Does Political Correctness Have Any Term Limits?
In today’s brave new world of political correctness, words are extremely important and because of this, words take on different meanings through the redefinition of terms that were traditionally understood by some that are now hot buttons for either hyper approval or hyper sensitivity.
Tolerate
To look at a few terms, look at the much-used word, tolerate. Tolerate used to mean, I don’t agree with your viewpoint/lifestyle, but for the sake of getting along, I will tolerate your view while I reserve the right to not approve.
Today we are told that because there are no absolutes, no one can be entirely right or entirely wrong; therefore, in our Darwinian evolution of everything, the term tolerate has come to be defined as just because your view is different than mine doesn’t mean you’re wrong or I’m right, but because there are no absolutes, I will tolerate your opinion/lifestyle as being equally valid to mine even though the differences between us are as different as night and day.
So in today’s politically correct society, many times we talk past each other believing we understand each other while in reality, we totally misunderstand each other.
Gay
Another word that has become popular in our politically correct society is the term gay when referring to homosexuals. A gay person used to mean someone who was lighthearted, amicable and fun to be around—an all-around happy individual. If that’s your personality, you could still use that term with that meaning in mind, however, you might get a raised eyebrow or two.
We encapsulate this paradigm in the Christmas carol (or the politically correct, anti-Christian term, Yule or Yuletide carol), Deck the Halls, with the mental image of the joyful season of Christmas with everyone happy and dressed up to celebrate the season thus, Don we now our gay apparel, referring to a lyric in the song.
It appears that this song has been modernized with lyric changes. Wikipedia states, … By the 1970s, perhaps because of developments in the meaning of the word “gay,” we see the line “Don we now our gay apparel” changed to “Fill the mead-cup, drain the barrel” in some sources.
Because of the tendency in today’s society to shorten everything (e.g., sound bites, texting, tweets with minimum letters, etc.), we have grown accustomed to using acronyms and substituting three and four-letter words to replace complex meanings and thought processes. Some no longer refer to homosexuals as such because of its negative connotation (why is it negative?) and substitute the term gay (today’s meaning: exhibiting sexual desire or behavior directed toward a person or persons of one’s own sex) to refer to people who are experiencing gender confusion.
On the website, dictionary.reference.com, the #1 meaning for the term gay used to be having or showing a merry, lively mood. It is now #3. The #1 meaning is the word’s association with homosexuals. I used The American College Encyclopedic Dictionary, copyrighted in 1958 by Random House, Inc. when I was younger. The first two meanings for gay within that two-volume set are: 1) having or showing a joyous mood, 2) bright or showy. There is no meaning to describe a homosexual—redefining of terms!
The wordsmith master was Sigmund Freud. Whether you agree or disagree with psychology is not the issue. Freud understood that if you’re going to charge a lot of money to analyze a person’s suffering from actual or conceived problems, it would be wise to carry on in the tradition of medicine by constructing words and their meanings from their use of Greek and Latin words. In other words, if someone is squeamish when they see a small legged creature on their arm and freak out, they’re not going to pay $90/hour for a counselor to tell them they’re afraid of spiders; however, if you redefine the term and your counselor, with a knowing wink and a nod says that you are suffering from an issue called arachnophobia (an abnormal fear of spiders), and assure you that this is a common problem that can be dealt with through treatment. In other words, if a person has arachnophobia, that individual might be more inclined to pay $90/hour for help.
The term arachnid is comprised of two words: arachnid = spider and phobia = fear. Thus, what we have accomplished is splicing two Greek/Latin words together which forms a word composition that creates a medical sounding term which impresses some people.
Digressing to our gay friends—in order to bolster their argument, placing themselves on an equal footing with everyone else’s sexual preferences, and addressing those who question their lifestyle or don’t like them because of their orientation and feel uncomfortable with their sexual persuasion, they can now refer to a heterosexual as a homophobic—which means fear of homosexuals. Of course, one must be careful when playing this game because after a while, the term homophobic, when overly applied to heterosexuals, starts to become hollow sounding. A straight person might look at his or her homosexual friend and accuse them of being heterophobic.
Bigot
In politics, Progressives love to use the term bigot (from Old French: name applied contemptuously to the Normans by the French, of obscure origin). A bigot is a person who is intolerant of any ideas other than his or her own, especially about religion, politics or race whenever a Conservative disagrees. For example, if the President, who is of mixed origins, says or does something he doesn’t like, that person can be attached by being called a racist or a bigot.
Of course, for a person of a less melatonin (white/beige) to call a person who has an abundance of melatonin (brown or dark brown/black) or vice versa, the person being attacked on their politics can be dubbed a bigoted racist. Obviously, this is foolishness because we are all human beings, which mean we are the entire same race. We can share organ transplants with one another; we can intermarry with one another, so the misnomer of being racially bigoted becomes an oxymoron.
Fair Share
Consider how fair share has been redefined. When I was a child on the playground and a mother sent cookies for all of the children to share, we had to fairly share (or share fairly) which meant that each of us had the same amount of cookies—no more, no less. We called it even Steven.
Another example of fair share means if somebody makes a dollar, a 10% tax on that dollar would mean paying a dime. If they make $100.00, they would pay $10.00, which is 100 times more than the one who made $1.00, yet is a fair share to pay because they pay the same percentage.
Not today! Today the one who makes the $100.00 fair share could be paying 10%, while another would pay 50% as his fair share—hardly fair! What we used to understand as fair share is everyone gets or pays the same; however, in Progressive political circles, there is no such thing as even-Steven! It is the Progressive’s fair share scale—the more you make, the more you progressively pay.
Budget Cuts
The redefinition of terms applies here as well. Consider this: if a child receives a $5.00/week allowance and that child asks his dad for a $1.00/week increase, but the dad agrees to a $.50 increase, the child would not tell the other kids that his dad cut his allowance by $.50; instead he would brag that he now gets $5.50 a week allowance. A Progressive would redefine the terms. They would say that the child would be receiving a huge $.50 draconian (great severity) cut in his allowance. What hype! What dishonesty! Unfortunately, a lot of people fall for their lies and the lies of the propaganda press.
Words do matter and those Progressives who attempt intellectual sounding arguments but fail must resort to using guttural four-letter words and name- calling, because they have no intellection premise upon which to stand. If you cannot win the argument, Progressives reason, don’t just belittle your opponent, but destroy him completely! When Progressives cannot defend their position—and in some cases, they are not even sure what their position is—they resort to name calling in order to deflect and redirect attention away from their inadequate defense. A good Progressive tactic to fall back on is to simply attack their opponent’s character and truth!
When we allow progressives to redefine our terms and then accept those perverted definitions and start using them ourselves, we have meekly allowed them to not only win, but to tacitly redefine us as well.
