It seems to me that the inevitability of a superficial or an ill-driven fashion understanding of certain political correctness originates ultimately from an irrational/poorly educated public.

"Political correctness" is one more popular neologism of the sort that is characteristic of psychotic thinking, i.e. words that are made up on the spot in response to irrational obsessiveness and compulsion. As with all such it's difficult to pin down an exact meaning (what politics? and why correct?). True for media-driven labeling in general (saves space for advertisement). Such terms indeed succeed well in reinforcing delusions. E.g., "geek". Were Aristotle and Plato ancient "Geeks"??

As an African-American(whatever that is supposed to mean), I get quite tired of being required to be outraged every time somebody uses the "N" word. I personally like people who stand by the courage of their personal convictions, no matter how misguided they may be. As we like to say in my community, we don't worry about the ones in sheets, we worry about the other ones. I am glad for some of the heightened sensitivities especially in the area of the "developmentally challenged" but personally I wanna be able to say that something looks "faggy" without drawing the wrath of PC Police. And frankly although I am a woman and all woman at that, all the pink clothing and accessories just look "faggy" on my rich darkly hued skin. Now dammit, I said it.

Ok, Cathy, you've lost me. You sound highly irrational here. The argument against using certain words or phrases is quite utilitarian. For every individual free to take certain actions there are tens, hundreds, and even thousands more unhappy with said action. You might appreciate someone using certain words or phrases, but what if those phrases became personal? What if they sparked riots? What if those comments harmed another individual? At some point here, I think individuals rights must give way to the legitimate moral claims.
Isn't it *moral* to preserve community? Isn't it *moral* to respect the dignity of others? Isn't it *moral* to view others as you would value being seen? I'm an African-American, too, and I think it my duty--no, my obligation--to live up to a decorum of respect that falls in line with the ancient traditions of Aristotle who believed the only way to be virtuous was to surround yourself around virtuous people. In my view, I can only do that, if I help lead my community to a life of virtuous and moral behavior.
PS And why, exactly, are we talking to that guy who wrote the "Greater Generation"? Are they not partially responsible for this "openess" (an Orwellian word if ever there was one). Well, that's another topic for another day.

Hmmmm,
Maybe Corey is right. And if so, naming a teddy bear Mohammad should be punnished by 40 lashes. The problem with trying to stay within the boundries of morality is those said moralities are transitory and region specific. Instead of the dogmatic belief in the power of individual words and what they mean to a few, perhaps adherance to fundamental principlals of conduct would better serve the ends of those trying to bring about the better interaction between people. In short, be polite, try not to show hatred but be free to express ideas openly. "everything we really need to know we should have learned in kindergaten." Robert Fulgem

1
The 1960s arena, where one could practice righteousness of an adolescent sort and save America from its absentminded sinfulness, was begotten by a generation which had survived the ?29 Panic and fought a desperate war on two fronts with various totalitarian regimes. Of course, compared to saving Western civilization(hard to believe that those rubes supposed it worth saving)from the dark side of the force, the breaking of custom?s cake by that generation?s children must be more profound, yes? Well.
2
In addition to congratulating ourselves for our "more caring, progressive, egalitarian society"(a time when decade succeeds decade as post-this-or-that and de-this-or-that), where one cannot utter NO, save to say NO to NO, we are treated to the banality of this post. Ere geneticists manipulate us into certitudes of grace, we are left with 5000 years of human history from which to mine our supposes, and from this cornucopia of folly, fornication and autos-da-fe we might have presumed a posteriori and a priori that the vanity of those who?ve reckoned themselves history?s solution is addressed invariably by our (apparently)irreducible and savage contempt for remediation.
3
"Political correctness" is no more or less than the orthodoxy of the moment, that variety of cognitive/emotive reality regnant within a society. However the term came to mean the giving of no offense to those views become sacred(and by extrapolation to practices or persons congenial to the substance of one?s precepts), each age has had its theses of being, certitudes enforced via opprobrium and/or the clink, the rack or hemlock. Naturally, no high tide of an orthodoxy supposes itself but the mortal effusion of an hour, the effluence of will sanctioned by its handmaid, intelligence. Today, one despises the gruff nature of those who suggest that tomorrow might be dull if a Shakespeare had no reason to write as Shakespeare wrote, that is, if men could stitch no more upon time?s flesh their "dreams of avarice" or make pogroms or jihads or wrestle in the mud as mud for the "good." If men had to awake one dawn to endure an age with which one could find no fault, save that perfection doth cloy finally. But then, ala Dostoievski, men do rebel occasionally even against the symmetries of Eden and this act of lese majesty committed upon the logics of "sense and sensibility" may be, after all, the pith that surpasseth understanding and the peculiar genius of this self-absorbed, terrified and terrifying cosmic orphan.
By the by, who is Whorf? And should we glean our apothems from Klingon philosophers?
Cordially, Lawrence Cottrell.

