Is "politically correct" a meaningless term?

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Okay, I'm some lunatic who thinks that natural languages need the precision of something like mathematics, but it seems that "political correctness" is a pretty vague and meaningless term. It seems like some sorta catch-all epithet someone uses to describe anything they dislike.

It actually refers to the anguish felt by those shoehorned under pain of politeness into avoiding their usual sexist/racist/homophobic/whatever commentary.

Liberals rarely use the term...but then, liberals don't have to censor themselves because they don't hold such ideologies in the first place.

Last edited by ValentineWiggin on 08 Feb 2012, 1:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

So, "political incorrectness" may be a euphemism for "f*cked up, bigoted, assholery"? Interesting.

Ah, no, the opposite.

It's a term USED by "f*cked up, bigoted, a**holes" to describe their butthurt about not being allowed to say f*cked up, bigoted, asshole-ish things.

Ex:
"Don't be sexist. PC b!tches hate that. LULZ!"
"Would it be too un-PC if I said Obama's people should stop playing the race card?"

I thik it's more along the lines of "socially correct" rather than political. A person is more likely to get social flak rather than political for using certain words, etc. I agree with not using some words and phrases, but I think it's gone completely overboard.

I define politically correct to mean the avoidance of offense to the point where there is bigotry towards any paradigm other than Liberal egalitarianism as well as a confirmation bias towards anything supporting the Liberal egalitarian paradigm. Boiling every objection towards political correctness down to nothing more than cheap excuses to express racist or sexist sentiments is ironic since goes against the open mindedness self proclaimed egalitarians stand so firmly for.

Last edited by AceOfSpades on 08 Feb 2012, 1:39 pm, edited 2 times in total.

If the news wasn't narrowed down to sound bites, I think "politically correct" wouldn't be said that often, as people would actually be able to describe their views instead of using a term that has devolved into a buzz word...or has it always just been a buzz word?

Last edited by snapcap on 08 Feb 2012, 1:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Or it's even a term used by ordinary people that think it's stupid to ban seemingly trivial words or phrases because they might offend some minority, such as making Santas say "Ha Ha Ha" instead of "Ho Ho Ho", because the latter phrase might offend women.

Right. Because women are minorities, and majorities are the best people to decide what minorities should be offended by.

True.

Obviously I was using the term minority in the liberal egalitarian sense, i.e. any group that was at some point marginalized by western culture.


I never said they were?

Then most of the particular minority would need to be offended by a word or phrase before we villified it. I have no problem with making words or phrases socially unacceptable if most of a group is offended by them, but I do not agree with changing speech pattersn for an entire country because a handful of people in a particular group are offended. I do think that if you know that someone is offended by, or likely to be offended by, a word or phrase or even gesture, that doesn't offend most others in their group, that you should still avoid using it in their presence, but we need to use some common sense.

It certainly does have a negative meaning today. But conservatives, liberals and those in between all have politically correct dogmas that they don't like to be challenged. Challenging them will get you booed or shunned in front of the wrong audience.

Because some groups see their views as absolute truth, they don't imagine that they are being politically correct in certain company. It's always the other guy who can't handle the truth and who succumbs to group think.

So the few women that have a persecution complex about the phrase "Ho Ho Ho" are the best people to decide what every other woman should be offended by?

So instead of saying that something isn't politically correct, why don't think actually describe their view? Can they not articulate it that well, or are they afraid of their stance being attacked?

Political correctness was invented by the Left.

From the wiki article:

By 1970, New Left proponents had adopted the term political correctness.[1] In the essay The Black Woman, Toni Cade Bambara says: ". . . a man cannot be politically correct and a [male] chauvinist too." The New Left later re-appropriated the term political correctness as satirical self-criticism; per Debra Shultz: "Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and progressives . . . used their term politically correct ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts".[1][2][7] Hence, it is a popular English usage in the underground comic book Merton of the Movement, by Bobby London, while ideologically sound, an alternative term, followed a like lexical path, appearing in Bart Dickon’s satirical comic strips.[1][8] Moreover, Ellen Willis says: " . . . in the early ’80s, when feminists used the term political correctness, it was used to refer sarcastically to the anti-pornography movement’s efforts to define a ‘feminist sexuality’ ".[9]


The Lefties have you coming and going.

ruveyn