- The Little Drummer Child
- Frosty the Snowperson
- We Three Monarchs of Orient (Are)
- (I'm Dreaming of an) Integrated Christmas
Showing posts with label polical correctness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label polical correctness. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Politically Correct Songs for Christmas
On this Christmas Day, I was reflecting that many of our traditional Christmas songs are not politically correct and therefore need a bit of revision. So, here are a few of my suggested changes:
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Feminists (and PC-ers), Leave the Language Alone
It’s not that often, these days, that we hear the word feminism or feminist. We do, though, hear a lot of talk about political correctness; and I think that many feminist ideas are included nowadays in what we call political correctness.
At one time I had the misfortune to work for a woman who was a pretty strong feminist. She criticized me, one time, for referring to one of my community-college students as a "girl." "If she's over 16," this woman asserted, "she's a woman, and you shouldn't call her a girl."
Yet adult males are sometimes referred to as "boys": "the boys in the band"; "a night out with the boys."
Not only are the feminists wrong in this particular case, I think they are so bent on cultivating the idea that women are persecuted in our society that they try to make out that even the language is against them.
I can graciously accept saying "letter carrier" instead of mailman; or "fire fighter" instead of fireman. Yet I feel that an insight into our English language and its history shows that the assumption that underlies this linguistic policing is incorrect.
The feminist/PC assertion is that, every time you see –man as part of a word, there is the implicit assumption that the word denotes a male, or implies that the person to whom the word is attached is assumed to be male.
Let's look at the word woman. It descends from the Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) wifman. That is, wif (meaning 'woman' and giving us the modern word wife) + man, meaning 'person'. Thus woman means 'woman-person', or, if you will, 'female person'. And man, when not qualified, just means 'person'—that is, a human of either, or of unspecified, gender. So –man, as it exists in all our compound words, does not, as the feminists insist, mean that we are sexistly asserting that the person is or is assumed to be male.
Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein
At one time I had the misfortune to work for a woman who was a pretty strong feminist. She criticized me, one time, for referring to one of my community-college students as a "girl." "If she's over 16," this woman asserted, "she's a woman, and you shouldn't call her a girl."
Yet adult males are sometimes referred to as "boys": "the boys in the band"; "a night out with the boys."
Not only are the feminists wrong in this particular case, I think they are so bent on cultivating the idea that women are persecuted in our society that they try to make out that even the language is against them.
I can graciously accept saying "letter carrier" instead of mailman; or "fire fighter" instead of fireman. Yet I feel that an insight into our English language and its history shows that the assumption that underlies this linguistic policing is incorrect.
The feminist/PC assertion is that, every time you see –man as part of a word, there is the implicit assumption that the word denotes a male, or implies that the person to whom the word is attached is assumed to be male.
Let's look at the word woman. It descends from the Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) wifman. That is, wif (meaning 'woman' and giving us the modern word wife) + man, meaning 'person'. Thus woman means 'woman-person', or, if you will, 'female person'. And man, when not qualified, just means 'person'—that is, a human of either, or of unspecified, gender. So –man, as it exists in all our compound words, does not, as the feminists insist, mean that we are sexistly asserting that the person is or is assumed to be male.
Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein
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