Political Correctness

A History of Semantics and Culture

Geoffrey Hughes

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444360295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Political Correctness

"Geoffrey Hughes has brought together with great panache the very many manifestations of political correctness, both absurd and vicious, and shown how they express a single collective mind-set. His book establishes beyond doubt that there is such a phenomenon, that it has become dominant in our culture, and that it represents a growing tendency to censor public debate and to prevent people from questioning orthodoxies which we all know to be false."
Roger Scruton, American Enterprise Institute

"What a joy this book is! Hughes' study traces, with unflagging zest, the modern history of PC. Sumptuous in data, in judgment precise, this is the latest and fullest of Hughes' series on the social history of language."
Walter Nash, Professor Emeritus, University of Nottingham

Political Correctness is now an everyday phrase and part of the modern mindset. Everyone thinks they know what it means, but its own meaning constantly shifts. Its surprising origins have led to it becoming integrated into contemporary culture in ways that are both idealistic and ridiculous. Originally grounded in respect for difference and sensitivity to suffering, it has often become a distraction and even a silencer of genuine issues, provoking satire and parody. In this carefully researched, thought-provoking book, Geoffrey Hughes examines the trajectory of political correctness and its impact on public life.

Exploring the origins, progress, content, and style of PC, Hughes' journey leads us through authors as diverse as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Swift; Philip Larkin, David Mamet, and J.M. Coetzee; from nursery rhymes to Spike Lee films. Focusing on the historical, semantic, and cultural aspects of political correctness, this outstanding and unique work will intrigue anyone interested in this ongoing debate.

PART I

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND ITS ORIGINS

CHAPTER 1

DEFINING POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

Preamble and Rationale: Words and Ideas, Norms and Values

Political correctness became part of the modern lexicon and, many would say, part of the modern mind-set, as a consequence of the wide-ranging public debate which started on campuses in the United States from the late 1980s. Since nearly 50 percent of Americans go to college, the impact of the controversy was widespread. It was out of this ferment that most of the new vocabulary was generated or became current. However, political correctness is not one thing and does not have a simple history. As a concept it predates the debate and is a complex, discontinuous, and protean phenomenon which has changed radically, even over the past two decades. During just that time it has ramified from its initial concerns with education and the curriculum into numerous agendas, reforms, and issues concerning race, culture, gender, disability, the environment, and animal rights.

Linguistically it started as a basically idealistic, decent-minded, but slightly Puritanical intervention to sanitize the language by suppressing some of its uglier prejudicial features, thereby undoing some past injustices or “leveling the playing fields” with the hope of improving social relations. It is now increasingly evident in two opposing ways. The first is the expanding currency of various key words (to be listed shortly), some of a programmatic nature, such as diversity, organic, and multiculturalism. Contrariwise, it has also manifested itself in speech codes which suppress prejudicial language, disguising or avoiding certain old and new taboo topics. Most recently it has appeared in behavioral prohibitions concerning the environment and violations of animal rights. As a result of these transitions it has become a misnomer, being concerned with neither politics nor correctness as those terms are generally understood.

Political correctness inculcates a sense of obligation or conformity in areas which should be (or are) matters of choice. Nevertheless, it has had a major influence on what is regarded as “acceptable” or “appropriate” in language, ideas, behavioral norms, and values. But “doing the right thing” is, of course, an oversimplification. There is an antithesis at the core of political correctness, since it is liberal in its aims but often illiberal in its practices: hence it generates contradictions like positive discrimination and liberal orthodoxy. In addition, it has surprising historical and literary antecedents, surfacing in different forms and phases in Anglo-Saxon and global culture.

Although this book is called a “history,” it is not really possible to write a conventional sequential history incorporating all these themes, of which there are basically six: political, literary, educational, gender, cultural, and behavioral. This is a large, interesting, but unwieldy package. The choice of “semantics” in the title rather than the broader and more familiar “language” is intentional, mainly because much of the debate was and continues to be about the changing of names, what are commonly known as “Orwellian” substitutions, and many of the practices which – rightly or wrongly – have given “semantics” a questionable name in popular parlance. Semantics (the study of meaning) is, of course, a respectable branch of linguistics unassociated with this practice, and much of the book is taken up with analyzing the semantic changes undergone by individual terms and in the evolution of word-fields.

