the physically and culturally quite homogenous groups that extend from the Siberian side of the Bering Strait to Greenland. The American Heritage Dictionary sums up, "While use of these terms ('Inuit' and 'Yup'ik') is often preferable when speaking of the appropriate linguistic group, none of them can be used of the Eskimoan peoples as a whole; the only inclusive term remains Eskimo."
(via Steve Sailer http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/08/palins-husband-18th-inuit-or-eskimo.html )

It's easy to see how a writer would fall into the PC dialect just to avoid being sidetracked. For instance, if a popular blog post's first commenter makes a petty objection to a non-PC standard, the thread of argument will likely be hijacked.

Unless, of course, such comments are speedily deleted in the interests of promoting a fruitful discussion free of ideological corruptions. (Last year Jeff Culbreath had a notable post on how he would police same-sex "marriage" comments made to Stony Creek Digest)

Have any good essays been written distinguishing PC from good manners? I'm sure several can be written on that theme.

The rise of "right-wing" PC is a matter of concern. I've tired of "elitism" accusations, even when they're justified.

It's also worrying when people try to prove their enlightened credentials by condemning leftists for not being PC enough.

For instance, in June 2002 Reason magazine, with sniffling propriety, denounced the mass murderer Che Guevara for making condescending comments about the black Congolese. Talk about missing the point!

(See http://www.reason.com/news/show/28436.html )

I was happy to discover a Facebook group with 54k members named "Che Guevara was a murderer and your t-shirt is not cool." A similar Italian-language group had 20.7k members. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of users have declared themselves fans of the man.

Did I miss something? I was in the kitchen eating an Inuit Pie and a female-person scout cookie.

Somehow I knew someone would show up to play "there's no one but us chickens in here." But the fact is that Political Correctness is alive and well today. Of course right-wingers are the are generally the only ones to use the term. That's because it's the same as the people described in the blog, "Stuff White People Like": that's the last term they would accept for themselves, no matter how much that truthful elephant in the room dumped on them. As far as omitting needless words, Political Correctness has moved into omitting needed words. Witness Mark Steyn's Voldemort Award of the Week given to journalists that conspicuously omit any reference to Islam when reporting on decapitations, riots, terrorist attacks, etc.

I sent in a comment saying that PC is wrong on Eskimos. They really do call themselves Eskimos. The blog told me it was held for moderation, did it get through?

I'll go find it, Kevin. I'm betting it had two links or more. The bot holds it, then. Thanks for telling me.

Likewise "Indian" or sometimes "American Indian" where there is a possibility of confusion with Asian Indians (or "Indian Indians," as my mother used to say).

I always tell others I am a native American because I was born in Vermont and my friends, and family, distinguish twixt American Indians and Asian Indians by using the words "feathers" and "dots."

Kevin Jones, I found the comment. It is above in the thread. It _can_ be tempting to try to catch lefties out when they are themselves not being PC enough, but I agree that it is tiresome and distracts from more important points.

It would be interesting to try to write the essay you are talking about distinguishing good manners from PC-speak. One immediate distinction that comes to mind is that restrictions on one's own speech arising from good manners have usually got some long-standings creds, to use a slang term. For example, not talking about sexual matters in explicit terms in front of a lady is a standard that has been around for a long time. What's happened in recent years is that sometimes we get a PC ersatz for good manners. So the feminist version of the above taboo is that one must not tell dirty jokes in front of a woman because it is "sexist," not because it is "ungentlemanly." The effect may be the same (though I would guess not always), but the motivation is strikingly different, and the culture that arises from the two different motivations will be different. Gentlemen hold doors for ladies. Men fresh out of sensitivity training and worried about losing their jobs for "creating a hostile environment to women" (probably) don't.

PJ O'Rourke is speaking in Auckland this week so I thought it appropriate I share his rant with our readers - hat tip to you of course.