I suspect there isn’t a reader out there who doesn’t have a story about being on the wrong side of so-called political correctness. Mine goes this way. In graduate school, my well-meaning professor had attempted to demonstrate to the class that some opening paragraphs for essays were more effective than others, and to that end he had anonymously copied several of our opening paragraphs from our last set of papers. One paragraph went loftily on about a certain theoretical approach the writer planned to take, but you couldn’t find in the thicket of words the line of reasoning the author planned to follow.
Our professor asked us to critique this paragraph. I said that it put me in mind of a fat lady on thin legs: The argument was too weak to carry the mountain of rhetoric forward.
After class, a fellow student literally cornered me in the hallway. I needed to pick a kid up from day care, but he held me captive with a demand that I retract my comparison. He knew the author, he said, and she was overweight, and I had been insensitive in the extreme. After apologizing for any feelings I might have hurt, I pointed out that I was using a metaphor.
No excuse, he said.
But I couldn’t have made it a fat man on thin legs, I said, because the image was really of those legs coming out from a voluminous skirt. I couldn’t call it a house on stilts, because the argument needed to move. So what should I have done? And by the way, I needed to pick up my kid.
Stop using metaphors, my politically correct accuser said, and then he let me go.
Though politically correct came into the lexicon by way of the Communist Party, it has been a derisive term for at least four decades. The difference lies in what’s being derided and why. In the 1960s and 1970s, a politically correct person was one who talked the talk but rarely walked the walk. The apotheosis was perhaps “P.C. Person,” from Brown University’s student newspaper, who had nothing better to do than to correct others’ speech. But this particular form of mockery did, at least, suggest that there were some legitimate concerns to which language might point; that the problem was PC scolds who never actually got their hands dirty in political action rather than the existence of a politically charged agenda.
Today, you can’t open a newspaper or magazine, or turn on the news, without reading another accusation of political correctness. Ted Cruz claims that political correctness is killing people. Comedians complain that political correctness is killing comedy. To Donald Trump, America’s big problem is political correctness. What these folks mean by the term seems to be not an “incorrect” use of language — e.g., colored person instead of person of color — but the presumed illegitimacy of ideas or movements they oppose. In response to such blatant, vague, knee-jerk attempts to silence opponents, some have claimed that political correctness doesn’t really exist amid the objects of the speaker’s scorn. In one of Tom Toles’s recent cartoons for The Washington Post, a pointy-headed white guy says, “I’m so sick of ‘political correctness.’”
“Try it,” says the woman he’s addressing, “without the ‘political correctness’ then.”
“I’m so sick,” the guy says, “of not being able to insult and belittle women and minorities.”
Or there’s PC2Respect, the browser extension that automatically changes political correctness to treating people with respect on any web page. As in the revamped headline, “Why Do Millennials Love Treating People With Respect?”
I like this move to disarm the PC-accusers by pointing out that what they’re loath to do, mostly, is to grant the legitimacy of others’ viewpoints. Certainly, that’s what’s happening in most of the news-grabbing moments.
But I also want to be careful. There’s a pendulum here. Forgetting the I in LBGTI should not be an occasion for eye-rolling. If a 22-year-old male feminist gets chastised every time he calls his female classmates girls, his feminism could go into retreat. Should I have found another metaphor for that awful opening paragraph? I still don’t know. But I do know that cornering me in the hallway and declaring metaphors off-base was not a convincing argument. There’s no such thing as the PC Police. There’s no such thing as an “incorrect” way to treat others with respect. But there are scolds, and we can try not to be one of them.