©2008 Katy Warner
You haven’t heard much about it in the news, but America is having a lexicographical crisis. Yes, amidst an economic meltdown and looming problems with North Korea, Iran and climate change, we are faced with the problem of a dwindling lexicon—words actually disappearing from our vocabulary. Words are not inexplicably vanishing, they are being tossed out by pantywaists hyper-considerate writers and speachifiers catering to the exotic sensitivities of disingenuously hypersensitive people.
Perfectly good words—solid, colorful and expressive words, which for centuries had been used in the common form without anyone mistaking the writer’s intent, have been transformed into radioactive, let’s-scream-and-self-flagellate, off-limits hot buttons. Freedom of speech, it seems, is now permitted only so long as it conforms to what the audience wants to hear and is presented in just the way that a refined audience wants to hear it. (No parsley on the side for me, please.)
Partisans on both sides of every issue pull their hair, writhe and foam at their collective mouths in outrage at the inappropriate and offensive words of the opposition. Of course, few people actually listen to what anyone is saying, and fewer still take time to think through what they’ve heard. They merely scan the words going by with antennae tuned to detect the slightest of slights.
As Henry Ford quipped, thinking is very hard work, which is why so very few people engage in it. This may explain why, as Goethe observed, when ideas fail, words come in very handy.
The removal of so many words from our social and political discourse has had its most pronounced affect upon humor. With all the colorful and expressive words locked away in the jail of political correctness, we are left with bland humor, watered down swill that amuses only young children and the dimwitted lexicographically challenged.
Satire and sarcasm are now neither tolerated nor understood. Hyperbole, my personal favorite, will get you tarred, feathered and branded with an ugly name. Jonathan Swift had it rough in the 1700s. Today he would be stoned socially re-educated.
Does the average high school graduate not realize that Mark Twain was not only a story teller but a social critic as well? Who is Mark Twain, you ask?
Have the minds of Americans shrunk from disuse to a point where information in chunks larger than sound bites and clichés can no longer be accommodated? Have American so reduced themselves that they are merely Homer Simpson in the flesh? Or…were people always this way?
BTW, that repetitious thudding is just me pounding my head on the keyboard. It doesn’t really help, but it does feel sooo good when I stop.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Political correctness has gotten to be nothing more than silliness. My daughter informed me yesterday that I am no longer to use the word “evil” because it implies a religious belief. I don’t know why that’s bad, exactly, but my daughter insists that Freddy Kreuger cannot be “evil” anymore. I don’t know what I should call him now. “Rowdy”, “unruly” or “delinquent” don’t seem to capture it.
If you go to a comedy club or even turn on the tv the comedians can and will say anything no matter how vulgar it is. They don’t care at all about not offending people who don’t care to hear vulgarity and obscenities. They wouldn’t dare say anything to offend anybody with offensive racial or ethnic slurs, but still Letterman can say anything he wants about Gov. Palin’s children. That’s ok.
There is a double standard to this political correctness. It’s not ok to offend anybody who is liberal, gay, atheist, Muslim, black, brown or Asian. On the other hand, it is perfectly ok to say nasty things about Christians or conservatives.