Verbal Hygiene-Political correctness PDF

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Summary

Trabajo sobre la relación entre la higiene verbal y cómo ser políticamente correcto. En inglés....

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Verbal Hygiene Civility and its discontents 

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS o

Preliminary notions 

The insistence on replacing usages deemed insulting and objectionable to various ‘minorities’.

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A challenge to the whole idea of a universal and neutral language.

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It pushes to the limit established beliefs about what a language is, or ideally should be, causing considerable anxiety.

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What conflicting views about language lie behind these wars of words? 

Verbal hygiene debates are never only about language.

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Anti-sexist + anti-racist verbal hygiene practices are about non-linguistic matters of political belief or allegiance.

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The nature of language itself and about people’s conceptualisation of language: simplistic assumption that ‘language reflects society’.

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Why do people object to linguistic reform? 

Objections focus more on language than on the social questions at issue.

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Ideas of ‘perverting language’ and ‘reading things into words’.

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The politicizing of their words against their will.

What is the real issue? 

What set of values will be affirmed symbolically in the language of public discourse.

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Proponents: feminist and multiculturalist values should prevail

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Opponents: attack on freedom of expression

Common-sense notion of language 

Traditional usage vs language as a shaper of ideas.

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PC proponents: language is always and inevitably political and the ‘truth’ someone speaks may be relative to the power they hold.

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HISTORY OF THE TERM “POLITICAL CORRECTNESS” o

Origins 

It emerged from the counter-cultural movements of the Left. Two possible sources: 

English translation of Mao’s Little Red Book

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differentiate the New Left from the orthodox Marxism it had rejected

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satirize the group’s own tendency towards humourlessness, self-righteousness and rigidly orthodox ‘party lines’

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poke fun at the notion that anyone could be (or would want to be) wholly ‘correct’.

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“Correct lineism” from the Communist Party o

a ‘correct lineist’ was a comrade whose holier-than-thou espousal of party dogma made other comrades want to spit.

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Middle point 

The term was used in connection with a particular set of issues: 

arcane matters of the university curriculum

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regulations governing offensive speech on American campuses

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the practice of affirmative action to promote gender and racial equity in the hiring of university professors

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Discursive drift: 

‘spreading the word’ through mass communications, thus losing control over its meaning. Its use was extended to include more activities than those mentioned above.

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Nowadays 

It is defined by its critics rather than its adherents, who deny that such movement exists.

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Enforcement of a set of orthodox views on class, race, gender and other forms of sociocultural diversity. 

Objectives: o

giving preferential treatment to members of certain social groups in schools and universities

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constructing educational curricula in which the traditional ideas of cultural heritage and artistic excellence are replaced with an emphasis on non-western, non-white and female cultural contributions

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prescribing the kind of language that may or may not be used to talk about the differences between humans

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NON-SEXIST LANGUAGE

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Guidelines 

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Style guides 

An influential group makes the rules

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The rules are codified

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The rules become widely followed

Non-sexist language guidelines 

Innovative character

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Overtly political character

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They are put forward by feminists with limited influence

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Gatekeepers are not persuaded as easily

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They attract controversy and provoke resistance

Examples of non-sexist guidelines 

University of Strathclyde: Programme of Opportunities for Women Committee (POWC)

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Leaflet on ‘gender-free language called ‘Gender free language: guidelines for the use of staff and students’

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Voluntary guidelines

Three beliefs 

Public language should be civil 

Language should not offend actual and potential addressees

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It is important to consider whether an expression is likely to offend women

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Accuracy in communicating meanings 

The highest value to which language-users can aspire is accuracy in communicating meaning

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People that use generic masculine terms intend the reference to be generic. Thus, they will receptive to suggestions that they should make that intention explicit

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Fairness or parity 

If there are two groups, both of them should receive identical treatment.

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This belief was used in complaints: some argued that the leaflet treated men unfairly.

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Objections

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In attempting to be fair to women, it ended up being unfair to men

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The elimination of gender distinctions only leads to confusion

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Sensitivity was considered a sign of paranoia: ‘those who feel slighted should seek psychiatric help

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Women were not offended, alienated or misled by traditional ’sexist’ usages

The politics of language change o

When people criticized the POWC leaflet, it was usually the ‘language’ whose best interest they claimed to be defending

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Liberals or leftists 

Also opposed to the linguistic reform

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Argued that language was treated as a priority but the ‘real’ social change should have been higher on the agenda

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Changing language is a form of cultural intervention.

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Speech and writing are also forms of public action and symbolic affirmations of an individual’s or society’s values

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The question of ‘euphemism’ o

‘Euphemism’ and PC language

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Orwell 

“It is difficult in many cases to find a neutral term that corresponds to a purported ‘euphemism’”

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Some so-called ‘politically correct’ terms were ridiculed as ‘euphemisms’.

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For example: African American 

Robert Hughes, for example, considers that African American has no marked advantages over ‘black’

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Three main reasons 

The people whose name is at issue prefer to be called, and call themselves African American

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African American symbolizes the principle of parity among the ethnic groups that make up the US population

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If African American is an euphemism, what is it an euphemism for?

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If it is the skin colour of the people in question, isn’t the main point of the linguistic intervention to challenge the racist discourse?

