political correctness

political correctness

the belief that language which discriminates or marginalises certain social groups should be banned to include greater sensitivity to these social groups

example of political correctness

‘disabled people’ → ‘people with disabilities’

priorities the person over their disability

'confined to a wheelchair' → 'wheelchair user'

the verb 'confined' has connotations with imprisonment and suggests that wheelchair users are restricted or constrained by their disability.

rejections to political correctness

the term 'political correctness' itself is a rejection to the ideals behind the movement, as it was coined by conservative commentators and often coupled with the term 'Political Correctness gone mad'.
Aitchison's crumbling castle metaphor can be applied to PC: the objection to certain language terms being exclusive to communities (e.g. gay or disabled community) could be implied as removing words from the English Language and therefore is a step away from the golden age of English.

descriptivism

The analysis of how language is used by its speakers/ writers.

Non-judgmental approach to analysing language as it is actually used, without imposing prescriptive norms or rules.

Issues of correct or incorrect language are not considered.

prescriptivism

The belief that a particular form of language is superior to another and should be treated as such.

Imposes rules on the use of language, asserting the 'correctness' of certain words, phrases, grammar, and the 'incorrectness' of others.

Prefers and values Standard English / forms of language.

semantic shift

the evolution of a word’s meaning over time due to cultural shifts, new technology, or social infleunces.

types of semantic shift

broadening / generalisation - meaning becomes more inclusive (e.g. ‘business’ referred to someone who was busy, now means any type of job/work).

narrowing / specialisation - meaning becomes more specific (e.g. ‘hound’ referred to any type of dog, now used for hunting dogs).

amelioration - meaning gets less offensive over time / gains positive connotations (e.g. ‘nice’ meant foolish/silly person in 1300s. By 1800s meant kind/thoughtful person. Slang terms ‘sick’ / ‘wicked’ now have positive connotations).

pejoration - meaning gets more offensive over time / gains negative connotations. (‘silly’ meant happy/spiritually blessed person in Old and Middle English, but by 1500s became associated with foolishness).

semantic reclamation - when a group of people who have been oppressed reclaim a word that has previously been used to disparage them.

linguistic amelioration

words get less offensive over time by losing their negative connotations and becoming neutral.
e.g. 'gay' was pejorative towards homosexuality in the 1960s but is now a neutral label for homosexual people (successful example of semantic reclamation).

linguistic pejoration

words get more offensive over time by gaining negative connotations

e.g. ‘retarded’ meant ‘delayed or slow’ but now is a derogatory term for people with an intellectual disability.

lingustic determinsim (Saphir-Whorf hypothesis)

the idea that language determines our thoughts (PC: and therefore we should change our language to be more inclusive).

e.g. Japanese has different words to address people based on their social status / relationship with the speaker. This reinforces the importance of social hierarchies in Japanese culture, and suggests they may have a different view of relationships to English speakers.

revised to 'linguistic relativity', as a weaker version of determinism, which suggests that language heavily influences societal attitudes.

lingustic relativism

the idea that languages influence how humans think and interact with the world.

e.g. English speakers say ‘he broke the vase’ (active voice) even for accidents, whilst spanish speakers say "the vase broke" (se rompió), even if someone was responsible.

suggests that spanish speakers focus more on the event itself rather than the blame compared to english speakers.

language reform

deliberate attempts to change the way we use language

e.g. Robert Lowth (1962) (prescriptivist) introduced the first grammar book for the English Language and created rules to prevent it from decaying and becoming dead like Latin. His grammar rules included:

1. pronoun ‘thou’ should no longer be used.

2. proposition (subject) should be placed before noun it applies to.

3. the infinitive verb shouldn’t be split (as it isn’t split in Latin, e.g. say ‘to care truly’, rather than ‘to truly care’.

Steven Pinker: ‘forcing modern English speakers not to split an infinitive because it isn’t done in Latin is wrong’.

verbal hygiene

societal efforts to ‘clean up’ / regulate language (prescriptivism, politeness, ‘correctness’) are actually attempts to impose order on social structures.

gate-keeping

refers to how various institutions and publications exert influence over how language gets used.

includes setting boundaries on language, behaviour, and viewpoints. often aimed at protecting marginalised groups

e.g. government (via laws and policies), educational institutions, newspapers, the broadcast media

Steven Pinker's euphemism treadmill

when a term gains pejorative connotations, a euphemism is created to replace the term. however, overtime this euphemism will become dysphemistic so will need to be replaced, which will repeat multiple times like a treadmill.

e.g. moron → retarded → intellectually disabled → special needs → disabled person → person with a disability

dominant group

Social group whose opinions and interests are very influential when forming public opinion, cultural norms and even laws.