Any discussion of political correctness necessarily involves its inseparable obverse, political incorrectness, just as “A History of Manners” would perforce involve bad manners, and “A History of Propaganda” would involve not only the techniques employed by propagandists, but the reactions of those being influenced and the strategies of counterpropaganda. For, just as people are suspicious of propaganda and resist it, so the institution of new taboos, especially against referring to personal features of size, color, addiction, and so on invokes feelings, even charges of censorship. These pressures provoke a counterreaction of satire, opportunistic defiance, and outrages, especially in popular culture. These reactions are covered in chapter 8. For all these reasons, the topic cannot be simply reduced to the standard template of “a definition,” a “story,” and a “conclusion.” This complexity in part explains this book’s structure.

The origins are in many ways the strangest feature. “Political Correctness is the natural continuum of the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don’t seem to see this.” So wrote Doris Lessing in the Sunday Times (May 10, 1992), continuing in this vein in her trenchant essay “Censorship” (2004), which is quoted among the epigraphs above. She was unambiguous and certainly right: political correctness first emerged in the diktats of Mao Tse-Tung, then chairman of the Chinese Soviet Republic, in the 1930s. But over half a century later it had mutated, rematerializing in a totally different environment, in an advanced secular capitalist society in which freedom of speech had been underwritten by the Constitution for two centuries, and in American universities, of all places. As Christopher Hitchens acutely observed: “For the first time in American history, those who call for an extension of rights are also calling for an abridgement of speech” (in Dunant, 1994, pp. 137–8).

Far from being a storm in an academic inkwell, political correctness became a major public issue engaged in by a whole variety of participants including President George Bush (briefly), public intellectuals, major academics, and journalists of all hues and persuasions. Some claim that the debate was a manufactured rather than a natural phenomenon, and that political correctness started as a chimera or imaginary monster invented by those on the Right of the political spectrum to discredit those who wished to change the status quo. These matters are taken up in chapter 2 “The Origins and the Debate.” The fact is that the debate certainly took place. Exchanges were often acrimonious, focusing on numerous general issues of politics, ideology, race, gender, sexual orientation, culture, the curriculum, freedom of expression and its curtailment and so on. All of these will be discussed and developed.

This work attempts a detailed semantic analysis of how the resources of the language have been deployed, especially in forms of semantic engineering and the exploitation of different registers, both to formulate the new agendas, values, and key words of political correctness and to subvert them. A whole new semantic environment has come into being, through creation, invention, co-option, borrowing, and publicity: a representative sample of this new world of words includes lookism, phallocratic, other, significant other, sex worker, multicultural, herstory, disadvantaged, homophobic, waitron, wimmin, differently abled, to Bork, physically challenged, substance abuse, fattist, Eurocentric, Afrocentric, demographics, issue, carbon footprint, glass ceiling, pink plateau, and first people, as well as code abbreviations like DWEM, PWA, HN, and neo-con.

These are not simply new words, in the way that Shakespeare’s incar-nadine, procreant, exsufflicate, be-all and end-all, unmanned, assassination, and yesterdays were original forms four centuries ago. They are more like Orwell’s artificial coinages in Newspeak, for instance, thoughtcrime, joy-camp, and doublethink. Many are of a completely different order of novelty, opaqueness, and oddity, several of a character aptly described by the doughty Dr Johnson two centuries ago as “scarce English.” The reaction of the uninitiated, and many of the educated, to this strange new galaxy of word formations or, some would say, deformations, is like that described by Edward Phillips in his New World of Words: “Some people if they spy but a hard word are as much amazed as if they had met with a Hobgoblin” (cited in Baugh, 1951, p. 260). That was in 1658, when new words of classical origin were still not welcomed as potential denizens, but rather regarded with suspicion as dubious immigrants disturbing “the King’s English” (as it has been called since 1553).

Language theoretically belongs to all, but is often changed by only a few, many of them anonymous. Resentment at interference or sudden changes in the language has a long history. It started in the sixteenth century with the Inkhorn Controversy, a contretemps about the introduction of alien classical vocabulary, or hostility at semantic innovation of the kind Phillips satirized. In the long run most of these “hard words” as they were originally called, have been accepted. But it has been a very long run. Political correctness is still a relatively new phenomenon, and the serious or general acceptance of these words is still a matter of debate.

