political correctness

political correctness

The term political correctness (often abbreviated to PC) arose in the 1980s, first in America and soon afterwards elsewhere. It deals with many areas of social interaction; in language it is concerned with avoiding or replacing words and uses that cause offence or are seen as discriminating against certain sections of society, e.g. by being racist or sexist or in other ways, and extends to the avoidance of terms that may be regarded even coincidentally as offensive, such as black in black economy and blind (to) meaning ‘unwilling to recognize (a fact)’, and to other words that offend various groups, e.g. deaf people, homosexuals, racial groups, women, and old people. The political correctness movement is also devoted to promoting an alternative terminology that seeks to assert a more positive aspect to negative or undesirable qualities, such as deficiency achievement for failure, differently abled for disabled, non-waged for unemployed, and many compounds formed with -challenged (intellectually challenged, vertically challenged, etc.: see challenged). Although the basic intentions of political correctness have attracted widespread sympathy, its more extreme forms have been met with scorn or even hostility. See also sexist language.