It's too bad that the term political correctness is so generically incorrect. Doing things like swapping out the N word for "african american," dropping the word "retard" from your vocabulary, referring to adult women as "women," and referring to people of non-european descent as more than "oriental" and "mexican" is not "being politically correct," it's doing something that takes you no effort that makes you less of an asshole.
The funny thing is, your own comment could make you look like an "asshole" in a few decades when moral fashions change again. That's part of the problem with political correctness. The other and much worse part is that in some situations the choice of words that you present as (as it indeed is) such a trivial matter can have very nontrivial consequences.
The other and much worse part is that in some situations the choice of words that you present as (as it indeed is) such a trivial matter can have very nontrivial consequences.
Not calling a black person a "nigger" may merely be a trivial moral fashion to you, perhaps, but language has been a very much non-trivial tool of fear and oppression for a long time. That's a fact.
For black people, it matters that a newspaper can't be taken seriously if it uses "nigger" as a descriptor. For women, it matters that men can't walk around at a hackathon calling them "baby" and "sweetie" like it's a Mad Men episode. Surely it's obvious why.
It's OK to disagree with that, but the burden of proof is on you. And linking to http://paulgraham.com/say.html doesn't cut it.
There is baby and there is bathwater in this discussion and it's decidedly not useful to conflate them, which is exactly what glib dismissals of the whole thing as "political correctness" do.
Using the term "political correctness" doesn't imply that one is automatically dismissing all talk about racial discrimination, for example. Political correctness is a distinct phenomenon-- at least, as distinct as any social phenomenon is-- and it's useful to be have a name for it. There are plenty of people who think racial discrimination is a problem and also think political correctness is a problem.
It is handy to have a term for political correctness.
Unfortunately many people misuse that term when they mean "politeness" or similar. These people don't want to stop using the word retard wherever they want, and they want to be outraged when people point out that they're being assholes.
Political Correctness is a form of passive agression. The entire premise is to pass it off as 'politeness'. It works in a certain way because its a defense mechanism for people entrenched in power an privledge. If you don't get the irony yet, keep thinking. It will come.
Political correctness isn't really about 'preventing offense', and simplistic arguments like this make it clear you're not aware of the issues it's trying to deal with. Political correctness is mostly about not using language which diminishes people due to factors outside their control, such as race or gender. Any single such reference is not so much a problem, but when it becomes the way people speak, it very much becomes so.
PC is, on the whole, a good thing. It's just ridiculous when taken to extremes, which is the bit everyone is focused on.
If we suppose the choice of words is a trivial matter then one wonders what a nontrivial choice of words would look like, if that is even possible.
The "choice of words" argument reminds me of a teenager, upon swearing at his mother, protesting that he is "just using a word". Of course he gets grounded anyway, and in time most people learn to outgrow that pseudological pedantry. In reality we use words that mean things and express ideas, and the ideas expressed in words like the N-word are generally odious and useless. And I would hesitate to assume that avoiding referring to an entire category of people with a swear word, associated with centuries of stereotypes and oppression, is merely a "moral fashion". I didn't know that conveying the barest level of respect toward your fellow man was a "moral fashion".
I don't think you'd actually want to do that. There have been throughout history lots of people who on account of their birth or religion have wanted to be treated as superior to some other group. Would you just want to go along with that?
In fact it would be impossible to do what you suggest, because the ways in which people want to be respected could be (and often have been) incompatible. For example, what if two people with different religions both want to be treated as believers in the one true religion?
There are also plenty of individual cases we'd both find hard to swallow. Murderers who wanted to be regarded as upstanding people, and so on.
(And "who" in this case is much stronger. "Whom" introduces a jarringly pedantic note.)
> There have been throughout history lots of people who on account of their birth or religion have wanted to be treated as superior to some other group. Would you just want to go along with that?
But you could treat them as your equal until they do something to show they're not your equal, which is mostly what PC should be about.
Don't reduce people to a single defining characteristic, because that makes it easy to write them off.
Yes, all this is the reason I said "if it's no trouble to you." Certainly the desire for politeness can go too far, but avoiding a handful of loaded words is not very far. I don't think it's quite fair to compare a black man not wanting to be called boy with a murderer wanting to be called innocent.
It's no trouble to me to reinforce someone's mistaken feeling of superiority to someone else. The problem is for the someone else. So the threshold you propose is insufficient.
