(Title Translation: Words Mean Things.)
I remember one day about 30 years ago when I was a partner
in a contracting business with my father.
We were sitting on the ground having lunch when he told me that a new
law had just been enacted that made employers personally responsible and liable
for the “hate speech” of their employees while at work.
I told him he was crazy.
This is America and we have freedom of speech. There’s no way that we could be responsible
for what our employees say. Well he
wasn’t crazy; he was right.
All this Politically Correct stuff has me freaking out. Think about how nutty it is. We are all allowed to say, “the N word,” but
we are not allowed to actually say the “N” word (that is unless you ARE an N
word, then it’s okay. It’s kinda like
the Q word. We aren’t allowed to use the
perfectly good word that means strange or odd in reference to someone who is "strange
or odd." Instead we are forced to use
another word that used to mean happy or merry but has been stolen from us and redefined.
However, if you are a person who is now described as happy or merry (even
though you probably aren’t really happy or merry), then you are allowed to use
the Q word in reference to yourself and other strange or odd people. Get it?
I didn’t think so; neither do I.
The result of PC speech, regardless of all the good,
happycrap intentions, is that we are losing our language and our ability to
communicate effectively. It has been
estimated that William Shakespeare had a working vocabulary of about 54,000 words. In comparison, most people in
America today have fewer than 3000 (and I think that might be a very generous
overstatement). A dumbed down system of education
coupled together with a dumbed down language has resulted in a plethora of
perfectly good words being lost.
About 12 years ago, David Howard, head of the Office of
Public Advocate for D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, made the national news for describing
his own administration of a particular fund as "niggardly" in the
presence of two of his staff members.
The dumbed down products of our dumbed down system of public education
came unglued. The race-baiting reverends piled on and exploited the opportunity to turn the comment into hate speech. In the end, Howard lost his job and the
English language lost a perfectly good word.
Was the word, niggardly, a racist word? No, it just sounds similar to another word. The word "niggard" predates the
N-word in the English language by at least a couple hundred years. The most commonly speculated origin is
Scandanavian and the root is conjectured to imply closing, tightening, or
pinching. That could be related to the
origin of phrases like “tight fisted” or “penny pinching.”
Regardless, truth doesn't matter much to PC lefties and Howard’s intentions along with the fact that he is not racist) were
irrelevant. The word has been redefined,
senselessly and incorrectly, and is now considered hate speech and can get you
fired simply because some illiterate people are always looking for some reason to feel offended.
And the list of words, banned by the PC Nazis, continues to grow. When you begin to imagine how thin-skinned, uneducated people might “feel
offended,” there is no end to the nonsensical speculations about insensitive word. Recently, some Bozo, public school educator, in New York named, Dennis
Walcott, compiled a new list of 50 words that He wants banned from public school tests. The word list contains
really, REALLY awful, hurtful words like “birthday, vacations, swimming pools, rock
and roll, television, and video games.”
Fortunately, for the time being, public outrage thwarted his attempt to vilify
those words. Ironically, the F word and
the S word, among other shocking vulgarities are not outlawed.
Probably the biggest problem is that much Truth from and about the Word of God could be, and has been, deemed to be offensive and therefore inappropriate, and in some cases illegal, speech.
My wife and daughters have a long enough list of words that they won't allow me to use. For all the rest, I have made a deliberate decision to reject PC speech as
much as possible because "Words Mean Things." And if that offends
you, go cry to someone who cares.
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. Colossians 3:16
1 comment:
Along the same line, remember that Burger King recently had to pull an ad with Mary J. Blige singing about chicken because it was a "racist stereotype." If she had been a white woman, it would have been, "Why do only white people get to make commericals? That's racist."
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