In Western societies they have, until relatively recently, typically been educated and/or wealthy white men.

muted group

Social group whose opinions and interests have little or no influence on public opinion, cultural norms and laws.

In Western societies they have, until relatively recently, typically been women, non-white people, less well-educated, and less well-off.

semantic reclamation

when muted groups start using the terms that dominant groups have used to insult them. the intention is to disarm the word's potential to offend

e.g. gay men adopting the word 'queer' and black people using the n-word (and using the suffix -a rather than -er to differentiate it from the slur)

unsuccessful examples of semantic reclamation

‘slut’ has pejorative connotations and is used to describe women who’ve had many sexual partners.

semantic reclamation was attempted through 'slutwalks' in the 2010s, aiming to remove the negative connotations, but this was unsuccessful.

the term is still largely pejorative and has has misogynistic connotations.

default assumptions

The idea that some words automatically (and often incorrectly) refer to members of only certain social groups.

e.g. 'doctor' would, to many people, denote a male, whereas 'nurse' would denote a female.

this lead to marked terms such as 'lady doctor' and 'male nurse' being used, which are also examples of negative semantic space and lexical asymmetry.

negative semantic space

describes words in a phrase which are not necessary if we don’t make false assumptions about other words in the phrase.

E.g. ‘lady doctor’ and ‘male nurse’ (as they assume the default gender of the occupations to be male and female respectively)

lexical asymmetry (sexism)

when words used to refer to men and women literally have the same meaning, but have different connotations (e.g. master/mistress, wizard/witch)

change from above

conscious language change where speakers are aware of the linguistic change and use it to sound more dominant due to social pressure.

the change begins with speakers in the higher social classes and diffuses down into lower classes.

political correctness is often associated as being 'change from above'

organisations (e.g. national governments) adopt political correctness to seem more inclusive and large groups (e.g. disabled community) advocate for this change.

e.g. saying ‘person with a disability’ rather than ‘disabled person’ to be more inclusive

change from below

unconscious language change that occurs from social / cognitive pressures.

originate within the working / middle-class vernacular (spoken language) rather than being imposed by prestigious groups / institutions.

e.g. dropping post-vocalic /r/ in ‘car’ or ‘park’ (British English)

irony

could be a motive for deliberately using politically incorrect and offensive terms, but without meaning to be politically incorrect and offensive.

in order to be inoffensive it would have to be mutually understood by both speaker and receiver.

intentionality

the idea that what a speaker means by using a word is of more significance than what that word may be taken to mean out of a specific context.

lexical gaps

occur when there is no equivalent word to refer to the opposite gender.

e.g. a woman can be referred to as ‘bubbly’ but there is no male equivalent. similarly a man can be referred to as a ‘bloke’ but there is no female equivalent.

generic masculine / ‘he’ (sexism)

when male pronouns and terms are used to represent both males and females.

e.g. 'if your baby cries, try giving him his bottle'.

e.g. with "mankind", some argue that the use of "he" rather than "he or she" reinforces male superiority.

androcentric language (sexism)

Dale Spender (1998) - involves placing males at the centre of attention by using the male version of words to refer to both genders

e.g. ‘mankind’ rather than ‘humankind’

order of precedence

when the male is placed at the forefront of phrases

e.g. ‘his and hers’’, and ‘sir or madam’

assumes that the male is of a higher status

marked terms (sexism)

when something is added to a word to make it gender specific or gender bias.

e.g. actress, female doctor

can extend to terms of address, e.g. Mr vs Miss/Mrs.

there is no male equivalent of ‘miss’ (lexical gap). women are forced to be identified by their marital status, whilst men aren’t (although some women use ‘Ms’).

inclusive usage (non sexist language)

gender specific words (e.g. fireman, policeman, headmaster/mistress) have been replaced with gender neutral terms (e.g. firefighter, police officer, head teacher).

Guidelines are issued to media journalists to enforce the use the use of such inclusive terms.

‘Person’ has replaced ‘man’ in many compounds (e.g. chairperson, spokesperson)

over represenation

having too many words representing a particular concept for one social group compared to another.

e.g. there are many more words to represent sexually active women to sexually active men

benign prescriptivism

a type of prescriptivism that is kind and well-meaning, rather than being dogmatic and pedantic (associated with typical prescriptivism).

political correctness is a form of 'benign prescriptivism'.

trivialising suffix

morphemes added to the ends of words to create a female form of a 'male' term.

e.g. an 'actor' becomes an 'actress'

plain english campaign

they urged the government and businesses to avoid using 'gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information' and to use straightforward English wherever possible.

ensures that public documents, laws, and business communications are clear, concise, and accessible to everyone.

academie francais

a (presciptivist) french organisation that aims to guides the usage, vocabulary, and grammar of french.

led to controversy: using masculine nouns if a male is present in a group of males and females, rather than being gender inclusive.