There are two sides of PC. The original meaning, and the way politicians use it. Both are presented, but I feel it fails to link them.
I have always been fascinated by the ever changing terms to designate (I have actually have no idea what the current PC way to say it is, so I'll go for "atypical") population that has a "condition" to be as generic as possible.
Step 1. There used to be a word with the actual meaning describing the condition. Step 2. Some people will use it in a pejorative way. Step 3. Now a new word is the official PC way to call this population.
However it was never the word that was pejorative. It just describes a condition. It is also a fact that people with this condition can not do some task, or with less ease than people who do not have the condition (that would usually be the overwhelming majority of people). And using the term as a metaphor for a person without the condition that fails at the given task, or implying this way that they would, is inevitable. It is a full part of language.
To make things worse, to be totally PC, the new term will have to be innovative to have no connotation, will go around the bush to avoid mentioning the thing that this people can't do, or even try to turn it into something more positive sounding in order to make pejorative connotation harder. But that just makes it more foreign, or inherently ridicule and even easier to make fun of than the original term, because the new term itself is usually laughable.
And so Step 4. Go back to Step 2. And this process just accelerates with time.
Note that it doesn't stop at describing people. It's generic for every time we use euphemisms to hide the actual nature of things, think "collateral damage" for instance.
Not only is the whole process ridiculous, it facilitates the other consequence evoked here. This is what allows politicians (usually on the objectively evil side of the spectrum), to use this ridiculous process that almost everybody has experienced to paint being "not PC" as a good thing and then to cover actually unethical, immoral or inhumane ideologies.
If people were not primed in almost everyday life to find PC terms laughable by their everchanging nature, they might not have a reason to see "not PC", or "he tells it like it is" as a quality.
Review by FLYVIP 2BlockedParent2021-01-19T00:46:57Z
There are two sides of PC. The original meaning, and the way politicians use it. Both are presented, but I feel it fails to link them.
I have always been fascinated by the ever changing terms to designate (I have actually have no idea what the current PC way to say it is, so I'll go for "atypical") population that has a "condition" to be as generic as possible.
Step 1. There used to be a word with the actual meaning describing the condition.
Step 2. Some people will use it in a pejorative way.
Step 3. Now a new word is the official PC way to call this population.
However it was never the word that was pejorative. It just describes a condition. It is also a fact that people with this condition can not do some task, or with less ease than people who do not have the condition (that would usually be the overwhelming majority of people). And using the term as a metaphor for a person without the condition that fails at the given task, or implying this way that they would, is inevitable. It is a full part of language.
To make things worse, to be totally PC, the new term will have to be innovative to have no connotation, will go around the bush to avoid mentioning the thing that this people can't do, or even try to turn it into something more positive sounding in order to make pejorative connotation harder. But that just makes it more foreign, or inherently ridicule and even easier to make fun of than the original term, because the new term itself is usually laughable.
And so Step 4. Go back to Step 2. And this process just accelerates with time.
Note that it doesn't stop at describing people. It's generic for every time we use euphemisms to hide the actual nature of things, think "collateral damage" for instance.
Not only is the whole process ridiculous, it facilitates the other consequence evoked here. This is what allows politicians (usually on the objectively evil side of the spectrum), to use this ridiculous process that almost everybody has experienced to paint being "not PC" as a good thing and then to cover actually unethical, immoral or inhumane ideologies.
If people were not primed in almost everyday life to find PC terms laughable by their everchanging nature, they might not have a reason to see "not PC", or "he tells it like it is" as a quality.