"Dammit Jarvis, you were on track and running well and then you had to get all insensitive. (Tongue firmly in cheek.) I am sorry, I know this couldn’t be farther from what this post was supposed to be about, but I find politically correct people to be highly offensive.
Sean and Karl, Jeff is a wordsmith by trade and training. He thinks fast, speaks fast and I would be willing to bet that he also writes fast. That is not to say that he does these things without proper forethought. His job is to get his point across as directly and understandably as possible. Brevity… wit, to quote The Simpsons.
You boys have drank the wrong Kool-Aid. You are rescue breathing for a nearly dead and fundamentally flawed ideology known as political correctness. The goal of political correctness was never equality, it was control. If you control the vocabulary you control the argument. There is an ages old adage that says something to the effect of, “a man (person) cannot think in a subject (topic) for which he (he/she) does not have the vocabulary (properly sanctioned word list).” Political correctness seeks to exploit this human conversational vulnerability by blacklisting (sorry, that was probably offensive) certain words crucial to making an argument contrary to whatever political side you fall on. It leaves the opposition saying things like, “person up” which not only makes you sound like a complete idiot, but it’s utterly meaningless. In both cases you fail to make your point and the other side wins the debate.
There are brilliant ironies that just plague the political correctness crowd. Being offended on the behalf of your wife or daughter, as well as trying to vilify certain terms such as “man up” has the opposite long-term effect than what you desire. I have always said that if you give a child a padded life, you are preparing them for a padded room. In essence, by trying to sanitize language that may be offensive to women, you are building their padded room. Free speech is one of our founding principles and with the good comes the bad. I think both of you would rather have your daughter exposed to the term “man up” for the first time in a blog, rather than in a board room.
Honestly Sean, it’s not the assertive women that get labeled bitchy. It’s the women that walk in with this air of entitlement expecting a genderless society that will still make allowances for their gender based shortcomings in whatever game that they’ve chosen to play. I am sure that sounds incredibly chauvinistic to you two, but it is experience based. The polarity between masculine and feminine is really the only thing that keeps our species rolling. Our differences are to be exalted not blurred by murky, nonsensical doubletalk."
Word Nazis, consider yourselves warned.
