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Political Correctness Creates Fools, Bullies, and Cowards
Chroniclers of academic insanity have a real beaut on their hands at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Apparently the apparatchik in charge of something called the Office of Diversity and Inclusion invented a series of new pronouns to ensure that all the institution’s incoming Babes in Toyland will be accepted regardless of their gender or species preference. Old-fashioned designators such as “him” and “her” must now succumb to the brave new world of “ze, hir, zir, xe, xem, and xyr.” Fortunately for the Klingon-challenged among us, this edict is accompanied by a chart illustrating the old terms and the proposed new ones.
That covers PC and fools. What about bullies? Oh my. So much evidence, so little time! At the risk of pointing out the obvious to weary culture warriors, let’s throw out a few oldies but goodies anyway. Zo, sie zay zyr liken de traditional marriage? (Sorry, still trying to get those pesky pronouns correct). Bigot! Homophobe! You probably also eat at Chick fil-A, which everyone knows is run by Christians. Or Nazis. Same thing, right? Speaking of which, comparisons of Nazis with radical Islamists are not welcome, regardless of what the two groups share in terms of historical connections and committing unspeakable barbarisms. Above all, do not refer to undocumented immigrants as ‘illegal aliens’ or ‘Democrat voters-in-waiting’, lest you be accused of being a Hater, Divider, Racist, or Republican. And sink that anchor babies talk. In fact, shut up already!
Which leaves us with the PC-coward connection, especially on our college campuses. Just think about all those institutions that are filled with wide-eyed, eager-to-please swarms, pitifully naïve about the ways of the world, bereft of knowledge, guts, good sense, and often good manners. And that’s just the administrators. For the students, the aforementioned have something special in mind, particularly if the little darlings get the vapors after being exposed to some idea that conflicts with years of determined indoctrination. Hence, trigger warnings, counselors, and quiet rooms, where nary a contrary thought is allowed to venture and all the micro-aggressions melt away in an ambience filled with soothing music, soft colors, padded walls, and maybe a pizza or two.
As preposterous as political correctness has been, we must keep in mind that its perpetrators are dead serious about completing their conquest of America and transforming the country into a totalitarian enterprise, ruled by the masters and commanders of speech and thought. From campuses to courtrooms, legislatures, bureaucracies, businesses, and churches, this project continues to succeed at a frightening pace.
Perhaps for the first time in its history, however, political correctness — in its media expression at least — has been challenged by a force that cannot be manipulated, co-opted, bought, bullied, fooled, or fired: Donald Trump.
Trump is a national phenomenon who apparently wants to rescind the last 16 years of Republican-Democratic governance in foreign and domestic policy, doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and refers to the current regime as ‘stupid’ and ‘incompetent.’ Whatever his policy prescriptions (which may or may not be nonsense), Trumpism represents a take-no-prisoners attitude toward political correctness—consider his dismissal of PC’s Univision darling at a recent press conference—that perhaps offers a teachable moment to many in the GOP’s milquetoast establishment, who too often seem scared to death about saying something that might offend America’s entrenched PC class.
Might not that attitude be of some good on America’s college campuses? Indeed, many rank-and-file Republicans have been waiting for decades for someone on the national stage to proclaim that the country’s education industry is corrupt to the point of being evil, and that something has to be done about it.
If that day never arrives, prepare to be ruled by America’s burgeoning corps of fools, bullies, and cowards.
Published in Education, General
I think the one unintentional message from that chart is how ridiculous and confusing the “gender neutral” version is. The top chart is just “duh, it’s easy to see, it’s easy to spell, it’s easy to pronounce, and it’s obvious just by looking at people.” That’s common sense, and I think these PC pushers just forget how appealing that is to most normal human beings.
Progressives hate sex. Not the orgasm part, of course, but they hate the biological reality of male and female begetting new life, and ultimately to hate sex is to hate human life. They need to erase the very idea of sex by eliminating or redefining the words that describe it.
So them becomes here? They should check with their English department but I think that word already exists.
In addition I am pretty sure Zem was the name given to all the mattresses living in the swamps of Sqornshellous Zeta in the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Academia is in dire need of a mass purging. For far too long, far too many of its denizens have abused their privileges while bleeding dry American taxpayers and unwary parents believing their sons and daughters are receiving an education, when in reality it is indoctrination.
Well, not invented. These funny-looking gender-neutral pronouns have been kicking around for a while now. They look invented to us, but I know progressives who have been using them for years.
Trump cannot be fooled? Or bought?
True Midge I heard about them back when I was in school.
What’s the gender neutral for: él, su, y los/las?
I’m having an attack of cognitive dissonance about the title of this post.
Images of chickens and eggs, carts and horses, and barn doors being closed after the cows have bolted, keep running through my mind.
I think it might be more accurate to state that fools, cowards and bullies created political correctness.
And shame on those aspects of society that created them.
Good question. Why does the University of Tennessee hate Hispanics?
I think the broader point is is that Trump is utterly intransigent, and cannot be influenced by anyone but Trump.
Which sentiment I think is accurate. And in these times, that is a huge plus in most people’s minds.
I’m sorry?
I think there’s a PC word for people like you, who think there are such things as ‘normal human beings.’
But I can’t remember what it is.
wait, you know people who actually talk like this? You know, that might be handy, kind of like a girl saying “I’m a vegan” is a signal “don’t date me, I’m crazy and super annoying!” this might be another way of informing me that I would be will justified in ending whatever relationship I might have with the other person then and there… or, if a professional relationship, limiting it as much as humanly possible.
I think it might be seen as a time-saver.
If they were invented, they’d only need three instead of 12 on the bottom half of that chart (and that wikipedia page would have to add another row on the huge table of pronoun options). Apart from the recent adoption by universities (there has been another, right?) I haven’t seen them in “the wild” (i.e., outside of blogs).