And I nowhere compared the two cases you mention. (That was an extreme case of putting words into one's mouth even for HN.) You're acting as if I said for ∀x-P(x) when in fact it's pretty clear I said -∀xP(x).
I'm done with this conversation, incidentally. I find that threads in which I have to say "no, what I said was" to this extent are always irrecoverable.
You're not supposed to respect everybody - respect is a ranking of people on some scale, and respecting everyone equally means disrespecting those who deserve respect.
For example, many people are great or okay at their professions - but not all of them. There are respectable and respected doctors, and there are those that just have a degree and a practice.
Quite a few people have made unacceptable moral choices in politics, business or personal issues - and it's okay to disrespect them because of that, and publicly despise and shame those choices, no matter how it hurts their feelings and dignity. Respect honors people by drawing a line, by distinguishing them from the others you don't respect.
Was really not expecting to see someone get downvoted for suggesting that maybe people should try to be nice if it's not too much trouble. Have I accidentally connected to Bizarro Hacker News?
Yes, but it's the intention of the teenager what's matter. There's a difference between Mel Gibson talking ill about jews and Sara Silverman or Lisa Lampanelli doing the same.
Another thing I don't buy is that idea that if you use "the N word" you're reviving two hundreds years of slavery, oppression and racisms. Certainly, if someone is racist, he'll use the word with hate. But pronouncing two syllables out loud doesn't transform you in a racist.
I think that most people can discern when you use a word with hate and when you don't. But there's some power in banning in words, in becoming a self-appointed speech police and to attack people by the way they talk instead of the content of their thoughts. I consider more dangerous to make certain words a taboo.
There's an old saying in Spanish: the word "dog" doesn't bite.
Some words like "oriental" or "retard" are very often used very innocently with no negative connotations or intents, though. "Political correctness" is an issue because we demonize people for trying to communicate with non-approved grammar.
Sure, people who knowingly inject offense into their speech and then cry 'free speech' are assholes. So too, though, are the people that cry foul at someone else innocently (if naively) expressing themselves.
The problem isn't the intent of the speaker. The problem is that the words themselves carry an intrinsic charge; they create an outsized potential for negative thoughts and impressions in the listener regardless of intent. There are neutral, more purely descriptive words that equally easy to use in conversations, and so it makes sense to push the negatively charged terms out.
Fashions will change, but Paul Graham is accidentally creating the impression that fashion is purely random. It is not. The word "retard" as a reference for the mentally handicapped is not going to come back into fashion; it has been obsoleted by a better understanding of both the processes of mental and developmental disability and of the role of the mentally handicapped in society.
Which is all for the better, because the verb "retard" is useful, and it would be great if fashion made it less clumsy sounding in normal speech.
There is a kids TV show here in the UK called Blue Peter, it's been running for decades. I'm not sure who Blue Peter actually was (the show is presented by a man, and woman, a cat and a dog) but anyone British will have watched it regularly growing up.
One day back in the 80s Blue Peter decided it was going to do something about discrimination against what were then known as "spastics" (I will use the term as it is historically correct). So they got someone on called Joey Deacon (see, I can still remember the name) to show that they were just normal people despite their physical condition.
It backfired spectacularly. The next day in the playground, "Joey" was the insult of choice. Now this may just be because kids are stupid and cruel but there is a lesson there: you can't do social engineering by clumsy attempts to manipulate language. It just doesn't work. So (for example) nowadays when we hear that a kid has ADHD, everyone just rolls their eyes and knows perfectly well that is just the PC way to say "bad parenting".
I have no idea how to parse this comment. Calling someone a "spastic" seems horrible. Kids in schoolyards looking to score points at the expense of the disabled are horrible. Assuming that a kid with ADHD is the victim of bad parenting seems like a terrible idea. Following your idea to its logical conclusion, it seems like we'd still be calling black people the n-word; after all, much of the use of that word in the first half of the 20th century was probably intended to be neutral.
It seems horrible now but it was the normal term at the time; even the charity was called the Spastics Society. And you only have that reaction because you've bought into the PC game.
But my point is, PC doesn't really work. Everyone "knows" what is really meant by any of the PC terms.
The problem is that the words themselves carry an intrinsic charge
I'd say that is precisely what they don't do. That's magical thinking (what sort of energy is this "charge"?) and I think it's the core of what's wrong with political correctness: people imagine that they're fixing reality by doing surgery on language, but they're not; they're fixing a reflection of reality, with "fixing" in the sense of "price-fixing". In other words it's photoshopping.
