Political Correctness Gone Mad™

I’m having to go through the insufferable hassle of typing this up on Word, thanks to O2 broadband, whose connection would be faster if a team of highly-trained apes printed the pages off the mainframe and swung across South London to deposit them through the open window. Today I’m looking at political correctness. I really hate that term, but there’s no real alternative. This seems odd to me, as the point of changing words and phrases is to move away from the stigmas attached to them, yet the term ‘political correctness’, with its evocation of po-faced tokenism with a dash of Stalinist rhetoric, has not been updated.

The idea, of course, is for people not to be labelled and stereotyped, to make society a more tolerant and understanding place for us all to live in. Of course, human nature doesn’t work like that, and so people learn the new words but retain the old attitude, to the point where saying that someone is ‘vulnerable’ is roughly equivalent to calling them a boozed-up nutjob. Anyway, the phrase ‘deaf and dumb’ has been bandied around the office a few times recently, which set my Not Cool alarm ringing loud and clear. What was particularly galling was hearing my colleagues deliver it as if it was a technical term, rather than “the granddaddy of negative labels”, as the National Association of the Deaf would have it (and they should know). This is a term that’s so out of date, the Ancient Greeks invented it:

Aristotle first coined the phrase “deaf and dumb”.

A fine philosopher, but Aristotle would’ve made a lousy social worker. The worst thing is that he actually intended it to carry the connotation that deaf people were indeed dumb in every sense of the word. I had always assumed this double meaning to be an unhappy coincidence, but apparently not. I then wondered to myself what was the correct term was for a person who cannot speak. To my embarrassment, I discovered there isn’t one – and why should there be? That’s the whole point really – the idea of changing labels is to one day be able to remove them entirely. If you cannot hear and you cannot speak, that shouldn’t define you as a person – the world should see you however you wish to be seen. Sadly, that’s not the world we live in.