Sunday’s Column: The PC Dictionary

Aug 11, 2013 by winjaw

“You’re talking to yourself again,” the Little Black Dress admonished me the other day.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes you are,” she replied. “What is it this time?”

According to The Dress, I talk to myself when something gets me riled up. I mentioned something about political correctness and words mean what they mean and we can’t just change them to appease some PC hippy and …

“Is this Alaska again?” she asked with a knowing look. Okay it was.

While in Alaska my news staff said there was a rather heated debate over the term “fisherman.” Turns out a lot of women fished commercially — and for leisure — and a subset of them wanted our newspaper to start referring to them as “fisherwomen.”

And yet another group wanted to go all equality on us and demanded we start calling everyone who fished as “fisherpeople” or even better, “fishers.”

I remember looking at my editor with this incredulous stare and asking, “Are you friggin kidding?” Apparently not. Being a somewhat mischievous sort, I said we’d just call everyone “people who fish” so no one would be happy, because I was of the opinion we had bigger fish to fry. And I swore I was done with the whole PC thing.

Yeah.

So I’m reading something online the other day and hit this story coming out of Seattle. Seems city officials are being asked to avoid using the terms “brown bag” and “citizen” because some may find them offensive.
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Huh? According to various media who reported on this, city officials said a brown bag was used determine if a person’s skin color was light enough to allow admission to an event and the phrase bothered some in the African-American community. Being journalists, the media up there checked around and couldn’t find anyone who associated brown bag with that scenario. I couldn’t either, asking around here.

I used to carry a brown bag. My mom put my lunch in it. And the LBD has even used brown bags packing my own lunch now.

And the whole “citizen” thing was because not everyone in Seattle is a citizen — as in American — so we should refer to everyone as residents. This is the same city that changed “manhole covers” to personal access units.”

Shoot me now.

This got me thinking about how governmental types are constantly changing words to ensure no one is offended, which, of course, offends me to no end.

Ethnic cleansing replaces murder; illegal aliens are now undocumented immigrants; blackboard, if you can even find one, are now chalkboards; those getting a sex change are actually undergoing gender reassignment; people we used to call ugly are now visually challenged; foreign food is now ethnic cuisine; and garbage men (women) are now sanitation engineers. We no longer have secretaries, but administrative assistants. Bums are homeless or displaced persons.

Natural disasters are unnatural events caused by man’s destruction of the environment, swamps are wetlands, midgets are vertically challenged, janitor is custodian artist, and a ghetto is an economically-disadvantaged area. And housewives are domestic goddesses. I’m actually okay with that last one.

Enough already. Let the debate over an airplane’s “black box” commence.