Political Language

Ah, election season is upon us once again. That means the air will be filled with "grow the economy," "foe-wards," "choice," "living in the shadows, " "green-house gases," hyphenated Americans and fifty different ways of referring to sexual deviants.

I have posted here before on what I have called the liberal lexicon. This is the language of liberals (now called "progressives" elsewhere) mainly in academia, the popular culture, the media and, yes, politics. It's a lexicon that encompasses virtually every aspect of modern human activity that previously were described with other, perfectly good words and phrases.

The lexicon was a code, at first, used by liberals to distinguish themselves as members of the club who really cared about the "issues." Once they were able to identify each other, they could form groups, go to the right parties, read the right papers and magazines, learn to laugh or gasp at the right time. In short, the new language allowed them to develop a sub-class or pseudo-society.

This new language started with the feminist "movement" when practically everything that had passed before was suddenly anti-woman. English words such as "man" quickly became unacceptable and marked anyone who used them as unenlightened or provocative political opponents. Those who considered themselves a part of this liberal sub-class dominated Western society's academic and cultural sectors and thus were able to perpetuate their lexicon in the language of subsequent generations of school children, voters and politicians.

The only distinction between the sexes permissible in the English language were biological or clinical. Out were the once ubiquitous references such as spokesman and businessman. Actress and stewardess are now verboten. Mrs. and Miss, honorifics that were used to distinguish a married woman from one who was single and presumably available, were replaced with "Ms" which means nothing.

The funny thing is that language in the European culture, against which all aspects of American culture is measured by the liberals, continue to make the distinction between married and unmarried women in the use of honorifics. Most of the surviving Romance languages in fact, separate certain nouns and articles by gender! The brand of feminism practiced here would be a complete failure in Europe.

One of the sadder side effects of trying to socially re-engineer languages is illustrated in one of the more famous political scuffles of the Obama administration. The President's nominee to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court uttered this redundancy: "A wise Latina woman..." at one point in her career. I think only one Senator noticed that "Latina" is the feminine form of the noun referring to person of Latin or Hispanic ethnicity. So a Latina is a woman and a Latino is a man. A Latina woman is an ignoramus or a political opportunist trying to score points with the liberal cultural elite.

And so liberals replace perfectly good words that have been used in thousands of years of human history with meaningless gibberish. Soon the great works of literature will be as alien to future generations as Cuneiform tablets and Egyptian hieroglyphics are today. Or they'll have been re-written to conform with whatever code is deemed acceptable by modern day liberals leaving scholars to bicker about what was the actual motto of the greatest democracy mankind is likely ever to have known.

Conservatives can only hope, in this election season, to hear their candidates reviving the classical language of our heritage in open defiance of the liberals who control most of what we see and read each day and all of what our children are taught.

No, I am NOT advocating that we return to common use words and phrases that are nothing more than crude disparagement of ethnic and racial minorities. Continual use of such vile references should constitute an embarrassing ignorance of our nation's history of slavery and repression of blacks and other racial minorities. There are good reasons why certain words leave and enter the language, political expediency real or imagined is not one of them.

And I do not, as the liberals do, presume to hold myself up as the arbiter of correct versus politically correct speech. I think you all know the difference and, I hope, you do not presume in your political correctness, to believe that you are exercising your free will and are speaking the way you want to speak. You are speaking the way THEY want you to speak. Who are they? They are your political, social, and moral opposites (or so you would have us believe). Do you hear them emulating YOUR way of doing things? No. Then why, I ask you, why do you insist on doing and saying the politically correct things? Check all that apply:

1. You think it makes you more appealing to liberal voters
2. You think it makes you appear more enlightened
3. You think it sounds more sophisticated and intelligent
4. You actually think there is nothing politically correct about your choice of words