That's why intent matters: it actually exists, while the intrinsic power of bad words does not. Ignore intent and you end up in an absurd place.
In extreme cases this leads to personal harm being caused, but those are pretty rare. What bugs me more is how rigid people get when they try to correct others. That special blend of prissiness and condemnation is an anti-peanut-butter-cup, and it just makes me want to say "jehovah" over and over again like the dude in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_hlMK7tCks.
It also misses how language really works. Language changes as people change. We can't control it, and it's silly to pretend that we can. That's like King Canute who ordered the waves to stop (except Canute's whole point was that they wouldn't comply, even for a king).
The truth about all this is told by the great comedians who mine the contradictions between language and social norms. Is there one piece of great comedy defending the politically correct view of language? I'd love to see it.
p.s. Just to be clear, I don't mean that you try to censor other people—I've never noticed anything of the sort. It's clear that your interest in this topic is in wanting not to hurt others with words inadvertently. That's totally distinct from the language-police impulse and I admire it. But I disagree with your model, I think.
The notion that words are charged isn't magical thinking. It's simple semantics. Some words have more than one meaning. Sometimes one of those meanings is sharply negative. Usage can be ambiguous. The use of such a negatively-charged word (see: n-word, f-word, r-word) carries a risk that listeners will infer an unintended meaning. That risk is often inconvenient for a well-intentioned speaker, and simultaneously convenient to some privileged or partisan group.
And words obviously have the power to frame issues. An inheritance tax is a sensible measure that increases government revenues at the point where money has its lowest marginal value to its owner, while also serving as a check on dynastic wealth. A death tax is an outrageous injustice by an overreaching government that surely seeks next to tax breathable air.
I think this seems dumb because you're intent on looking at attitude and language as a discrete causal relationship. But it's not; it's continuous and reciprocal. Some people condemn racism. The n-word is gradually shunned. The shunning of the word becomes another vector for the idea that racism should be condemned.
Surely, there are people who would like skip the "people change" step, and proceed directly to policing our consciousness through control of the language. But I'm always struck in articles like this one how silly the motivating examples are; a student with a complaint about the word "niggardly" in Chaucer? Come on, that's small-ball compared to institutional racism. Which, if you made it that far into this article, is the reason USDA had a (silly, I agree) $200k seminar with a speaker asking the audience to say "The Pilgrims Were The Original Illegal Aliens": USDA had, believe it or not, been an epicenter for modern institutional racism, recently forced to pay out almost $2bn in settlements to black farmers who had been denied aid.
Surely, you're not militating for the return of the word "retard". Are you sure we really disagree?
I'm not here to to argue that there's no such thing as "political correctness" --- though I dislike that term, which appears in modern usage to mostly be a tool for defending privilege. But all I chimed in here to say was that linguistic fashion isn't random.
I'm not understanding everything here, but I agree that my post was simplistic to say that language is just a reflection of reality. It's more complex than that. I thought that when I wrote it, too, but didn't go there because it doesn't change my point and because I'm unsure how much precision I'm capable of.
Words condition our thoughts and feelings and behavior. So it's not just that people-change causes language-change; there's a feedback loop. But it's not a feedback loop we can control with anything as heavy-handed as ideology. To attempt to intervene that way is exceedingly crude. That's why it's associated with rigid thinking and pushy behavior.
In its milder forms that intervention is nannyism; in its more virulent forms it turns into persecution. Is it as evil as racism itself? The question seems ridiculous. If I have to answer, the answer is "obviously not", but really that whole line of thinking is a distraction. I don't accept that a repressive attitude towards language is of the least value in correcting injustice.
I could go on about this indefinitely so perhaps I'll stop here.
I suppose I would disagree: that the fashions are random, or largely so. "retard: to slow": yet "mentally retarded" changes to "mentally handicapped" to "mentally disabled".
Going strictly by the original definitions, I'm just not seeing the better accuracy of the later terms.
As a counter example, I applaud the gay community for putting the brakes on the politically-correct-damning of the word "gay" which was on it's way to becoming an 'offensive' term. I suppose some still things it is, and of course some teenagers still use it with ill intent, but I think most agree that it's not 'bad' when used in a 'proper' manner.
