John Derbyshire argues that the movement to expunge "politically incorrect" terms from our language is misbegotten. I pretty much agree: PC activists, in trying to mount the horse of civic virtue, have extended their activism into a synthetic programme of linguistic cleansing; it's a leap too far, and they've landed clear on the other side of the horse. Derbyshire has plenty of decent examples of this sort of thing, and they're entertaining to read.
But you get the sense that Derbyshire laments more than that the movement has loosed all these unmotivated and disorderly intrusions into reasonable (morally unobjectionable) linguistic practice; he seems to think that the changes wrought constitute an authentic loss to Language. You can see Derbyshire casting about for principled
reasons to prefer the Old Linguistic Ways when he declares, for instance, that
[i]n this essay, I shall use only generic “he” on the principle declared by Winston Churchill: “The male embraces the female.”
Granted,
the practice of using the generic 'he' is perfectly acceptable, and
there are many reasons why this is so (e.g., it's an established
practice with no compelling, unconfusing, less ambiguous alternative). But
Churchill's fatuous dictum surely isn't one of them: That "the male
embraces the female" is pure cant.
And given Derbyshire's lobbying in this way on behalf of linguistic tradition's contingent repository of to-be-preferred modes de l'emploi, it's particularly odd that he approvingly quotes Samuel Johnson's argument:
My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk
as other people do: you may say to a man, ‘Sir, I am your most humble
servant.’ You are not his most humble servant. You may say, ‘These are
bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times.’ You
don’t mind the times. You tell a man, ‘I am sorry you had such bad
weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet.’ You don’t
care six-pence whether he is wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society: but don’t think foolishly.
True, but obviously too true for Derbyshire's argument to go through. For if language is merely the "dress of thought," what can it matter that contemporary mores of usage prefer, for instance, 'humanmade' to 'manmade' (a preference that Derbyshire specifically decries)? Not much -- Johnson's argument renders 'humanmade' but a bit of innocuous cant, after all. (Besides which, it's hardly as if 'manmade' were of the two terms any more "in accordance with the truth of things.")
Language and "modes of talking" within it develop and change capriciously. And Derbyshire's right that the PC prescriptivists mostly just need to get over it. But he might follow his own advice.
(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)
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