The Garden of the Blind

What’s up with political correctness? I understand that it’s an effort to avoid offending people, but I don’t think that it works. The problem is that changing the wording doesn’t change the meaning. Today’s polite expressions will be tomorrow’s insults unless there is a change to the underlying attitudes. So far, substitute wording hasn’t brought any of that about. “Retarded” may not be acceptable, but “differently abled” isn’t exactly the rosy euphemism that it once was either.

It even creates moments where the language fails all together. I recall during the 2002 Winter Olympics, a black woman was part of a two person team that won a gold medal. That day, there were all sorts of comments made about how she was the first African American to win a gold medal in the Winter Olympics. While that statement is correct (she competed for the U.S.), it doesn’t convey the meaning that they had intended, which was that she was the first black person to win such a medal, regardless of nationality. But they couldn’t say that, could they?