Language police bar 'old,' 'blind'

Reuters ^ | Wednesday, May 28, 2003

[presidio9]

Oh heck: Hell hath no place in American primary and high school textbooks.

But then again you can't find anyone riding on a yacht or playing polo in the pages of an American textbook either. The texts also can't say someone has a boyish figure, or is a busboy, or is blind, or suffers a birth defect, or is a biddy, or the best man for the job, a babe, a bookworm, or even a barbarian.

[Frank_Discussion]

I am the BARBARIAN BOOKWORM!!! AHAHAH!! (Pirate Laugh)

[Ramius]

This is doubleplus nongood.

[gov_bean_ counter]

Inspector Clouseau to person wearing dark glasses - "What are you blind?"

Blind person - "Yes"

Inspector Clouseau - "Oh"

[billhilly]

Damn! This old white male who eats red meat recently lost an eye, and now I am being told I can't be called blind in one eye. There is another word for PC and it is poppycock.

[OXENinFLA]

Buy it.

[ElkGroveDan]

"Gosh Dan, Tell us again why you spend so much money sending your kids to a private Christian school...."

[presidio9]

Presidio9 once had a college paper handed back to him with an "F" on it. Halfway down the first page the word "freshmen" was circled. In the margin, the words "first year students" was written in red ink.

[Publius6961]

Language police bar 'old,' 'blind'

This is not only getting old and blind, but deaf dumb and crippled too!

Gheeeeeez!!

[Liberal Classic]

Newspeak doubleplus ungood.

[Publius6961]

There is another word for PC and it is poppycock.

Having one eye is now called "poppycock"?
I didn't know that.

In Spanish there is a word for it, tuerto; I always felt bad that in English we had no single-word equivalent.
Poppycock it is then...

[KarlInOhio]

From 1984:

We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone.

[SquirrelKing]

"GET OUT OF THE PASSING LANE YOU VISUALLY-IMPAIRED, GOLDEN-YEARED BINGO-JUNKIE!" does have a satisfying ring to it.

[LiteKeeper]

anti-PC SPOTREP

[TontoKowalski]

Nor is the government the only source of constraint or censorship in the watch-what-you-say business. Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer, recently banned racy men's magazines from its shelves although it continues to sell sexy underwear.

I know I'm in for a hot night when Honey-bunch wears her Walmart bloomers.

Don't come a-knockin' if the trailer's rockin'!

[EggsAckley]

While writing my Master's Thesis, one professor rejected a term paper due to the use of the word "mankind." We argued it out, and I won. But that was only because she liked the paper, and liked me. Such crap!

[billhilly]

You should read more carefully in order to avoid embarassment.
Political correctness (pc) was the theme of the article. That is what I made reference to.

[profmike23]

This spring, I lost ten points on a paper in Spanish class for using "Americans." It was crossed out and "U.S. citizens" was written instead.

[Our man in washington]

My brother came up with the following PC term:

"Self-appointed Population Control Specialist."

You know, like O.J. Simpson or Ted Bundy.

[Liberal Classic]

``Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.''