What Is Political Correctness
The language of our age- political correctness or factual correctness
The basic wants in any social interaction are the two aspects of face. According to Brown and Levinson face is the public self image that every adult tries to project, and positive and negative face exist universally in human culture. Positive face is the want of every member that his wants be desirable to at least some others and refers to one’s self esteem, whereas negative face is the freedom of action or freedom from imposition. In order to avoid face threatening acts our society has come up with the phenomenon of political correctness.
The term ‘political correctness’ refers to a powerful political movement located on university campuses and in ‘alternative’ political …show more content…
It is typical, for example, for anxieties about cultural difference and fragmentation to be paralleled by anxieties about multilingualism as a threat to unity. So-called ‘politically correct’ language may not be as overt a threat to the project of cultural unity as the existence of militant minority language groups, but the idea that there is some analogy is not without foundation. Endless bickering over what to call things (and people) draws attention to a lack of social consensus. Furthermore, whereas language has traditionally been the privileged symbol of one kind of social identity—ethnicity—the ‘PC’ phenomenon makes it symbolic of a bewildering range of affiliations: gender, race, sexual preference, region, subculture, generation, (dis)ability, appearance, and so on. This is exactly what the opponents of political correctness tend to oversee. Politically correct language doesn’t try to find a common language with which to bridge the differences between people, it denies that such language ever existed or could exist. As the postmodernist theorist Donna Haraway has written, the ‘dream of a common language…is a totalizing and imperialist one’ (1991:173). It is ‘totalizing and imperialist’ because it casts all experience in the verbal image of the dominant group’s experience. From the dominant group’s perspective, it is ‘obvious’, for instance, that African-American is a pompous euphemism, that no one should shrink from a good plain word
The basic wants in any social interaction are the two aspects of face. According to Brown and Levinson face is the public self image that every adult tries to project, and positive and negative face exist universally in human culture. Positive face is the want of every member that his wants be desirable to at least some others and refers to one’s self esteem, whereas negative face is the freedom of action or freedom from imposition. In order to avoid face threatening acts our society has come up with the phenomenon of political correctness.
The term ‘political correctness’ refers to a powerful political movement located on university campuses and in ‘alternative’ political …show more content…
It is typical, for example, for anxieties about cultural difference and fragmentation to be paralleled by anxieties about multilingualism as a threat to unity. So-called ‘politically correct’ language may not be as overt a threat to the project of cultural unity as the existence of militant minority language groups, but the idea that there is some analogy is not without foundation. Endless bickering over what to call things (and people) draws attention to a lack of social consensus. Furthermore, whereas language has traditionally been the privileged symbol of one kind of social identity—ethnicity—the ‘PC’ phenomenon makes it symbolic of a bewildering range of affiliations: gender, race, sexual preference, region, subculture, generation, (dis)ability, appearance, and so on. This is exactly what the opponents of political correctness tend to oversee. Politically correct language doesn’t try to find a common language with which to bridge the differences between people, it denies that such language ever existed or could exist. As the postmodernist theorist Donna Haraway has written, the ‘dream of a common language…is a totalizing and imperialist one’ (1991:173). It is ‘totalizing and imperialist’ because it casts all experience in the verbal image of the dominant group’s experience. From the dominant group’s perspective, it is ‘obvious’, for instance, that African-American is a pompous euphemism, that no one should shrink from a good plain word