I think the problem with "Political correctness" is that it takes a good idea too far. The infamous "N" word for instance is a demeaning term - at least when used by non-African-Americans. In fact, if I had just used the "N-word" instead of "African- Americans" in this post, it would have aroused a storm of protest. Rightly so.
When I grew up in the 50's, everyone I knew used the "N-word". It describe a people who were: stupid, lazy, immoral, over-sexed, ignorant and smelled bad. They were good at basketball but couldn't play hockey or swim. Education was wasted on them and they were so inferior that you could pick them up by the toe.
The "N-word" includes all these negatives stereotypes within it's definition. This is why it should not be used by anyone who either values truth or wishes not to be offensive.
A common mistake with "Political correctness" is to treat perfectly innocuous words as if they were inherently negative or offensive.
For instance: I was once severely reprimanded for saying that a person who couldn't see was blind. I was told that the politically correct term was "sight challenged". Why? Because the word "blind" apparently labeled the person who couldn't see as inferior. Being in a non-philosophical mood, I ended the conversation with the politically incorrect: "F--- off!"
What I should have done was point out that was the word "blind" is merely an accurate description of a quality and implies inferiority only in the sense that, for humans, it is better to see than not to see. "Blind" carries non of the negativity or political content associated with the "N-word".
For me the worst aspect of 'Political correctness" then is that it undermines simplicity of expression and clarity of thought.
Sincerely, Ed Healy

A story:
I was in a bathroom in Chinatown in San Francisco. Two Chinese women came in and began to discussing a variety of topics. One commented that her brother was dating a new guy "he's Caucasian, you know." I felt a small wave of being offended. I immediately questioned this feeling. Why should I be offended? I'm Caucasian. I burn in the sun. I'm a white girl. I realized that the offence was not in the word, but in the thought - and in the specific thought that: "we are a group and THEY are not part of our group." As a white gal, the feeling of being a "them" instead of an "us" was foreign (no pun intended).
So ultimately I realized that the PC words do not matter. The reason they work at all may be in the small reduction in the sting of racism between the time they are first introduced to when they are accepted as mainstream. In this time lag, the meaning, the cultural baggage, the emotion and the ideas behind these new words have not yet caught up to this latest PC new-speak.
Angela
www.bodywreath.com
P.S. I'm also a little offended that my spell check capitalized Caucasian. It's not a country or a religion (not in the way it is currently used), I don't belong to an organized group. What's up?

It's been my own experience that Political Correctness is rarely about avoiding nasty terms in the presence of the person or group to whom those terms might apply. Rather it almost always involves different sensibilities among member of the same group, none of whom are directly implicated by the term(s) in question. I'm thinking mainly of family dynamics, e.g. the kid home from college who's takes offense to an older relative's use of an outdated ethnonym or label. I think the notion of kindness was invoked on the show, but where does that play in when no one in the conversation is directly implicated by the offensive speech? Who's being the unkind -- the 20-year old who's decided his parents are backward-thinking, or the parent who at best enjoys needling his overly-sensitive child or at worst feels threatened by his child thinking he's backward-thinking?

There's also this funny posting at languagelog.org about the meta-linguistics of political correctness:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005259.html

While the over-reaching thesis of political correctness might be overzealous policing of every term and word, and antithesis a reactionary backlash, it seems to me the appropriate synthesis is a focus on being sensitive in our use of language.
Reasonable accomodations should be made when a term hurts someone else's feelings. Use of outdated terms shouldn't be scorned or mocked, but gently corrected. Using "police officer" or "firefighter" instead of "policeman" or "fireman" is totally reasonable. Replacing all pronouns with "zi" may be going a bit far. Spelling it "womyn" seems a little radical.
Bottom line: language is powerful and we ought to be sensitive (not over-sensitive) when we use it.
P.S. Black folk were enslaved and Jim Crowed in America for a couple hundred years - is it really too much to throw them a bone and say "African American"?

Re: the Philosophy Talk show on "God" (now in re-run):
Not addressed in that program: "God", a capitalized proper name connotes
an existing person or personage or person-like form. "order" is a simple noun.
So if we say that some order entailed the creation of the universe or was entailed by
the creation of the universe, then hey! no problem, BUT as soon as you say "God"
you are invoking an anthropomorphized, texturized soy-bean product first
concocted by a Mesopotamian field hand 8000 years ago, no?
That guy from Claremont is clueless. The Universe was created to appeal to
our sensibilities, he said? Duh: this bud's for you! See the USA in a Chevrolet!
Duh, God, a Madison Ave. marketeer? Duh!

In response to Lawrence Cottrell and anyone interested in proper philosophical discussion:
Whorf refers to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, not a Star Trek character. In a nutshell, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the limits of language are the limits of a language speaker's reality; e.g. the Inuit language has several words that describe different kinds of snow, but the English language only has the word "snow." If you're familiar with the novel 1984, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is directly applied in Newspeak.
Now, your post reads beautifully and froths with fervor. However, in philosophical discussion, literary quips are generally avoided. This is mostly because literary language often contains gaps in reasoning and also vagueness, ambiguity, and general imprecision. For example: you compare the enforcement of political correctness to events such as the horrors of the Inquisition and the death of Socrates. Firstly, there is a gap in reasoning: you do not explain WHY political correctness is similar to those events. Of course, you could claim that your reason is implied, but that is impermissible in philosophical discussion, which stresses explicitness. I could also refute your claim as an ad hoc fallacy. Which leads to the second point, I could claim that the comparison commits the fallacy of false analogy. I think many would agree that the enforcement of political correctness is nowhere close in degree to the torturous killings of the Inquisition.
Rigor is essential in philosophical discussion, and I hope what I wrote helps you and others understand common errors made in philosophical discussion.

