When William Shakespeare wrote “A rose by any other name smells just as sweet”, he could have been anticipating the modern trend of finding new verbal disguises for awkward truths. Slaughter by any other name, be it the Americans’ “taking out” or Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution”, is just as deadly, just as barbarous.
The problem is that the political trend to obfuscate true intent by seemingly innocuous verbiage has filtered down to everyday life. It has become impolitic and impolite to use a range of words because they are seen as denigrating the people to whom they are applied. While one can appreciate that a word like “nigger” was always supposed to carry both offense and the suggestion that a black slave was a lesser human being than his white master, it must be wondered if cumbersome replacements such as “Afro-Caribbean” are really useful. What was wrong with “black”? There was Black Pride and there was Black Power, coined by the US black community itself. Yet the white majority felt uneasy with “black”, perhaps because it still pointed too unerringly to their prejudices. North America’s original inhabitants were known by white settlers as “Red Indians”, a hangover in part from Columbus’s belief that he had reached India when he made landfall on the American continent. The locals knew themselves by their tribal names. Now, however, the generic term “Red Indian” is considered hugely pejorative and the latest expression to describe them is “First Nation North Americans”. It is a mystery how some of the newish constructs are supposed to achieve anything. “Mongol” was a literal description of the facial features of children and young adults smitten with this tragic condition, which leads to an early death. The medical world decided that a more accurate description was “Down’s Syndrome”, which was fair enough; but, thereafter, anyone who used the old name was roundly criticized for belittling the sufferers.
By changing the name of something, there is clearly an attempt to change its nature. In a world that has never been so full of broadcast and printed words, an absurd power is being ascribed to them. Yet at the very same time, in the democracies of the world, less and less ordinary people are prepared to believe what their political leaders tell them.
What is so significant about political correctness is how little it seems to be connected with morals and how very much it is linked to appearances. In a world where it is important for people to say the right thing, the need to actually do the right thing, almost invariably a far more difficult undertaking, is lessened, if not removed entirely.
A world dedicated to appearances is in danger of serial hypocrisy. Dressing up oppression such as that of the Palestinians by the Israelis with the measured tones of an apparently civilized state was something Hitler did, before annexing Austria, invading Czechoslovakia and finally Poland.
To attempt to conceal the true, sometimes unpleasant or awkward, nature of something by renaming does not change it for the better. A rose smells just as sweet whatever it is called — and its thorns are just as sharp.
