Language I Won't Be Using Here

I love words. They're a passion of mine and I admire the great writers who use words like a painter uses colour. Leonard Cohen and Harper Lee are two of those writers. Margaret Atwood is another. They're understanding of the value of a single word is incredible. It's almost embarrassing that we could take a language that gave us Shakespeare and T.S.Elliott along with so many others...and demean it until it is virtually meaningless.

It's the result of the best efforts of the politically correct and somewhere along the way, the rest of us allowed ourselves to be conned into accepting that it is words, not intentions, that are harmful. Change the words and the offence or the pain of the issue is gone. The fact that the intention behind the words might still be there becomes irrelevant because the new language...the politically correct language....so sanitizes the meaning that we become willingly blind to it.

Afro-Canadians used to be called Negros. It was a simple, precise term that had no meaning other than to define race in the same way that Caucasian defines my race and Oriental defined those we now call Asian.  Negro fell out of favour because the politically correct thought it was too close to "nigger", a word that had an ugly intention behind it most of the time (but not always, it is commonly used by many Negros, including comedians, athletes and entertainers.) In the 60's, negro was replaced with "black" but after a decade and a half, black was determined to be too associated with evil so the politically correct came up with Afro-(insert country of choice). This took the simple word, negro, and replaced it with two words and a hyphen as if that somehow would eliminate racism. How stupid can you be? Skin colour is about as relevant to a person's value as hair colour. Fretting over a word like negro is like getting upset and feeling the need to change the word blond so that those with fair hair will no longer be the brunt of jokes about their intellect. Ain't going to work folks!

Consider someone with European heritage, should we do as we now do with Afro-Canadian and refer to them as Euro-Canadians? What about my grandson? His heritage is Canadian. Do we refer to him as Canadian-Canadian or North American Canadian. The issue here is that the word negro simply defines a race. It attaches no value to that definition. The value  behind the word or phrase, positive or negative, comes from the intention behind it because racism has nothing to do with the word and everything to do with the character of people using it. You can be just as intolerant and racist of an Afro-Canadian as you ever could a negro. If the intention is to overcome and defeat intolerance, changing words isn't going to accomplish it. To overcome intolerance, you have to overcome prejudice and fear. Changing words does nothing to address them.

Not only does politically correct language not solve racism, it resolves no issue. It is an illusion that tends to obscure rather than clarify. Too often it is used to remove the humanity from the issue as in referring to people at work as "human resources",  The term dehumanizes them and turns them into a commodity making it  easier to fire and lay them off or as the politically correct put it, "curtail redundancies in the human resources area". Employees are no longer people, they're just another corporate resource.

I hate the smug attitude behind politically correct language. I hate the fact that it is more about appearing to do the right thing and dealing with serious social issues than it is about actually rolling up your sleeves and getting it done.

I also hate stupid language and God knows there is a lot of that around.

I am not interested in "sharing quality time" with anyone nor do I want to "bond", "connect" or "interface". I won't use "economically disadvantaged" when I mean poor nor will I refer to being broke as being in a "negative cash-flow position". I won't refer to a homely person as having a "severe appearance deficit" nor will I refer to someone who is bald as being "too tall for their hair." I don't consider declining birth rates to be a "national fertility deficit" and I'm not interested in giving someone 'a little space." If you need space, back off.

Blind people are not "visually impaired" as far as I'm concerned and the handicapped are not "physically challenged." There is nothing wrong with the word blind and no stigma attached to the word handicapped. I happen to believe that there is something admirable about overcoming a handicap to accomplish things in your life like learning how to paint when you have no arms. That is a major handicap to painting and yet, there are those who have accomplished it. Politically correct language obscures that accomplishment and demeans it to the point of meaning almost nothing.

It is what it is but increasingly we seem to be afraid to acknowledge "it", whatever it is. We invent soft language to obscure and hide meaning, sometimes to the point where we just don't have to deal with it anymore. Personally, I think there is something hypocritical about using politically correct language to hide from the mean and sometimes evil intentions of some while at the same time using vulgar and often vicious language to attack those with whom we disagree.

It's time to stop deluding ourselves. Language was developed so that we could communicate with each other. Too many today use it to hurt, to attack or to obscure meaning. People died to provide democracies with free speech and it seems a terrible thing to treat it so poorly.

© 2011 Maggie's Bear
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