It is not obsoleted because we better understand mental health. It is obsoleted because being mentally unhealthy is commonly regarded as bad, and it becomes to be used as pejorative term having no relation with actual illness. This, of course, annoys those who notice now actual mentally ill people are associated with something bad, through no fault of their own, and that's not nice. So they invent a term that is "pure" and detached from the bad meaning. Which in a short while again enters into use as a pejorative, and the euphemism treadmill continues to roll. It has nothing to do with better understanding.
Of course, there's another way - making the euphemism so clunky and unnatural that nobody outside of professional context would be willing to use it. Thus things like "differently abled".
From my time in paediatric neurology a decade ago, 'retarded' has been replaced with 'developmentally delayed'. I have yet to see that enter into use as a pejorative, and frankly there are too many syllables for it to do so. It's not unnatural, not a euphamism, and is an apolitical description of what's happening: we haven't determined a specific issue with the child, but the child is not hitting the developmental milestones one would expect for the age.
I'd also strongly contest the 'nothing to do with better understanding', given that we now have multiple ways to classify mental issues, where previously they were all lumped into huge, overbroad groups.
Isn't "developmentally delayed" lumping everybody who didn't hit the certain set of milestones into one huge, overbroad groups? For one, some of them may be "delayed" - i.e. they may catch up with these milestones later, but some, unfortunately, would never reach them, in which case "delayed" is plainly misleading. Is is a wrong definition or feel-good term that is incorrect in fact?
Edit: I guess I should elaborate. Developmental delay is an indicator of a problem. It's not meant to be a final diagnosis - where possible, a reason for the delay is sought out. 'Developmental delay', like 'mentally retarded' is a symptom - it's just in olden days it was left there; the root cause was rarely sought.
Yes, the term can be misleading, and I don't like it for that reason. But it's not 'feel-good' nor incorrect in fact. It's an accurate description of what is happening.
His comment will never make him look like an asshole to anyone with historical perspective, because they will know that he was being polite in his time. Terms like oriental are offensive to many people this decade, so I won't use them this decade. If you think that's a moral fashion, then you're confusing the data ($offensive_things) with the moral principle (don't needlessly offend people). I hope you're not hard-coding the data into your morality - that's very bad practice.
> The funny thing is, your own comment could make you look like an "asshole" in a few decades when moral fashions change again.
Oh really?
Do we look at Abraham Lincoln was an "asshole" because he referred to "Negroes?" Or do we accept that he was a creature of the 1860s, and remember him for freeing these very "Negroes" who were held in slavery?
Lyndon Johnson referred to "equal rights for the American Negro." Do we regard him as an "asshole" for using the term "Negro?" Or do we instead look at the "equal rights" part of that phrase, and celebrate him for his work on the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
> Do we look at Abraham Lincoln was an "asshole" because he referred to "Negroes?" Or do we accept that he was a creature of the 1860s, and remember him for freeing these very "Negroes" who were held in slavery?
Abraham Lincoln was most certainly racist and did view black people inferior to whites, there are multiple instances of documented statements where Lincoln said as much. Also, we do not attribute the end of slavery to Lincoln alone.
Why should "oriental" be offensive? It's derived from a word for "eastern." What fool came up with the idea that we should be offended by it, and start using the term "Asian," which could refer to anyone from Tel Aviv to Vladivostok?
Why should "Mexican" be offensive? It's refers to a nationality. Are you offended by "American" or "Japanese," and if not, why should you be offended by "Mexican?"
"Retard" was originally intended to be a clinical term referring derived from a word meaning "slow" or "delayed," which replaced previous terms such as idiot or imbecile. How much gentler can you get? If retard has become perjorative, it's because nobody wants to be what the word refers to, and there's not much you can do about that. If you successfully replace it with a nonsense word, say "quixmar," in ten years "quixmar" will be used as an insult in middle school, become offensive, and have to be replaced. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Calling someone Mexican is fine if you know they are Mexican. Calling someone Mexican because they're Chilean and that's your word for brown people is offensive precisely because it's a nationality-- you're saying that you don't know, or more likely don't care, that there is more than one country Hispanic people come from.
I can't find a good source on this, but I suspect you're wrong about "retard" being used clinically. The terms "mentally retarded", and "mental retardation", were and still are used in clinical settings to describe delayed development (though they're going out of fashion quickly). The use of "retard" (as a noun) is pejorative because of linguistics relating to the distinction between attribute and essence; the same reason "a group of black men" is fine, but "a group of blacks" is not.
