Are We Moving Closer to Newspeak? - Page 2
© Barb Alexander
As may be said today. Am I really committing some terrible act if I refer to dwarves or midgets as such, instead of as "little people"? Am I doing a disservice to mankind by saying someone is Asian, rather than "Korean-American"?
Is it so bad to suggest a child is unruly or bad, instead of considering he may have Oppositional Defiant Disorder? That he may be an active kid with a very short attention span, instead of calling him ADD/ADHD? The fact that we are now encouraged to label negative behavior as something "acceptable" makes me want to pull my hair out. (Perhaps I've got "anger management issues.")
I often wonder how far we can take political correctness before it truly becomes a Constitutional issue (don't we still have freedom of speech in the USA?). I see abbreviations, acronyms, compound words, hyphenizations, and contractions as true evolutions of the language, and reluctantly as a necessity in our fast-paced twenty-first century. But I do worry about PC, the Thinkpol of our time; that it will get out of hand and come to fruition in a society headed toward the Orwellian.
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