Dear colleagues! Today I’d like to discuss with you such an interesting phenomenon in the language as political correctness and its peculiarities in English.

As you probably know the main aim of the movement of PC was to balance the role of men and women in our modern society. The term gender appeared to differentiate between the notion sexus as a biological sex and the socio-cultural peculiarities involved in the concept of men and women. Thus, for example, such words as steward & stewardess should be changed to the neutral word flight attendant. According to this idea, the words including the element –man need to be transformed too:

business person -  businessman;

chairman -  chairperson, chair;

postman - postal worker;

mailman - mail courier.

One more example: in the USA they often use the neutral address Ms. to avoid such words as Mrs. or Miss as they convey too much personal information.

However, there may be real extremes in PC: e.g. Mary Daly introduced the neologism herstory to underline the role of women in HEstory [Daly, M. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism]. Moreover, in her Webster’s First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language some well-known words get some new meanings, e.g. home is defined as most women’s place of work, and the word homesick has the following meanings: 1) sickened by the hom; 2) sick of the home; healthily motivated to escape the patriarchal home and family.

There are some other doubtful gender-free forms like considering such words as management, manipulate, manicure, manhandle man-oriented (though they are from Latin origin: manus means hand. Furthermore, there are more suggestions like introducing such words as femstruate (instead of menstruate) and wimmin for women. Fortunately, such forms are still gender-marked.

What do you think? Is it important nowadays to be aware of the ideas of PC and take them into consideration in teaching? And meanwhile I’ll say you Happy holidays in a politically-correct way:

Happy make-your-kids-into-little-greedy-materialistic-consumption-addicts!