PC Speak

Lincoln was fond of asking people: “If you call a sheep’s tail a leg, how many legs does a sheep have?” And when they answered “Five,” he’d say, “No, four. Because calling it a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” What he was reflecting on was people’s belief that changing the name of a thing changes its nature. As if language had some magical power to transform reality.

I’m doing a graduate course in English Literature at Arizona State University on line, which is a fine, convenient, competent program. The work is demanding, the instructors are gracious and fair, but the farther I get into it, the more troubled I become. One professor announced that she would be using the pronoun “they,” even though she knew it was grammatically incorrect, but she feared offending people by having to choose between “he” and “she,” or the clumsy expression “he and/or she.” And so we get a sentence like: “One of my students said that they were sick.” I’m sorry, but that means that the student is talking about other people—other people are sick, not him or her. That’s what the pronoun was meant to convey. A pronoun must agree with its antecedent in gender and number; PC or not, that’s the rule. And God knows we have precious few of them in English.

Just today, one of my classmates referred to prostitution as “survival work,” a term I had never heard, at least not in that context. To me, survival work is any crummy job you have to take to pay the rent and feed yourself. My survival work was vacuuming carpets, and pumping gas, and wiping up the blood on the floor in the basement of a butcher shop. The idea is to avoid using the word "prostitute," since that might offend them. Forget that that’s what they are; we don’t dare offend them since doing so would not be politically correct. And that’s what lurks behind all this, after all: political correctness. It was quaint and kinda cute when it started back in the 90s, during the Clinton presidency—you remember Bill Clinton, who molested women and was accused of rape—but it’s gotten worse over the years, and now it’s out of control.

Now we have “triggers” and “safe rooms” in schools to protect our students from being made to feel uncomfortable. As if they were intellectual toddlers who have to be saved from banging their heads. Well, sometimes it’s a good idea to bang heads, sometimes it’s the only way to get people to wake up and grow up and think. Now we have protests to shut down speech with which we disagree, and riots to run speakers off of campuses. We have controversial thinkers bullied and intimidated and attacked, and classic books rewritten and even banned. My son had to read Huckleberry Finn over the summer, and I got a two-page letter from the school warning us about the language, and apologizing for Mark Twain. I couldn’t help but think how Twain would have loved that. It was exactly the kind of Letter from the Earth which he himself wrote a hundred years ago. He saw it coming; he just didn’t imagine that his own work would be a victim.

History teaches us that the first victim of tyrants is language: Change the way people speak and you can change the way they think. They all did it, the fascists, the communists, the racists and anti-Semites, the homophobes and misogynists, and now it’s the politically correct crowd. And they don’t even realize the company they’re so eager to join. Control language and you control thought, control thought and you control expression, control expression and you control dissent, control dissent and you can enslave people. They did it in the late, unlamented Soviet Union, where Jews were the “cosmopolitan element;” they’re doing it in Muslim countries where the murder of children is “honor killing;” they did it in Serbia where genocide was "ethnic cleansing;" we did it in Vietnam, where massacre was “pacification;” they’re doing it now in North Korea and Cuba and Iran, where anybody who dares to disagree is “an enemy of the revolution.” Language equals thought, which equals expression, which enables dissent, which leads to freedom. So control language, Mr. Tyrant, if you want to survive.

There is a growing glossary of words in our society which we are no longer allowed to use. Not allowed by whom? Government? Media? Peers? Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn; I am a writer, and nobody tells me what to think, and what I can and cannot say. That's in the nature of my profession, woven with words and blood into its history. Writers before me have been persecuted and prosecuted and imprisoned and killed to preserve the right to write what they pleased, and to tell anybody and everybody and sometimes even nobody what they believed to be true, in words of their own choosing. Their only tool was language, their only weapon was truth, and churches and governments and bullies of all kinds who feared the truth instinctively targeted language.

I love the English language; it’s the medium in which I live and think and speak, the language in which I dream and fantasize, mourn, celebrate, muse, and meditate. It’s a living, growing organism, vibrant and rich as spring, as much a part of me as blood and tissue, and I treasure it. So please don’t twist and torment it for political purposes; let it develop naturally, don’t try to force it into faddish shapes to slake your PC fetish. Leave the English language alone, let it breathe and be, respect the few rules it acknowledges; don’t try to make a sheep’s tail into a leg, because we’ve seen where that leads: George Orwell showed us seventy years ago in 1984.