[ExI] "PC"

[Damien Broderick]

At 03:39 PM 9/9/2008 -0700, Lee wrote:

>"Purely to do with politeness". Oh, sure! I strongly suspect that
>if those who first coined the term had meant only politeness, then
>they would have used "courtesy" or "politeness" or some phrase
>based on them. No, instead we have "political correctness" which
>does have a Comintern/Orwellian ring to it, as it *obviously*
>rules as "incorrect" (i.e. inadmissible with implied threat of
>forbidden) anything that is not the Party Line.

It's complicated. Wikipedia isn't bad on this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness>

...a term used to describe language, ideas, policies, or behavior 
seen as seeking to minimize offense to gender, racial, cultural, 
disabled, aged or other identity groups. Conversely, the term 
"politically incorrect" is used to refer to language or ideas that 
may cause offense or that are unconstrained by orthodoxy.

Ruth Perry traces the term back to Mao's Little Red Book. According 
to Perry, the term was later adopted by the radical left in the 
1960s, initially seriously and later ironically, as a self-criticism 
of dogmatic attitudes. In the 1990s, because of the term's 
association with radical politics and communist censorship, it was 
used by the political right in the United States to discredit the Old
and New 
Left.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#cite_note-Perry-1992a-0>[1]

================
"Initially seriously and later ironically"--I think the "seriously" 
aspect might not have been long-lived, except among the rabid 
Maoists. I encountered it in Australia in the late '60s and early 
'70s in use among lefties and libertarians who *always* meant it 
ironically (usually uttered with a laugh), at the expense of the 
programmatic communist lunatics. Maybe this was not the case in the 
US, in which case I've been... misinformed.

Damien Broderick