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Verbal hygiene

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Sometimes fails to challenge the underlying prejudice and stigma of certain terms

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Labels have to keep changing 

What is considered ‘polite’ now, in a few years it will have acquired negative connotations. A new term will be proposed

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BREAKING THE LINGUISTIC CONTRACT: ‘POLITICAL CORRECTNESS’ AND ‘NEWSPEAK’ o

TWO LINES OF CRITICISM 

Claim that verbal hygiene is trivial

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Claim that verbal hygiene represents an attack on language whose realworld effects are potentially catastrophic

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Linguistic norms may restrict our individual freedom, but they contribute to the common good

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If the fundamental purpose of language is communication, certain kinds of verbal hygiene are bound to appear threatening

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‘Natural’ linguistic change can be considered as reflecting some kind of broad social consensus

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Verbal hygiene is the antithesis of this: it reflects the interests of a minority

CONTROVERSIES OF NEWSPEAK o

Destruction of language: loss of reality 

Twentieth-century liberal critics have added just such a step: they have suggested not only that verbal hygiene can destroy the existing relationship between words, meanings and entities in the world, but that it can substitute a new set of relationships by fiat

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Newspeak 

The first aim was to mislead citizens about the true state of affairs of the world. The second one was to eradicate any language in which those citizens might communicate subversive thoughts to one another, or even just silently to themselves.

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George Orwell provided a durable example of the organized substitution in the language of Newspeak

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It was successful. It abolished some words and redefined crucial vocabulary items so that propositions had no truth value or logic.

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The language also specialized in abstract formulations that, since they connected with no concrete reality, conveyed no meaning at all. Its speakers

not only could engage, but actually had to engage, in a meaningless and nonsensical form of discourse requiring the suspension of rational thought. o

His theory was only to be applied in totalitarian states. This movement was popular among conservatives and liberals providing a dependable formula for anti-Soviet media commentary.

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Roger Scruton, a right-wing philosopher detected all the hallmarks of Orwellian ‘Newspeak’, such as ‘democracy’ which was defined such a way as to exclude western democracies based on the principle of universal suffrage and make the SU into an example of democracy.

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His theory was useful to demonstrate that Soviet Union was using Orwellian techniques of linguistic manipulation to crush political dissent, not merely by proscribing its public expression but by perverting the Russian language to make anything other than dogma literally ineffable.

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He went on to argue that feminists in the West were following the same strategy in their organized attempts to destroy the gender distinctions encoded into languages like English.

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10 years later... 

We can say that the citizens of the SU were not just forbidden to express themselves but unable to express themselves freely.

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Julian Konstantinov (1990) believes that some westerners had begun to advance in the wake of anti-soviet revolutions that ‘Newspeak’ had no effect at all.

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“We should see totalitarianism not as an efficient stainless steel machine, grinding people into moral pulp, but as a blind and cheerful force which achieves the same goals by substituting traditional stability with chaos, absurdity and general lack of logic.”

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He cites the way the days of the week were moved about to meet the needs of the economy, leading to such bizarre announcements as ‘The Lenin Saturday scheduled for Sunday will take place on Monday’

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‘Newspeak’ is wrong as it overlooks the power of the creative imagination as a linguistic and political force - it leads to a efficacy of verbal hygiene by brainwashing the citizens. Secondly, every political discourse uses the same device of constructing imaginary representations of reality and denaturalizes familiar representations.

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Fixed codes and speech codes

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Speech codes are a disciplinary offence to use certain expressions deemed racist, sexist, anti-semitic and homophobic.

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For example, a white student at the University of Pennsylvania was irritated by some noise that black students were making. He told them they were behaving like a ‘herd of water buffalo’ and they made a formal complaint of racism. Much of the case was focused on the meaning of ‘water buffalo’ in this context, as for some people it was not something racist but for others it was racist.

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Here the word depends on the context and how they use it. In this case it was offensive as the white sutent related those black people with buffalos, a wild animal.

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Our interpretations of other people’s speech-acts are based not on simply looking words up in a mental code-book but on a whole constellation of contextual judgements. This is how communication works, though the myth of the ‘fixed code’ obscures it. Granted, few exchanges cause the kind of overt dispute the water buffalo exchange did, but if a random sample of exchanges were put to the test, it would often be just as difficult to achieve consensus about their ‘real’ meaning.

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Cultural Politics and the ‘dream of a common language’ o

A constant theme of critiques of ‘political correctness’ is the fear, shared by conservatives, liberals and some leftists, that society is disintegrating: ‘identity polities’

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For conservatives this spells the end of traditions and for liberals the end of civility.

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For some, to say that the possession of a common language is a sign of common culture is wrong and imperialist as one cannot impose just one culture in every country.

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Free speech, normativity and what’s in the back of our minds

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Fish states that ‘there is no language without normativity. If there really were no restrictions of any kind on what could be said and how, speech would be inconsequential gibberish, and social interaction at an end.

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Absolute freedom of speech could only be utterly trivial freedom to make meaningless noises.

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The verbal hygiene movement for so-called ‘politically correct’ language has the merit of bringing contests that are often submerged to the surface of public discourse.

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It threatens only our freedom to imagine that our linguistic choices are inconsequential....