The term "politically correct"

[SHRED]

I view it as code for:
"I wish I could just offend whomever I want with my RW bullshit but the pussy liberals now require I be aware of others so some bleeding heart doesn't get their feelings hurt".
My blood boils when I hear the term on the MSM.
It's as if it is code for, "see how the liberals are".

How did this asinine catch phrase ever get started?

Damn it.
:mad:

[unblock]

1. it actually did get started among strong liberals

it was used when strong liberals got together and discussed issues and so on internally. they used it to mean, "if you were entirely consistent about your liberal politics, you would also do this other thing". one example might be a debate about whether or not it is politically correct to eat every scrap of foor on your plate. that's actually a debate i remember from college ('81-'85). another way of looking at it would be "what would a TRUE liberal do?" or, "are we being hypocritical when we advocate one thing but also do this other thing?"

it was never meant to COERCE non-liberals into anything at all, it was only meant to apply among liberals committed to the cause.


then the right wing latched on to the phrase and decided to popularize it to the public, along with the laughably straw-man story that you still hear today: that liberals want to control your thinking and speech and so on. christina hoff summers was one of the biggest and earliest proponents of this crap.

[SHRED]

4. Well...

...it sure got twisted.

Musta been that "liberal media".
:sarcasm:

[EST]

2. Code word.

It is sooo eighties.
The racists and bigots of the right wing long for the days when it was funny to tell nigger jokes, pollack jokes, irish jokes, on and nauseatingly on. When your mind, by habit and crooked nature runs to disparaging people to burnish your own image and you are too simple to dig up enough originality to justify your existence, you resort to pretending that you are superior to those you regard as inferior.

Because dumping such swill onto the public perception would arouse much deserved indignation and condemnation, the microcephalic miscreants resort to code, to try to smear those who won't put up with such garbage.

[beam me up scottie]

3. sigh...

I'm with you.

I hear it every day from the freepers I work with and it does no good to argue with them.

I hate how they have hijacked so many words as well as our government.

[Minnesota Libra]

5. My experiences with political correctness have been.....

......that neocons don't mind being politically INCORRECT but don't let a liberal do the same thing.:wtf: Neocons will yell from here to hell and back, and with them it's always back to religion.:puke:

PLEASE, let me make one thing perfectly clear. I AM NOT anti religion I just don't want a neocon's version, or anyone's version, of religion forced down my throat with every other word.

[beam me up scottie]

6. You make a good point.

Political correctness to them is not criticizing christianity or their exalted leader.

[Solo_in_MD]

14. Sort of

PC = prevailing orthodoxy in the situation. Sometimes that orthodxy is liberal, other times conservative. Being non-PC is going against the percevied group norm or being contrarian.

Examples: Resisiting the DLC/Hillary is not PC in some groups
Support Bush in any way is very non PC at DU
Supporting civil rights is very non PC at Freeperville

Also, taking a contrarian apporach (being Non-PC) tends to upset the doctrinaire. Just look at the Gungeon here at DU

We don't like the way Repukes use it, they don't like the way progressives use it. Oh well.

[MH1]

16. Exactly, and in addition, "PC" has non "political" meanings

I hear the phrase often used in corporate offices, referring to the PC-ness or non-PC-ness of a particular statement, and often the "political" part of PC in that case is referring to office politics.

PC is just an expression that is shorthand for, as you say, "prevailing orthodoxy in the situation". I wish people would stop getting their knickers in a twist over it.

[Cerridwen]

7. Once upon a time...

it actually meant that we acknowledge that not everyone on this planet, nor even in the U.S. is a white hetero male with money, education, property and privilege. Pretty obnoxious, huh?

During that same time, the government started using some weird government speak to change titles of employees and defend some of their idiocy - it got really funny in a few cases. The rwing during that time conflated the two into one and used the government double-speak as examples of political correctness gone wild. It was very effective. I hear liberals today sneeringly refer to "political correctness" and PC on one hand and arguing that words don't mean anything on the other hand while distancing themselves from the word liberal on their 3rd hand.

Oh the joy of living with the results catapulted propaganda.

/sarcasm

edited to add: in essence, political correctness is the acknowlegement that words have power as does the way in which we deliver them. The rwing uses the power while all at the same time denying they have power and telling us to "get over it" and "can't you take a joke?"

[salin]

8. check out the link in my tag line

it was an item on PC that I read some time ago - that I thought was SO good that I hoped that placing it in the tag line might lead a few more folks to read it.

[mcscajun]

9. In one of the most ridiculous conversations I ever had with a Republican

friend, he called the casting in "Gladiator" a victim of political correctness.

"They just HAD to put a woman gladiator in that movie so it would be politically correct. GOT to show those strong women now, even if no woman was ever a gladiator. How stupid!" (I'm paraphrasing; it's been a few years since we had this conversation.)

I sputtered at him that there were certainly women gladiators (a fact I'd gleaned from my studies in college several years back) and the argument raged for a while because he just wouldn't believe me.

