I think I need to lose weight, and the only person who would dare say anything to me is my trainer at the fitness club and I think he’s right. If he said anything to me in the US, I could take him to court for "severe induced stress, occasioning psychological damage".

I could do with the $10 000 payout, I can tell you.

So what are you allowed to call the person with the thickening waistline? Officially - "person of substance" - and that, in linguistic terms, is euphemistic claptrap. The slow but methodical scrutinization and expurgation of anything the woolly-headed left deem unacceptable derives, originally, from the 1929 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, concerned with linguistic determinism and relativity.

Put simply, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that "a language's grammatical categories and value-loaded vocabulary shape its speakers' ideas and actions".

Politically, the goal then is to worm your way into a position of influence as a shaper of the nation’s language, in education, journalism, the arts, music, literature, religion and politics and then go ahead and mangle it according to what you see as important and valuable.

And what is important and valuable? Well, paraphrasing American Professor Marilyn Edelstein’s words, it goes something like this:

University policies must now become more pluralistic, more multicultural, more sensitive to race, gender, class, personal orientation and disabilities. Universities need to minimize harassment, on campuses, on the basis of gender or race.In other words, we must all become more sensitive to other people.

Well who would argue with that?

Traditionalists don’t argue with the principle – they argue with how these driven people have gone about gaining control over the language, what they see as offensive and who the next victims are.

Traditionalists also add that when this process is applied to children from the earliest years, it is no less than social engineering and when applied to adults, it’s simply censorship.

Here are some examples of the profound wisdom of these people:

· In 1988 a Stanford University faculty changed its popular "Western Culture" course to "Cultures, Ideas and Values", as "western" was now seen as a dirty word for some minorities.

· The Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work, in the UK, believes that "non-fluency in English should not be used as grounds to refuse employment, even for an interpreter or air traffic controller". That means you don’t need English any more to become an English interpreter – you learn it on the job.

· In 2003, the University of Middlesex drew up a paper calling for a ban on all "unsound" words which a committee had identified. When you look at the composition of that committee, it becomes even more interesting.

· American historian and educator, Diane Ravitch, in 2003, quoted guidelines by New York publishing houses for prospective writers:

"Topics not to include are: abortion, death or disease, criminals, magic, politics, religion, unemployment, weapons, violence, poverty, divorce, slavery, alcohol or addiction. Women cannot be depicted as mothers or caregivers or doing household work. Men cannot be depicted as lawyers, doctors or plumbers. African citizens are not to be portrayed in a negative light. None of these things can be themes in any publications handled by us."

· A London educational conference was told, in 2003: "Everything written before 1970 was either gender or racially biased" and that "reading and writing are merely technologies of control." Therefore, writers like Shakespeare are now out of favour.

· In 2005, at two universities in Britain, it is now possible to obtain a degree in English literature without even reading Shakespeare. Two-thirds of reading lists now comprise feminist writers instead.

· Early in 2005, in the United Kingdom, a government think tank wanted schools to replace the term "Failure", for under-achieving students who did not pass their exams, with the term "Deferred Success", so they would not "feel sad".

· An under age criminal must now be called a "child at risk", so that he does not become traumatized by the word "hooligan".

· A person living illegally in our country is now to be called an "undocumented immigrant", so he does not become anxious about his situation.· Men must never call their beautiful wives "wives", because that’s humiliating. They are now your "spouses" or "significant others"

.Of course, despite the nullification and denial implicit in the process, yet it’s called, in their Doublespeak, "affirmative action".

Affirmative indeed - eliminating the last vestiges of the colourful and synonymously offensive and replacing them with the bland, more acceptable, in their logic, to any oppressed minority whom the Politically Correct proclaim as such from time to time.

When traditionalists ask why ideas such as intellectualism, patriotism, family life, striving for success, defending one’s country and the nature of right and wrong are no longer central to the education of a child, they’re labelled unreconstructed and anachronistic.

Traditionalists also point to the proliferation of the suffix "-ism", added to anything the PCers find offensive. To racism, sexism and elitism, now add two new ones - "lookism" [looking at someone in an offensive manner] and "clientism" [liking one of your clients less than the others].

PCers reject the criticism that they are the new "Thought Police", that they’re only happy in a "smilingly bland, uniform, anti-intellectual, barely literate mediocrity", that they want to "deliberately re-write history in terms of currently fashionable ethnic and sexual minorities" and that they want to create a "new, officially approved reality".

Instead, they insist they’re working towards a "philosophy of inclusion" and an "uncritical tolerance" for all, whatever their "personal orientation" and irrespective of whether they are terrorists, drug addicts, paedophiles, dropouts.Everyone’s welcome in the Brave New PC World.

posted by james higham at Saturday, July 29, 2006