Let us agree: political correctness in language has never done as much harm as political incorrectness. No one will suffer if you or I abstain from the direct and maybe offensive language that I or you think he — oops, do I mean they? — deserve. And plenty of people have suffered and may do so today, if we speak as our forefathers — oops again, though it really was mainly they, not their wives — too often spoke. Yet I dislike the emasculation of language that may be the result.
Emasculation? Should I correct that word before the PC police collar me? Am I suggesting that language is a male invention? Actually, no. I’m merely using a word as it has been used for centuries without harming anyone. And that’s one reason why I object. For much of history, women have been the oppressed half of humankind, and in many societies they still are. But has their oppression been increased by the use and spelling of such words as history or women? Is their cause advanced one iota by writing herstory and wimmin?
Not that I can see. Much depends, of course, on how PC language is used. A French feminist once wrote an admirable book titled, Ainsi soit-elle, a feminization of the common French phrase ainsi soit-il, so be it. If such verbal shifts are used with wit, fine. More often they are used with plonking solemnity, and merely incite male mockery.
I’ve no quarrel either with the convention that some words may be used by those who previously suffered from them, but not by others. “Black” Americans have readily called themselves successively negro, then coloured, then black and now Afro-Caribbean. But they never accepted nigger. It is now almost unprintable in the United States of America. Yet if one black American chooses to use it, in sarcasm or good humour, about another, no one objects. In my view, rightly not.
Likewise, Western homosexuals have begun to use the word queer, once used against them. New York has a Yiddish newspaper called, in the Anglo-Yiddish version of the German jude, Der Yid. Imagine the justified uproar if any non-Jew used the word.
What’s wrong is when reasonable decency is taken to idiotic lengths. If Americans ban nigger, fine. But let’s not pretend that Agatha Christie never wrote a book called Ten Little Niggers, even if in America, as early as 1940, it was published as And Then There Were None (and later filmed as Ten Little Indians, Red or Asian I wouldn’t know). And what about recent objections to niggardly, which has no link with nigger whatsoever?
Gender-correctness too has bred its own nonsense. For centuries, the word he was accepted, when need be, as implying she. Or one might say he or she. Likewise with him and his. No longer: most people now say they, them and their. Often that is pointless, at times absurd. I’ve seen in a sports report every professional cricketer knows their career may be cut short by injury. How many women play professional cricket? Indeed in a pamphlet about a hostel for battered women, I came upon each woman has their own room. They does, does they?
This use of plural for singular always sounds odd. At times, it can be actively misleading. My local paper reporting a schoolboy match wrote that the players’ abuse of the referee was so bad that they might have quit football entirely. Who? What the reporter’s grammar said was the players; what he (or she) meant was the referee — who was, you guessed, a man. Why not just say he?
For young children, there used to be a way around: except to the parents, the child was often simply it. No longer: we get follies like give your toddler their meals at fixed times, not when they demand them. What English needs is new words for he or she/him or her/his or her. How about hesh, herim and hisher? Too bad there’s no English version of the Académie française to invent and lay them down. But ainsi soit-il. No English-speaker would obey it, would they?
