14/10/2002
Political correctness Classwork essay
Choose five words that are seen as politically incorrect and explain the issues they raise. Discuss how significant you think political correctness is in language.
The Five politically incorrect words I have nominated are: coon, nigger, gay, handycapped ,and Raghead.
I will introduce my essay with all the certain types of political correctness and their cardinal importance throughout the twentieth century.
Some of the most loaded words in the English language are those associated with the way society talks about itself, and especially about groups of people whom it perceives to be disadvantaged or oppressed. The most sensitive domains are to do with race, gender, sexual orientation, ecology, religion and (physical or mental) personal development. During the 1980's,an increasing number of people became concerned to eradicate what they saw to be prejudice (especially language prejudice) in these areas. The label racialist was already known from the return of the century, and racist from the 1930's.
Followed by a series of other -ist terms that focussed on real or imagined areas of linguistic discrimination. Many of the critics were members of progressive or activist groups (eg. Advocates of minority rights.), especially in universities and thus as the movement grew, attracting hard line extremists alongside moderates, it drew down upon itself in the antagonism of conservative academics and journalists. By the 1990s, this hard-line linguistic orthodoxy was being referred to, Pejoratively, as political correctness (PC).
Anyone that used vocabulary held to be 'Politically incorrect' risked severe condemnation by PC activists. Organizations, fearful of public criticism and litigation, went out of their way to avoid using language which might be constructed as offensive .The word black, for example, was felt to be so sensitive that some banned its use in all possible contexts. (Including such instances as blackboard...
Copy and Paste?
Good sections in this essay, but the overall appearance and structure seems patchy.
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