7.879, Disc: Politically correct

[The Linguist List]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List:  Vol-7-879. Wed Jun 12 1996. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines:  167
 
Subject: 7.879, Disc: Politically correct
 
Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. <aristar at tam2000.tamu.edu>
            Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at emunix.emich.edu> (On Leave)
            T. Daniel Seely: Eastern Michigan U. <dseely at emunix.emich.edu>
 
Associate Editor:  Ljuba Veselinova <lveselin at emunix.emich.edu>
Assistant Editors: Ron Reck <rreck at emunix.emich.edu>
                   Ann Dizdar <dizdar at tam2000.tamu.edu>
                   Annemarie Valdez <avaldez at emunix.emich.edu>
 
Software development: John H. Remmers <remmers at emunix.emich.edu>
 
Editor for this issue: dseely at emunix.emich.edu (T. Daniel Seely)
 
---------------------------------Directory-----------------------------------
1)
Date:  Mon, 10 Jun 1996 12:02:08 CDT
From:  Mark at dragonsys.com (Mark Mandel)
Subject:   "politically correct"
 
2)
Date:  Tue, 11 Jun 1996 09:35:39 +0800
From:  lngmyers at ccunix.ccu.edu.tw ("James T. Myers")
Subject:  "PC" summary (1996 version)
 
---------------------------------Messages------------------------------------
1)
Date:  Mon, 10 Jun 1996 12:02:08 CDT
From:  Mark at dragonsys.com (Mark Mandel)
Subject:   "politically correct"
 
Dennis Baron writes:
 
>>>>>>>>>>>
Jesse Sheidlower writes: Fred Shapiro of the Yale Law Library,
who's the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of American Legal
Quotations and a top quotation researcher, has called my attention
to this 1793 (!) example. The use refers to linguistic etiquette,
and is quite close to the modern use. This is from the Supreme
Court decision _Chisholm v. Georgia_:
 
    "The states, rather than the People, for whose sakes the
    States exist, are frequently the objects which attract
    and arrest our principal attention....Sentiments and
    expressions of this inaccurate kind prevail in our common,
    even in our convivial, language. Is a toast asked? 'The United
    States,' instead of the 'People of the United States,' is
    the toast given. This is not politically correct."
 
    [Nabokov quotation deleted -- MAM]
 
earliest cite:
 
    Phrygia was famous for its slaves-so famous that the name
    Phryx denoted a slave all over the empire-and Lycaonia was
    notorious for bandits and thieves.  To use such words would
    have been equivalent to calling his audience "slaves and
    robbers."  But "Galatians," a term that was politically
    correct, embraced everyone under Roman rule, from the
    aristocrat in Antioch to the little slave girl in Iconium.
 
    [H. V. Morton, In the Steps of St. Paul (New York: Dodd, Mead,
    1936), p. 244.]
<<<<<<<<<<<
 
I do not think that these two quotations use the phrase
"politically correct" in the sense under discussion. Both deal
with the appropriateness of referring to a particular _political_
entity in a given context. Here the word "political" is not so
close to the modern use (referring to matters of social policy)
as to its origin in the Greek "polis" 'city-state' (thus "nation",
when applied in the contexts of the Roman Empire and the early
USA).
 
I paraphrase the Supreme Court's meaning in using "politically
correct" as
 
    This nation consists essentially of the People, not the States
    that they have created as their servants.
 
and Morton's [insofar as I can infer from only the passage given]
as
 
    While the members of the audience may have come from Phrygia
    and Lycaonia, so that addressing them as "Phrygians and
    Lycaonians" would have been denotatively accurate, they were
    also all members of the political (geographical?) class called
    "Galatians", which was therefore also denotatively accurate
    (as well as being connotatively inoffensive).
 
In the absence of unambiguous support from other sources, we
should reject the modern idiomatic reading of the phrase in favor
of the analytic reading. I see no evidence here requiring us to
take the whole as anything but the sum of its parts: in these
passages, the expression "term T is politically correct" means no
more than "term T refers accurately to political entities".
 
                Mark A. Mandel : mark at dragonsys.com
    Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02160, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com/
 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)
Date:  Tue, 11 Jun 1996 09:35:39 +0800
From:  lngmyers at ccunix.ccu.edu.tw ("James T. Myers")
Subject:  "PC" summary (1996 version)
 
As I suspected, the origin of "PC" has been discussed before (including,
apparently, on this list, in 1994).  I will only add a few tidbits which
were sent to me by my many correspondents.  First, here is a reference:
 
Perry, Ruth (1992) "A short history of the term politically correct" in
Aufderherde, Patricia (ed.) _Beyond PC: Towards a Politics of Understanding_.
 
I am not able to check this myself right now, but apparently it promotes
the Maoist origin theory, which seems to be well-supported by the personal
anecdotes I was sent.  However, Dennis Baron provides evidence suggesting
that the term is still older.  It's possible that the 1947 Nabokov
citation and the 1936 citation were borrowing Marxist-Leninist terminology
(with the 1793 citation a fluke), but they certainly can't be Maoist.
Perhaps these extra-early citations were influenced by the same sources
that influenced Mao, but that's going back a bit too far, I think.  The
phrase didn't take on a life of its own, apparently, until it was picked
up by radicals in the '60s.  Frederick Newmeyer's observation of a shift
in usage by leftists (from politics to individual behavior) is also
supported by anecdotes I was told.  The usage of "PC" that I encountered
in college in the mid-80s was then a still later, sarcastic, usage.  It
was this usage that was then modified and spread to the mainstream by
non-leftists.  Hence (and feel free to disagree with this -- I won't
defend any of it):
 
(0)  Compositional semantics usage:  "PC" = "politically" + "correct"
     (at least since 1793)
(1)  Marxist-Leninist usage:  "PC" means to conform to official policy
     (ca. 1930s?)
(2)  Maoist usage:  the same
     (ca. 1950s?)
(3)  North American Maoist usage:  the same
     (ca. 196x?)
(4)  later NA leftist usage:  "PC" means to behave in an appropriate
     fashion, even if there is no official policy at stake
     (examples of this usage found as late as mid-80s)
(5)  leftist/centrist sarcastic usage:  "PC" means to be too
     dictatorial about appropriate behavior in others
     (earliest anecdotes go back to 70s, perhaps dominant usage by 1985
     -- still may be used this way on occasion, even in mainstream press)
(6)  current usages:  see your local media
 
The only other interesting thing I can say on this is to pass on the
observation of Miriam Meyerhoff, who, at university in New Zealand ca.
1981, heard the phrases "politically unsound" and "politically sound" used
according to usage (4), along with the abbreviations "PU" and "PS".  Just
to add a bit of lexical variation to your helping of semantic drift.
 
Anyway, thanks to the following correspondents:  Karen Baumer, Elissa
Flagg, Warren Frerichs, Dorine S. Houston, J. P. Kirchner, Joerge Koch, Tom
McClive, Miriam Meyerhoff, Janice Rothstein, Kevin Russel, Marilyn Silva,
Daniel Swingley, Karl Teeter.
 
-  jm
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-7-879.