Defenders of politically correct language claim that it is a civilizing influence on society, that it discourages the use of words that have negative or offensive connotations and thereby grants respect to people who are the victims of unfair stereotypes. In this view, the purpose and effect of politically correct language are to prevent bullying and offensive behavior and to replace terms loaded with offensive undertones with allegedly impartial words. So, for example, people are discouraged from referring to someone with a mental disability as “men- tally retarded” and instead encouraged to refer to him as being “differently abled” or as “having special needs.” Similarly, one can no longer refer to “garbagemen” or even the gender-neutral “garbage collectors”—no, they are “environmental service workers,” thank you very much!
Edit: TL;DR: O’Neill is passing a value judgement on language change, something the field of linguistics considers poor practice.
Linguist specialising in swearing and offensive language here. Furthermore, I am actually a corpus/computational linguist who has done statistical and computational research on the subject (O’Neill is a statistics and mathematics professor). The gist of O’Neill’s argument is that words are made insulting by virtue of having euphemistic counterparts. To simplify, euphemism here is a technical term for any word that takes the place of a word considered more offensive. So “mentally handicapped” by this definition would be a euphemism for “retarded”. In reality, euphemisms develop as a reaction to a term that has become offensive. “Retarded” did used to be a medical term that referred to someone who is developmentally disabled, but it began to be used as an insulting term in non technical speech, and so the technical term changed to reflect this semantic change and distance itself from the offensive term. (This is wildly simplified. I wouldn’t even consider “developmentally disabled” to be a euphemism at all but this is just to make it easier to explain the point without giving a whole intro to linguistics lecture)
He also argues that a lot of terms now considered offensive are changing primarily for performative reasons. This is also not really the case, and we can demonstrate that with “retarded” versus “developmentally disabled”. In general, people have started preferring terms that are more specific and descriptive. When we rephrase the term “mentally retarded”, we see that it essentially means someone has a “slow brain”. This, however, is no longer considered to be accurate for many people that used to be diagnosed with conditions under that umbrella and so the label has changed to reflect that.
Language is always in flux and will never stop changing, just like species will never stop evolving. O’Neill is taking what is considered a prescriptive approach to language, which means deciding how language should be used. Virtually all linguists now agree that linguistics is a descriptive science and prescriptive approaches to defining language are often futile at best and counterintuitive at worst. Basically what I’m saying is if people want to use these terms, even if it’s for the reasons that O’Neill is describing, it is not inherently a “bad thing”. It’s just a “thing”.
Rude language, swearing, and insults are also constantly changing as society changes. It’s an established fact that the semantics and pragmatics of a term will change over time. Some terms will become more offensive and some will become less offensive. It’s just a thing that will inevitably happen as society shifts and changes.
Edit 2: O’Neill also does not provide any linguistic evidence for his claims, he’s mostly going off of his own perception of them. Basically, his argument doesn’t really hold any weight because he hasn’t actually proved that these terms are actually used in the way he describes or for those reasons.
I think this is a bit of a misrepresentation of political correctness. I think the term political correctness is a bit outdated but I’ll use it here.
Reclaiming derogatory language by minorities is obviously very empowering and has been done successfully. It’s also the case that words that are offensive in one context can be neutrally used, demented and retarded are often used in medical contexts without anyone becoming offended.
Now one can come up with hypothetical situations where it can be difficult to negotiate whilst being politically correct, especially if the person speaking may not have the vocabulary. But in almost every real life instance of someone complaining about political correctness all that is being asked of them is to be considerate, kind, and inclusive. It can be taken too far but that is the exception, overwhelmingly people are understanding of slip ups or of people not knowing the correct terminology.
Empathy and kindness are important for their own sake, whether it’s labelled as political correctness or not.
The conflation of insults hurled by schoolyard bullies and terminology used in law and government is a routine theme with this topic.
I’ve never been a big fan of political correctness for its own sake, but I’ve not the capacity to put it into words. The article does a pretty good job, especially when touching on the sheer futility of it all.
What does this hypersensitivity mean for the actual playground bullies? It means that they win by default. As the advocates of politically correct language cede one word after another, refusing to allow for the possibility that these words can ever be delivered in a neutral or positive way through acceptable context or tone, the playground bullies succeed in capturing one word after another, imbu- ing them with offensive meanings without the slightest fight over them. Thus, we see the spectacle of an ever-increasing vocabulary of insults and purportedly offensive terms, along with a retreating and ever-changing list of socially accept- able terms. As surely as night follows day, the current politically correct terms differently abled and having special needs, if they catch on at all, will eventually become terms of insult and will be thrown onto the politically correct scrap heap. All that is required is for the terms to enter popular usage and start to be used by bullies in an insulting tone and context. We will then be presented with new terms, coupled with denunciations of those who continue to use the old language.