One other point I like to make about how odd the push toward gender-neutral pronouns is is that it’s really about grammatical gender, not sexual gender.
Saying “The user enters his credentials into the login screen,” doesn’t indicate that the user is a male. It indicates that the noun “user” is grammatically masculine.
This is much easier to display in Latin, and other languages who still really have grammatical gender. This kind of thing is basically impossible in other languages because they have rules.
For instance, cities, ships, countries, earth, etc. Things like this are referred to grammatically as feminine. They are obviously not women, but in Latin they were grammatically feminine. Thus, when pronouns take their place, the pronoun doesn’t indicate the actual gender, but the grammatical gender of the noun. This doesn’t quite happen as often anymore, but you’ll see it from time to time.
Since English doesn’t really have grammatical gender, at least not strictly, pronouns tend to take the masculine under the masculine inclusive, feminine exclusive paradigm, which is common to most PIE type languages.
I know I’ve seen l@s as a gender-neutral form, that’s actually been around a while.
Edited to provide the link. There’s been a lot more pushback against this business with regard to French (at least in France).
So I have a dumb question. Why does “ze” get conjugated in two different ways? I assume “xe” is supposed to be plural (though this is also confusing since our plural pronouns don’t imply any gender already.), but what do there need to be two different “ze”? I thought “ze” would be the gender neutral one. So we would have he, she, and ze. This would correspond to male, female, and neuter. Of course a neuter gender would imply that the noun in question is some form of inanimate object. In which case I guess we could just have he, she, and it.
Excellent point. English suffers from its gender loss. Though with respect to your example I thought that today it has become common practice to use they as a singular pronoun in place of he/she. So it becomes “The user enters their credentials into the login screen.” Of course now instead of potentially mixing genders your are mixing up singular and plural. Basically you can’t actually win, the language doesn’t support what the activists want to do. This though does explain why they want to change the language. Simply put the best way to fight them is to ignore them and refuse to conform. The language won’t change if we don’t actually change it.
Old english used to have grammatical gender but shed it for some reason over time.
Anyways, regarding the OP the made up pronouns seem less offensive to me than they used as a singular. I was listening to a lady talk about how she was careful about her pronouns so as to not hurt anyone. So this is where the culture war has taken us: we can’t even keep our basic description of people.
While we’re talking about reclaiming pronouns can we also make people spell lose with one o instead of two? What’s up with that? There I said it.
You can generally avoid such awkwardness by pluralizing the noun. “Users should enter their credentials into the login screen.”
“Children (or “students”) are required to bring their own pencils to class.”
I don’t know why more people don’t do this.
Yes, this is the case. But I find that it’s a conversation worth having.
Most appreciate the distinction between grammatical and actual gender, if they know a little grammar anyway, or took a semester of French or whatnot. I find it throws people off the script.
You can appeal to a kind of cosmopolitan sophistication in the interlocutor in suggesting that languages like Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German (You know, those sophisticated European languages), cannot have these self-righteous egalitarian pronouns because they make no sense and would render the language unintelligible.
The number of people I’ve met in person who regularly use these odd pronouns: zero.
Some of my flesh-and-blood friends have vaguely speculated that maybe using them would be a good idea, but somehow (wisely) never get around to insisting on it.
Anyone who’s ever pulled a Soto and basked in the sheer weirdness of radical gender politics has probably known about these pronouns for a while, though, through websites or other media.
“I’m a feminist” is a similar deterrent.
OK, so this “ze” thing is allegedly based somehow on old German grammar (anyone who has ever had to sing Carmina Burana knows that old forms of German can be quite weird). It’s not that there are two different grammatical conjugations of “ze”, but that the people using “ze” haven’t agreed on which convention to use for conjugation. So there are two competing conventions. And “xe” is, as far as I know, not the plural of “ze” (the plural of any gender-neutral pronoun, whether “ze” or “xe”, would logically be “they”). It’s merely yet another convention for a gender-neutral pronoun.
“Hum” for the gender-neutral pronoun is yet another nother convention and even more annoying, since “hum” is already a perfectly well-established word in its own right, with a meaning totally unrelated to gender or lack thereof.
Xe have ways of making you talk.
Xe has ways of making you talk?
;-)
Fascinating. I guess it doesn’t pay to make assumptions about made up words. So “ze” and “xe” are all singular. My question then is why not use “it”. “It” is a perfectly good pronoun and is already in use in place of genderless objects. Heck you can even use “it” to describe a gendered noun like an animal.
So if you are talking about your female dog you can say, “She got the ball,” or you can say “It got the ball”. In fact if you don’t know the dogs gender you would not assume it. Rather you would use the latter formulation, and isn’t that the problem they wish to correct? If you can’t assume a humans gender you should refer to them as it.
Oo grammar burn!
It is probably considered dehumanizing, though, and not without reason. Though in the past we sometimes called small children “it” for exactly the reasons you state.
I think people have started to stop, though, calling small children “it”. At least I can’t remember hearing a child called an “it” in while. That said,
“What is the baby doing?”
“It is crying.”
“What is the child doing?”
“Stuffing crayons up its nose.”
still seems perfectly grammatical to me.
Yes, I see the dehumanizing angle.
(It puts the lotion on its skin.)
But, then again this whole obsession about finding a better pronoun is kind of dehumanizing anyway.
So much of this is convention though as you point out. The convention though seems to be the inability to distinguish gender. Since now it has become politically fashionable to be incompetent at this task when it pertains to our own spices (the one living organism we are the best at distinguishing the gender of) I say we foist the progressives on their own grammatical petard.
This of course used to be a joke.