YES BLOG

Political Correctness

Guillermo and I argue after the Chilean film, ‘Manchuca’, about political correctness. He argues that the film is clichéd, weak, because it is trying to be politically correct. I argue that ‘politically correct’, in the UK at least, is a term of abuse that has been annexed by conservatives, to ridicule anyone trying to do anything to restore dignity to the historically abused or diminished. Apocryphal stories abound about ‘Romeo and Juliet’ being banned as ‘heterosexist’ in a school somewhere, and are used to discredit all the valiant and creative attempts to shift the subtle manifestations of clichés and stereotypes in the English language (such as ‘black’ to unawarely denote evil, and ‘white’ to denote goodness, which then become associated unconsciously with racial stereotypes as well). 

Those defenders of the ‘purity’ of language – who invariably loathe such terms as ‘cameraperson’, for example, instead of ‘cameraman’ – are ignorant of the evolution of the English language itself; which is fluid, absorbing, ever-growing and shifting in the service of precise expressions of consciousness. Language is not fixed, it is a tool; a playful, mutable form, which benefits from change. (In the same way, there are those who loathe the language of SMS texting and e-mails; apparently ungrammatical, encouraging bad spelling and punctuation. I love the little haiku of phone-texts; the mistakes and brevity in e-mails; it seems to be an evolving language of its own, without pedantry or pomposity. It is its own form, with its own rules (or non-rules). At the same time I am a fanatic for correct – or at least conscious - punctuation and grammar when writing prose; it is all about precision and intention, fluency in communication, knowing and respecting the form you are using).

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