Routes to
freedom:
2. The politics
Alan Fisher
The tourists desert Egypt
I don’t know who
he is, but Ryan Giggs
deserved his privacy
Rear Window
Arnold Kemp on John Knox
North Berwick, East Lothian
Glasgow Central Station
Drumpellier Park, Lanarkshire
Photographs by
Islay McLeod
A linguistic reactionary
R D Kernohan
I get sensible, if rather puzzled, answers when I ask my friends what the ‘Atlantic Isles’ are. The Azores? The Scillies? The Hebrides? But my friends are politically incorrect. The Atlantic Isles are what, except possibly in some Irish pubs with very extended hours, used to be called the British Isles.
Friends also note that among our family photographs is one of a long-departed pet dachshund. None has yet called it a ‘companion animal’, a liberationist American usage which recently found a kennel in an eminent British broadsheet.
Languages inevitably change and evolve, not only in meaning and shades of meaning of words – who now dares sing ‘A bachelor gay am I’ at a church social? – but in usages, phrases, and terminology. There are also needs for new words for new technologies, often producing ugly or makeshift terms that become permanent – as telephone once did and paywall and Wi-Fi threaten to do today. But not all attempts at linguistic manipulation succeed, not all trends are sustained. Current language always includes presumptuous experiments, such as the bid to smuggle companion animals into the Atlantic Isles or call Christmas the ‘winter festival’ or just ‘the holidays’, and areas where old and new usages compete or coexist.
I recently explored online and traditional ways of renewing my passport. One wanted to know my gender but the other asked my sex. No tabloid is likely to call ‘gender reassignment’ anything but a sex-change and any arguments about Olympic Games gender verification will generally be reported as about sex-testing. Sex will survive, not because the common person and their newspapers – note my ugly but gender-neutral style – share the passionate convictions of grammarians that ‘gender’ belongs to them but because the media love short words. Every endeavour becomes a vow, every attempt a bid, and any objection ‘fury’. We might even hope to reverse the talk of gender, still mainly among bureaucrats and intelligentsia, if media use had not made ‘sex’ also synonymous with copulation or (in older English) swiveing, a good word unknown to my prudish spell-checker.
Often one word or phrase drives out another but sometimes uneasy competition subsides into peaceful co-existence. We shall continue (most of us) to be interested in the opposite sex and not the alternative gender. The most obvious example of co-existence is the successful transatlantic voyage of the drab and deliberately ambiguous ‘Ms’. Mrs survives, along with some formidable Misses. Maybe it’s a pity that the EU didn’t send us a directive to follow the German and French styles by which all women can become Frau and Madame with whatever surname and marital status suits them. But we can live with Ms. Many of us rarely have to pronounce it and it costs nothing to write it.
There will be always be ambiguities as languages evolve and words get new meanings but they become more evident when attempts are made to define their politically correct usage. It’s not just because I’m a white, patriarchal, reactionary with very structured-language preferences that I occasionally struggle with such problems as whether lesbians are also gay and pale-brown Asians also black. I’m uncertain when I reluctantly encounter the mainly American use of B C E and C E (instead of the familiar B C and A D) whether I’m expected to relate this to a common, current, or even Christian era.
But uncertainty gives way to annoyance when linguistic manipulators don’t just play around with initials or give old words new meanings but create new words and use them to promote racial, sexual, religious, or social politics. My list of such words includes racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and Islamophobia. Some of my fellow Christians are trying to extend the list by finding an effective word to denounce discrimination in adoption or foster policies or even workplace jewellery. ‘Christophobia’ has already some currency but we could surely do better.
It’s not that such words and the emotions that accompany their use lack all virtue. On occasion they may reflect valid and even necessary moral impulses. But as I encounter them they lack objectivity and are often used not to open up argument but to close it down. To question the theology, practices, and contemporary hyper-sensitivity of the Muslim world brings denunciation as Islamophobic. Resistance to the lobby for homosexual ‘marriage’, even from those who accepted the idea of civil partnerships, now risks a charge of first-degree homophobia. Discussion of the pros and cons of retiring ages is inhibited by the invention of ‘ageism’, which may also be a factor in the political reluctance of a cost-cutting government to deal rationally with such absurdities as universal old-age winter-fuel allowances and free bus passes.
But by far the most easily manipulated of ill-defined concepts is ‘racism’, now so deeply embedded in our laws and the vocabulary even of Conservative politicians. It has exalted resentments at racial discrimination, historically well justified but remediable on an issue-by-issue basis, into a general theory and a derivative concept of ‘institutional racism’. (In fact one neglected opportunity for financial economies is the institutional anti-racism which has become embedded in our quango and local government cultures.)
I resist the temptation to be polemical in so sensitive an area. I suggest very mildly two unfortunate consequences of the way words and concepts linked to ‘racism’ have been used. One is that the concept itself has been trivialised by being invoked in minor ethnic exchanges of pub insults and football incivilities, even among the indigenous inhabitants of the British (or Atlantic) Isles. The more serious one is that the concept has quite disproportionately related itself to the failings of white tribes and not to the universal reluctance of humanity to love its neighbour as itself. It has been obsessed with the consequences of historical sins, some real, some imagined, and not of original sin, or whatever you choose to call the weakness of human nature.
Fortunately in accepting that language must change and evolve (difficult though that can be for conservatives) we can also hope that linguistic development will be determined more by practical necessity and common speech, sometimes tempered by aesthetic sensitivity, rather than ‘political correctness’. I use that phrase in the sure and certain hope that it has already become hackneyed and even an invitation to derision. I don’t expect ‘companion animal’ to make it and I think ‘sex-worker’ is past it. ‘Sex-care provider’ only had a brief outing even in the United States.
We shall always have to live with euphemism, for there seems an innate human tendency to shrink from the uglier truths of life, death, and human imperfection. We have a set of plain or robust words which it’s unfashionable to use, especially in print or when the studio microphones are switched on, rather different from those Victorians avoided. In time to come our extreme sensitivities may seem as odd as theirs do to us.
There are some signs of tentative reversion to common sense as well as common speech, especially where political correctness cohabits with bureaucratic jargon. But some extracts from the Scottish Review’s encounters with official obscurity or obstruction warn me against expecting too much soon. And I saw recent opinions on whether to let Scottish children eat what they like described as discussion on whether they should ‘take ownership of their diet’.
On some of these matters the jury is still out – to use a metaphor now so popular that it will soon be as cold as the tip of the iceberg. But in language the jury is not only always out but constantly changing membership without ever really coming in.
R D Kernohan is a writer and broadcaster and a former editor of the Church of Scotland’s magazine Life and Work
website design by Big Blue Dogwebsite development by NSD Web