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26 March 2008
Let's say "husband" and "wife" instead of succumbing to the Orwellian prescriptions of the PC-class
I wonder how many people are fully aware of the fiddling that goes on with the language we speak. I wonder, too, whether the ordinary person is aware of the purpose behind the fiddling and who the fiddlers are.
No doubt most people are aware that feminists want to rid society of language that is insulting and demeaning of women. And that seems fair. Who could object? I certainly had no objection all those years ago when the issue of ordinary fairness to women arose.
But when such changes as "fireman" to "fireperson" were mandated I began to wonder. After all, the vast majority of firemen actually were, and still are, men. And then there was the class of changes represented by the scrubbing of "air hostess" and the endearing Australian diminutive of "hostie" to "flight attendant". A word like "hostie" reflects the unique colour in the way Australians speak English.
These deadening and sterile changes to our living language heralded something more than just fairness. Then came the truly bizarre as when some feminists insisted on calling Manly Beach "Personly Beach". I am still not sure whether or not someone could be so ideologically mad.
I once visited a feminist bookshop on business and could not help noticing on the bulletin board an invitation to a "clitail" party. I thought, what in the hell is that? Naturally, the invitation was (in the true hypocritical style we have come to admire in the PC-class) a women only affair. There would have been a lot of hissing and fang-bearing if someone like me had turned up.
And that's just the key. The changes in our languages are due to the feverish work of ideological fanatics who control university and government departments. Then there are those who set up their own little associations, often an offshoot of a university department, and give them an official appearance so that their mates in the media can call on them when their pet issue is raised for "debate". Debate? Don't make me laugh.
You have to stand back and marvel at the audacity of the enterprise and its stunning success. Who would have thought fifty years ago that a fanatical ideological group could degrade our language to such an extent that most of us now use the grotesque "he or she" when formerly people used "he". During the centuries before the ideological assault, nobody would have thought "he" in the right context was "non-inclusive" and that only men, meaning males, were being spoken of. The gender of the indeterminate "he" is grammatical; "he" is a generic pronoun - and the context would tell you when it was a generic indeterminate pronoun.
The campaign to control the language we speak is not just a feminist campaign, although feminist groups play a big role. No, the project to re-engineer our language is a major plank of PC-class policy in which homosexual activists have as much interest as feminists. Witness the success in making the mildly objectionable word "poofter" taboo and the recasting of the vocabulary surrounding relationships and marriage. The idea behind the broad campaign to artificially change our language is that by changing or recasting some words and banning others the PC-class will achieve political change. The aim is to corral the population so that it is saturated with the thoughts of the PC-class and dissenters isolated. One can understand where the notion of "thought crime" originates.
The Wikipedia entry on politically correctness includes some information on this particular part of the PC-class agenda. The reader is encouraged to read the full entry, but the opening paragraph is:
According to Andrews, using "inclusive" and "neutral" language is based upon the idea that "language represents thought, and may even control thought"; per the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, a language's grammatical categories shape the speaker's ideas and actions, although Andrews says that moderate conceptions of the relation between language and thought are sufficient to support the "reasonable deduction" of "cultural change via linguistic change".
Unlike a lot of my contemporaries I did not read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four until shortly after the year 1984. I thought to myself while reading it, 'Excluding the overt darkness of the Party's regime, this is roughly what's happening in Western society. How prescient of Orwell.' The role of Newspeak in the Party's policy particularly struck me. This is the opening paragraph of the Wikepedia's entry on Newspeak:
Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it is described as being "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year." Orwell included an essay about it in the form of an appendix in which the basic principles of the language are explained. Newspeak is closely based on English but has a greatly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar. This suits the totalitarian regime of the Party, whose aim is to make any alternative thinking ("thoughtcrime") or speech impossible by removing any words or possible constructs which describe the ideas of freedom, rebellion and so on. One character says admiringly of the shrinking volume of the new dictionary: "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."
The Newspeak term for the English language is Oldspeak. Oldspeak was intended to have been completely eclipsed by Newspeak before 2050.
People who speak English and those learning English should clutch a collection of John Keats' poems to their breast and hope that it will remain out of reach of the fanatics. But surely, nobody could be so ideologically deluded as to tinker with the Ode to Autumn.
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