Let us briefly consider a fairly recent focused linguistic intervention, the attempt by feminists to alter or enlarge the stock of personal pronouns and to feminize agent nouns like chairman in order to diminish the dominance of the male gender, traditionally upheld in the grammatical dictum that “the male subsumes the female.” Proposals for forms such as s/he were successful in raising consciousness, but produced few long-term survivals. Forms like wimmin and herstory became objects of satire, while the extensive replacement of man by person aroused some strong reactions: “I resent this ideological intrusion and its insolent dealings with our mother (perhaps I should say ‘parent’) tongue,” wrote Roger Scruton (1990, p. 118). Scruton’s mocking parody “parent tongue” is a response we shall see replicated many times in reactions to politically correct language. Nevertheless, some new forms like chairperson and spokesperson have managed to establish themselves.

Another comparison can be made with radical political discourse. Communism attempted to establish a whole new ideological discourse by means of neologisms like proletariate, semantic extensions like bourgeois, and by co-opting words like imperialist and surplus. Hard-line Communists still call each other “comrade” and refer to “the workers,” “the collective,” “capital,” and the “party line,” terms which are regarded by outsiders (who now form the majority) with irony and humor. For the days and locales when Communists could impose semantic norms on populations have long disappeared.

There are three characteristics which make political correctness a unique sociolinguistic phenomenon. Unlike previous forms of orthodoxy, both religious and political, it is not imposed by some recognized authority like the Papacy, the Politburo, or the Crown, but is a form of semantic engineering and censorship not derivable from one recognized or definable source, but a variety. There is no specific ideology, although it focuses on certain inequalities and disadvantaged people in society and on correcting prejudicial attitudes, more especially on the demeaning words which express them. Politically correct language is the product and formulation of a militant minority which remains mysteriously unlocatable. It is not the spontaneous creation of the speech community, least of all any particular deprived sector of it. Disadvantaged groups, such as the deaf, the blind, or the crippled (to use the traditional vocabulary), do not speak for themselves, but are championed by other influential public voices.

In these respects political correctness has a very different dynamic from the earlier high-profile advocates of, say, feminism or black consciousness in the USA. The feminists of the second wave, such as Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Gloria Steinem, and Susan Sontag, were highly articulate, individual, and outspoken controversialists who did not always agree with each other, characteristics shared by Martin Luther King, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X. By contrast, the anonymous agenda-manipulators of political correctness are more difficult to identify. These features make the conformity to political correctness the more mysterious.

Paradoxically, political correctness manifested itself rapidly and most strongly, not in political parties, but on university campuses; not in the closed societies of Eastern Europe, but in free Western societies, especially in America, the only country in the world where freedom of speech is a constitutional right. Much play was accordingly made about the rights enshrined in the First Amendment, their “ownership” and their proper application.

In addition to these contemporary issues, it is important to recognize both a historical and a moral dimension, that is, to be aware that political correctness is not an exclusively modern manifestation. Accordingly, it is enlightening to consider some earlier forms of changing orthodoxies and their semantic correlatives, as well as the moral imperatives which these changing orthodoxies have generated. In many ways there has been a continuing dialectic between political orthodoxy and dissent since the sixteenth century, virtually since the invention of printing. Reflection shows that political correctness of one sort or another has been a feature of English society for centuries, certainly since the English Reformation, the first major political change which was not an invasion.

Furthermore, literature illuminates the topic in many fascinating ways. Our greatest dramatist, for instance, wrote some plays which uphold traditional ideas of authority and the Divine Right, but others which interrogate this notion. “Family values” proves another highly problematic concept in his work, for his insights into sibling rivalry are deeply disturbing. Very few love relationships are free of hostility, jealousy, or tragic interference. A good case can be made for the view that from about 1600 Shakespeare seems intentionally to have written plays which deal with irresolvable moral and political problems. Major issues are not buried in the subplot or in speeches of minor characters. No audience could fail to be disturbed or provoked by a whole series of resounding utterances, such as Hamlet’s misogynist generalization “Frailty, thy name is woman,” or Shylock’s question “Hath not a Jew eyes?,” or Falstaff’s cynical view that “honor” is “a mere word,” or by the bastard Edmund’s dismissive comment on heredity: “fine word, legitimate!” A mere century later Alexander Pope was to mock “the right divine of kings to govern wrong,” while two centuries before Shakespeare, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, created in a supposedly harmonious medieval social setting, contains biting satires of the ecclesiastical establishment and many unexpected expressions of xenophobia, racism, sexism, ageism, and lookism, even vestiges of the class struggle. Part IV accordingly seeks to accommodate these historical and literary dimensions.