In the aberration that was the later Roman empire, gladiatorial contests got more and more bizarre to sate not only the current emperor's tastes, but to please an increasingly jaded public. According to Suetonius, Emperor Domitian favored fights between dwarfs and women.

But it made my friend more comfortable to not think, not question, not even be Interested in why they'd shown a female gladiator in the film, but to go on with a knee-jerk assumption that any time you see a woman in a period piece or historical drama doing "a man's job" it Must Be Political Correctness Run Amok.

[Iniquitous Bunny]

10. Because it's threatening to some people...

to have it pointed out to them that they are insensitive, cretin pigs. It makes them all defensive and stuff. They then try to turn the argument toward you as if it is you who are to blame.

[rock]

11. I'm always suspicious of anyone that

modifies "correct". It's as though there's something more important than being correct (it may still be correct, but that would only be incidental).

This is similar in effect to using "virtual" to modify something else; it always means "not". Example: "virtual leather" can be anything except leather (it cannot be leather).

[USA_1]

12. It was first used by reich winger Reed Irvine...

... of Accuracy in Academia.

Any viewpoint that did not conform to his reich wing interpretation of history and politics was said not to be "politically correct".

[rman]

13. As though the RW cares what liberals "require".

Who's in power? Well then.
It's more the other way around: Dem reps tend to conform to what the RW portrays as PC.

[Igel]

15. It's a translation of the Russian

"politicheski pravil'no".

Things had to be done "politicheski pravil'no", in accordance with the party line and policy. Anything not done in that way was censured, frequently by fellow (or not-so-fellow) CPSU members; if you were also a CPSU member, it could occur at a party meeting, or the local partorg or politruk (party organizer or political leader) would have a talk with you. If it escalated to needing attention at a meeting, the routine way out was samokritika 'self-criticism', in which you castigated yourself for not abiding by the CPSU 'politika', confessed your sin, and pledged to do better. You might be censured, kicked out of the party (very, very bad) or restored to good graces.

It became difficult, because what was "politicheski pravil'no" was frequently a mystery, and tended to change from time to time. It meant that what was proper and allowed to be said, spoken, or done was a matter of constant concern, and you were always aware that you were being monitored by either the partorg or party members. This led to a lot of self-censorship. Frequently it was specific words that had to be avoided or used, or the definitions given to those words. It led to the Soviet slogan "think one thing, say another, and do a third": in other words, institutionalized hypocrisy.

On edit: Lest people try to impute it to a later source, this was quite common in the '20s in Russia, and within a year or two in America. But you can see the term used, just not stereotypically, in compart writings from the decade before, if you have the wherewithall to tolerate actually reading any of them.

"Politically correct" is a not especially felicitious translation of the Russian. "Politika" is 'politics', t'is true, but also 'policy' or 'party line'. But the US Comm Party wasn't linguistically gifted and was too slavishly pro-Soviet, they accepted the term from Moscow English. CPSU policies were vaguely similar, it seems, to those in the 'motherland'; from there, it spread.

I started using it in the '70s, during the great negro/colored/black/afro-american/african-american linguistic tussle, and it continued with the indian/native american/indigenous american/first peoples business. If I said the wrong one in the wrong context, I was a racist; this, of course, was complete nonsense. But, then again, many of the trivial distinctions and shifts of meanings of Russian words compelled by party politics was, likewise, complete nonsense.

Compare the mess with "Eskimo" and 'squaw'. We are supposed to say Inuit, because most eskimos in Canada are Inuit and if you're in Canada and refer to eskimos you're likely refering to Inuits. But not all eskimos are Inuit, and apparently those that aren't Inuit take offense at being mischaracterized as a different ethnicity. 'Squaw' has been given a false etymology, and the meaning 'c**t" imposed on it--something a similar word might have had in a language that was unknown to Europeans when they borrowed the word from a different language. Yet, to pay homage to a policy that presumes to dictate the 'true', albeit wrong, meaning of the word, we have to revise maps. Point out the error, and the policy shifts to meet the same ends: 'squaw', in English, is (usually? frequently?) intended to be offensive; therefore, it's always construed to be offensive. We may lack a formal party to impose which policies are correct or incorrect, but we have informal arbiters of the same kind of persnickety rules and regs, leading to the same kind of meticulous self-monitoring and samokritika (or, conversely, rebellion against the rules, in true refusenik style).

On edit: Things not done "politicheski pravil'no" were "politicheski nepravil'no", "politically" incorrect (or wrong). Both the positive and negative terms were common in the '20s in Russia, and spread quickly via translation to the US; you could see them in use in the 1910s in Russian. It's only with the post-NEP crackdown in the mid-late 20's under Lenin, and esp. under Stalin, that the term became life-threatening.

[HardWorkingDem]

17. Michael Lerner in The New Republic - defined it long ago...

in an article in the New Republic - probably back in the 80's. All I can remember was that the way he defined it then is not the same context that it is used today. I think another poster hit the meaning when it was when a member of a group made a comment about their group that went against what the thoughts of the group normally are, rather than letting a conservative get up and say bigoted remarks and excuse it as being truthful or unflinchingly honest

Wish I still had that article.