Language of Sissies

-Ashley Carlisle

The holidays are supposed to be the best time of the year, with a reprieve from school and work as well as an abundance of gifts and mounds of deliciously fattening food. Oh, I'm sorry. Did I offend you by using the word holiday? I didn't mean to imply that you should celebrate a holiday. If you are atheist or Daoist or Hindu or Confucian or Native American or a Scientologist, then please accept my deepest apologies. Because that's what I'm supposed to do, right? I'm supposed to make sure that I don't offend anyone by using common words that really have no significant bias. I'm sorry for being a human; I'll work on it.

Political correctness, sometimes called being "PC" is a concept that entered the public lexicon in the '70s, as liberal social movements began to gather steam. The phrase was used by liberals to discredit rigid conservative thinking, declaring their practices prejudiced. However, the phrase has morphed into a grenade. One that has sparked three decades of culture wars, which have generated a constantly burgeoning amount of non-biased and PC terminology.

From holiday greetings to song lyrics, political correctness has been used as an excuse to change "biased" words into words that are completely "accepting" of all religious and social and cultural standards. A recent dispute in Oxfordshire, England over the lyrics of the famous song "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" reveals the slowly growing phenomenon of political correctness. At the school, teachers asked children to change the lyrics from "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" to "Baa, Baa, Rainbow Sheep" in order to avoid the possibility of offending any ethnic or cultural group. This revolutionary change showcases how the concept of political correctness has the power to corrupt even our children, and how they are learning about differences. If anything, changes like this reinforce the idea that ethnic differences do cause problems. By reinforcing that these problems do exist, children are taught that they should avoid confrontation altogether. If kids learn to avoid issues by always making sure to use PC terms, then how will they ever really learn?

Luckily, I'm not alone in my extreme dislike of PC terminology and thinking. Many organizations have been created in order to combat the idea and its effects upon our society. These organizations, including the Anti-Politically Correct Society and the Anti-PC League, work to stop the censorship-like qualities of politically correct thinking and to allow communities to accept differences and adapt to them, strengthening bonds between different groups.

It's not just the new and unneeded terminology that bothers me; it is primarily the fact that today's idea of being politically correct completely defies its original purpose. Initially, it was a mindset aimed at assimilating differences into a tight-knit and accepting community with a non-discriminatory vocabulary. However, the present mindset makes the idea of community far-fetched. The frenzy of having to be politically correct just elevates awareness of racism and thus increases disunity within a community. In order to truly develop an accepting society, people with differences have to learn to adapt to situations and phrases that they might find offensive. If there are no disputes, then there really can't be any growth, leading situations to worsen and develop new and worse passive aggressive traits.

I do believe that it is important to respect differences; however I don't believe that we should assimilate using a vocabulary that doesn't showcase those differences. The world, especially America, is a microcosm of differing people, views and ethnicities. In my opinion, we should embrace these differences individually and not try to combine them into a society where they would only fade away.

I completely respect diversity, however if ultra-sensitive people can't handle common vocabulary, then they just need to put on their big-girl panties and deal with it. It's not the end of the world if someone gives you an incorrect holiday greeting or uses a slang term that you may find offensive. If you aren't mature enough to deal with the fact that people are fallible, then you need to reevaluate your life and how you view it.