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.

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.

PC is, on the whole, a good thing. It's just ridiculous when taken to extremes, which is the bit everyone is focused on.

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".

You can read more about this here:

http://paulgraham.com/say.html

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

But my point is, PC doesn't really work. Everyone "knows" what is really meant by any of the PC terms.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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?

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.