In addition, the new South Africa offers a fruitful example of the semantic and social problems of “normalization” after the iniquities of apartheid. The nation has been in a political and social time warp, only recently emerging from the agendas of colonialism, white domination, and racial separation to deal with the issues of democracy, national identity, affirmative action, and various forms of empowerment in a multicultural society. These aspects are covered in this chapter, in chapter 5, and in the Conclusion.

What is Political Correctness?

This fundamental question has become increasingly difficult to answer as new agendas have materialized. Most people would frame answers along the lines of “It means not using words like nigger, queer, or cripple,” or “It means showing respect to all,” or “It means accepting and promoting diversity.” These answers are adequate, but cover only the main issues, by means of proscription (the first) or prescription (the second and third). The emphases on offensive language, prejudiced attitudes, and insulting behavior towards the marginalized are central. The question is less easily answered in a comprehensive way, as the historical précis has suggested. Specific answers are supplied by verbal definition, by identifying role models, by description of approved or bad practices, or assumptions about proper and improper behavior.

Leaving aside the theoretical and social aspects for the time being, let us briefly consider the epigraphs at the beginning of the book. It is striking that the oldest, from Chaucer’s portrait of a medieval nobleman, describes a role model, an ideal of behavior (that of never saying anything disrespectful to anyone, regardless of status) which conforms with the best notions of political correctness. Chaucer evidently regards this aspect of his “verray, parfit gentil knyght” as both admirable and unusual. The exchange from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night shows us two very different knights, one idiotic, the other decadent. Although the comedy is set in Illyria, the issue is highly relevant. Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s antagonism towards Malvolio as a suspected Puritan (“I’d beat him like a dog”) has a contemporary edge of intolerance, which Sir Toby Belch’s critical reproof rightly shows to be mindless: “For being a Puritan? Thy exquisite reason, dear knight?” Being tolerant towards the Puritans, who wished to impose their strict religious régime on all, who hated the theaters and eventually succeeded in closing them, required an act of considerable charity. But Sir Toby, for all his faults, has a balanced, laissez faire attitude. The kind of sectarian extremism which lay ahead is shown in the scathing references to “Jesuitism, Puritanism and Quaqerism [Quakerism] and of all the Isms from Schism” in the remarkable quotation from 1680. From a different perspective, the quotations from Milton, John Adams, and Justice Holmes show a faith, indeed an insistence, on open debate and in “the principle of free thought,” attitudes which are often lacking from modern political and educational forums, a point which Doris Lessing argues strongly. Indeed “free thought” and “free speech” are often seen to be curtailed by political correctness. Dr Johnson’s famous dictum reminds us that though “cant” is now largely obsolete as a word, the plausible hypocrisy which it denotes still thrives, and is too often encountered.

The question could be put another way: what do speech codes, Chairman Mao, eating foie gras, the letters of Philip Larkin, Tintin in the Congo, George Orwell’s 1984, wearing fur, shock jocks, McCarthyism, Borat, AIDS jokes, Christmas cards, the films of Spike Lee, ethnic slurs, and The Simpsons have in common? At first sight, not much. Discussion of these topics will show that political correctness and its obverse, political incorrectness, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• THE LANGUAGE LIBRARY
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Epigraphs
• PART I: POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND ITS ORIGINS
• PART II: THE SEMANTIC ASPECT
• PART III: ZONES OF CONTROVERSY
• PART IV: CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL ISSUES
• CONCLUSION: THE RIGHT THING TO DO? PROGRESSIVE ORTHODOXY, EMPTY CONVENTION, OR DOUBLE STANDARD?
• Bibliography
• Author and Subject Index
• Word Index