Mistaking a Chilean for a Mexican is no more offensive than mistaking a German for a Swiss (or a Spaniard for a Portuguese). If you think it is, then I strongly suspect you are actively looking for opportunities to be offended, for your own reasons.
I mean, I'm not offended, because this never happens to me, because I'm white. But I'm given to understand that national pride is as important to Central and South Americans as it is to anyone, and this is something that matters to many expats, and it's not hard for me to understand why.
Try calling your average middle American a Russian (same difference, right?) and you might be in the ballpark.
I read up on "retard" due to this post. Retard was originally used to replace words such as cretin, imbecile, fool, etc.
Those were once clinical terms, but by the late 19th century they had become pejorative. So retardation was introduced, and worked for a while. Then it became a schoolyard insult, and was replaced by mentally disabled or mentally challenged.
If schoolchildren invent an insult out of "disabled", then I imagine a new term will be introduced. This doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea to replace "retarded", but it seems likely that there's no permanent solution.
They already have, sort of. I have heard "what, are you challenged?" or "you are special" a few times now... which is actually one step further than disabled down the euphemism treadmill.
Yeah, special was already an insult when I was in school in the 90s. Didn't realize challenged had become one already. Have they made a noun out of it or just an adjective? Retarded produced both, which is one probably helped it spread.
And that's one of the problems with PC. In that regards, it doesn't work. If we call "orange thinkers" those which IQ is around or above average and "green thinkers" to the other group, then sooner you'll hear "What? Are you a green thinker?"
But I know for a fact that "retarded" and "retardation" have not been replaced; they're being phased out for political reasons, but the terms still have a specific meaning and are definitely still in use clinically.
What I doubt (lacking real evidence) is that the person-noun form "retard" -- think about phrases like "discharging a retard", "managing retard behavior", "a unit full of retards" -- was ever in widespread clinical use, as "idiot" or "imbecile" were in the past. The move to stop using those terms was not about just changing the word, but also recognizing mental disorders as something distinct from a person's inherent nature.
(Again, similar to the move from "negroes" to "black people". Either can be used pejoratively, but the former is arguably intrinsically offensive.)
I know someone has to have written about this, but I don't know who. My sense is that it is like an unconscious societal arms race. In the presence of prejudice labels take on negative connotations. People notice and use new terms that are free of these connotations. Then the new terms acquire the connotations and the cycle repeats.
Maybe this is the best we can hope for, that we get lulls in the coloration of terms and less prejudice to confront at each new cycle.
With regards to "Mexican", I think he meant referring to anyone of hispanic/latino descent as "Mexican". Its offensive in the same way as referring to any Asian nationality as "Chinese".
That's the biggest problem with PC: it just makes you to switch your brains off, to the point where blacks who have nothing to do with Africa are called african americans.
This PC trend is really retarded.
A few years ago, a friend was telling me about a post-colonial African country (I think the Republic of Congo). He mentioned something along the lines of how after they gained independence, the majority of their government was African American.
I almost imminently said something like "thats horrible", thinking that he was implying that America managed to set up our own colonial rule under the guise of independence.
PC-types enjoy attacking how people say things, instead of what is being said.
Personal anecdote: I started up a visitation group for the lonely elderly where I used to live because I felt that it must be pretty shitty to be old and alone. Wrote up a website, fixed up a nice pamphlet and organized everything with the municipality. All out of my own pocket.
The PC media interviewed me and they latched on to the fact that, in my personal explanation on the site, I had linked to a news story on a non-PC site that wrote about a municipality in another part of the country that had cut down on the elderly care budget so much that food rationing was implemented.
See, the PC media were far more horrified that I had linked to the site, than they were about the fact that homes for the elderly in a first-world country were even rationing food for the generation that had built the country.
You really need to show me where The Founding Fathers say that Freedom is Speech is out there to talk about weather while enjoying tea.
The Freedom of Speech is there to talk about dangerous, unpopular ideas without the Fear of Prosecution. And that's what PC killed. Example: try having any type od scientific discourse even in a medical field about DNA differences among races that cause higher rates of lung disease among blacks.
Just plain stupid. And I agree that future generations will be laughing at PC as much as they laugh at MacArthur communist witch hunt from 1950s.
> Example: try having any type od scientific discourse even in a medical field about DNA differences among races that cause higher rates of lung disease among blacks.
Exactly what incident are you referring to? If you want to claim that scientific thought is hindered by the PC police then you need to back it up with something. Otherwise you are just repeating allegations.