Dear Mark,
When Philosophy has nothing left of substance, when, that is, it's a discipline for discipline's sake, one ought consider becoming a plumber, the latter being a useful occupation.
(1) If men are no more than "the limits" of their linguistic "reality," the poet is more real than the Philosopher. I am the former, mostly.
(2) If Philosophy is no more than analysis of grammars, she has become the tramp of a credentialed naivete clinging to a deductive clemency not even interesting; ontology, once Philosophy's reason for existence, is de trop but had at least the capacity to kill or resurrect, to cause a stir on some rialto or in some garret.
(3) If men are no more than "the limits" of their linguistic "reality," they are nothing per se. If they are nothing in se, "good" and "evil" are grammatical convention, and one is entitled to feed men to the fishes for amusement's sake or sacrifice hecatombs for aesthetic symmetry.
(4) Unlike a genuine science, which may get us to Mars, Philosophical scientism is where grown men play jacks when the occupation of spiritual Asclepius is no longer available to them. If Minerva can not inspire us into a chapel or onto a barricade, cause some authority to wish to trepan one, a Philosopher ought be embarrassed at the irrelevancy of his Ph.D.
(5) Explicitly, "each age has had its thesis of being," and whether deviation from an orthodoxy has brought upon the miscreant an auto-da-fe, a gulag, a gas chamber, a shunning or a "C" when one deserved a "B," the simple truth of my assertion seems to have leapt the ha-ha of your comprehension. Moreover, what ever "gap" you've imagined in my brief frolic within the marches of your domain seems to arise from your supposition that orthodoxy is less orthodox because it does not kill but only coerces humanely, i.e., modern deduction is on the non-dark side of the force. Well. Given the language limitations of your "reality," you'll forgive me if I prefer a good tickle on a Sunday afternoon to the condesensions of a logic-chopping martinet presuming to edify me regarding ratiocination's catechism.
Cordially, Lawrence Cottrell

In the small city that I live in I have noticed that it has become very popular to "help" the refugee families from Africa. Working as a social worker in a setting which is truly diverse and multi-cultural I noticed a few things that concerned me this week. First of all, there is a tendency among the "refugee helpers" to want to give them more services and help and to allow for more socially "inappropriate" behavior to continue. For example at holiday time, most of the families in the setting in which I work want and need help with gifts, clothing and food. I find that the one thing that most of the families have in common is poverty. Yet several staff members and outside companies wanted to sponsor a refugee family from Africa. Today was our last day before holiday break and at the end of the day a co-worker called me and said, "Why did you not deliver the gifts to the -----family (a refugee family from Africa)? I was first defensive explaining that, through an interpreter, I had discussed how the gifts could be picked up and the father, who had a vehicle would be happy to pick up the gifts. I went in to the office to "vent" because I was shocked and this person came busting in and said, "I just thought that it might be helpful for you if I delivered them!" I again, explained that there was a plan in place. At this point I was angry because there were racist overtones. Many families without vehicles had come with strollers or had found rides to get gifts. I did deliver some but am a one person show and could not do it all. I finally kind of lost it when I saw the person in the parking lot. I said, "You know I am a straight shooter, and I am wondering why you would ask me why I hadn't delivered the gifts"! She denied ever saying that and I called her on it and said, "Yes you did". I, once again explained what the plan was but she showed no remorse. She later called,.... blah, blah, blah, " I wasn't sure if it was because they aren't Christian". Another incident involved a family where the family has a huge van, they live around the corner and the father drove the women to the agency and had them all load the goods while he sat in the car. He also refused to pick up a huge basket of food a few weeks ago and had me and his wife carry food for ten up to the third floor. I think that he is sexist, plain and simple and needs to be educated that other women in this culture will find him as such if we do not let him know this. The family also has a vehicle, help from a settlement agency with finances, employment and all kinds of support. I realize that they face great difficulties coming to a new culture, though these families have been here a few years, but I also feel for the hundreds of other families who have no beds for their children, no work, no food etc... who are not refugees. In this small city it has become politically fashionable to help refugees from Africa even if it means that in the short run they receive special privileges that others who live in poverty do not receive. Just venting. I am sure someone will call me racist but I am not a racist. I just believe in equity.

On Juan Williams' firing by NPR: It wasn't what he said that condemned him in the eyes and ears of NPR---it was where he was when he said it. I agree with Neuman on his main point. Politically correct speech was a low point, but only one of many. The sickness in our society only begets more sickness.