IS THE WORLD IS FULL OF POLITICALLY CORRECT NUMPTY'S?

Numpty, a term reintroduced and popularised by Alan Brazil.

I think I first heard Billy Connolly using it.... It's not common in parts of Scotland where I'm from... a or at least it wasn't...

Kenneth

Trademark of Kim Standerline

Numpty

One of my fave words

And yes I agree about the rumpus over the Royal thing

Comments made 3 years ago, pathetic.

What does this have to do with marketing?

I think it was Dan Kennedy that said 90% of the population is wrong about everything 90% of the time.

I'd rather we be too politically correct than not enough.

TL

Can't stand political correctness, it is an insiduous form of social control and censorship that has been gaining ground for far to long.

Someone, anyone decides what words we can and cannot use because it may or may not offend one group or another. How silly is that. Given enough time no one will be speaking to anyone else.

Just recently there was a story in the papers over here in the UK which goes-

"THE head of a new school has banned the word "school" -- in case it upsets pupils' parents.
Watercliffe Meadow is known as a "Place for Learning" because staff say "school" has a negative impact on some mums and dads."

And there have been countless instances of this sort of thing over here.

Ridiculous!

Pete

Hmmm. Jim - as you can see under my Warrior name - not everyone has gone to political correctness. But as a person degreed in Ethnolinguistics, I have a few thoughts on the matter.

People label others because 1. we think in words 2. our cognitive system stores words (i.e. ideas) catagorically. Labels are natural and there is not one damned thing anyone can do about that. If you say you don't label anyone - you are 1. lying through your teeth 2. Incapable of human thought

Language is also fluent and evolves with ethnological groupings as their society evolves. It reflects the climate of the society.

Governments are basically inept forms of control by people who think because they are at the head of things that they are smarter than everyone else. They are also power hungry idiots who will do anything they think will enhance their control over the masses.

The idea behind PC is that if people don't say something they won't think it. They think if they wipe out certain forms from our diction that our attitudes will change accordingly. This is and isn't true to some extent.

The generic "he" in itself is a discriminatory term. So is woman, she, and any other way of indicating the female(another one here) using morphemes attached to the morpheme indicating male - this construction indicates the idea that women are not half of a species - but a subclass of the species.
Politicians seem to think that neutralizing the generic "he" people will quit thinking male first and women second - however, until words for women are developed that are not subclassed from male morphemes, this is a lost cause in the days of mass printing and more standardized linguistic practice.

How about the words nigger, spick, wetback, chink, gook, honky? These are used in America but there are equivalents across the globe in all languages. I use English examples only because this is the language I am most familiar with.

Politicians, in their profound self-exposited wisdom, have the idea that if they change offensive words and make others taboo that they will change the feelings of the people. This is sheer stupidity. If people are not changing their idea of a group, they will assign the derogatory connotations to the new words that they are told to use. So if someone hates a race - it doesn't matter what they are told to call them - that word that they are told to use will eventually develop the same negative aspect as the word that was struck from the language. Only if the feelings about a certain group change will new words drop the negative connotation. If the feelings change first, negatively connotative words will either drop from the vocabulary voluntarily or they will just change toward a neutral connotation.

In other words -- all that forced word construction will do when "labeling" is to induce censorship and if a society allows this type of censorship to take place the government will soon be telling you what it is legal to think as well as what it is legal to say. It's a dangerous precedence.

As far as the tagged morphemes for female and male in english - none of the new constructions really are going to do any good as long as we are still she, female, etc. The only generic construction we have is ownership - his/her and personal him/her. The stigma of sex is going to take hell of a long time to get over so I don't see the language evolving naturally for a long time. Politicians, though, are there to "help" in any way possible.
As far as tags for groups such as "nigger" and "chink" - as long as we can SEE differences in people, there will be new tags - whether they are derogatory or not will be determined by our feelings about the group, not by politicians.

BTW - for those still worried about word censorship - you might want to worry about the fact that it has already evolved into thought censorship - books are being banned in schools and libraries that until the last 8 years were considered classics. Lord of the Flies, 1984, and Animal Farm are no longer allowed in schools.

I'm fascinated by the idea that parents will take their kids on a "place of learning run" in the mornings!

Ray

Oh we already have. Unfortunately, politics is not as clear as race and you can't just "see" that someone is a politician. So we use more generically encompassing terms for them -- "psychotic" "sociopath" "fascist" "f***ing ____ fill in the blank yourself". The important thing to see is that most adjectives describing these self-proclaimed rulers are very negative and there is not one damned thing they can do about euphemising this state of affairs other than to completely take our freedom of speech from us.

I was thinking about how PC everything is after seeing all the complaining about the Royal Family & that video of the son in the military. I thought most of it was good for a few laughs...especially the bit about ginger pubes heheh