The Euphemism Treadmill

I've had about enough with being told that I can't say this word or that word anymore.  The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, not freedom from being offended.  I don't intend to go off on some weird Tea Party-esque  diatribe about free speech, so don't worry.  I'm just trying to figure out why we are so afraid of offending people these days.  Left-leaning people seem to shudder at the thought of accidentally offending almost any vocal minority, or at least those that are popular with the Democratic party, such as black people, gay people, or Jewish people. Offending rednecks and religious people is apparently encouraged, however.  For the record, I'm neither religious nor a redneck.  

Okay, there might be just a smidgen of redneck in there.

Well, I'm not religious, anyway.

I'm also not one to be politically correct, as I'm sure you've already picked up on.  I fact, I tend to offend somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of all human beings I come into contact with.  Some who've never even met me have already determined they hate me (on reputation alone, I assume--though perhaps they read my blog).  So I'm not afraid of upsetting folks, but I find it disturbing that I can suddenly alienate vast swaths of people for using the wrong language, with no real reason given for it, apart from the whim of the Cult of Political Correctness.  There's something basically wrong with that...  I mean, it's the ideological equivalent of trying to follow a flock of blackbirds.

Let me show you what I mean.  First, let's just try to nail down what IS politically correct.  What are the socially acceptable phrases of the day?

It's hard to keep up with.  For instance, gay people apparently don't like the word "homosexual," or so I've been told by my liberal friends.  They now prefer the word "gay" or the "LGBT community".  That's the initialization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transexual community, in case you aren't up on the latest in PC speech.  I was completely unaware of it myself, and was walking around referring to people as homosexuals, and actually was feeling pretty good and proper for not using any of the purposefully offensive slurs, like "queer" or "faggot" or the like.  I understand fully why those types of words are considered improper; they were meant from the beginning as insults.  The thing I don't get is the adoption of a former slang term (gay), and the rejection of the scientific term (homosexual).  Who decides this shit?  It just makes no sense.

Race is another PC minefield.  Black people have changed labels at least three times in my lifetime, from Black to Afro-American, back to Black, to African-American, and now presumably back to Black, since African-American has too many damn syllables.  That's not counting the old-fashioned labels of negro, colored, and such.  Again, these earlier acceptable words were not meant to be insulting; on the contrary, they were considered the civilized, proper, and non-offensive monicker.  I completely understand the rejection of the dreaded "N-word," as it was meant from the very beginning to be derisive.  I'm trying to wrap my head around why words originally intended NOT to be offensive suddenly are verboten.

It's an endless cycle it seems.  Let's look at the word "retarded" as a case study:

There have been people with mental handicaps for basically as long as there have been people.  All sorts of unfortunate problems and accidents can cause people's brains to not function as well as most.  We have words for this, because it is a thing that exists, and that's what language is.  They used to call kids with intellectual disabilities "slow," "feeble-minded", or "simple."  The actual medical terms for various levels of low-IQ scores at the time were "idiot," "imbecile," "cretin," and "moron."  Guess how kids started using those words.

This seemed a little harsh to folks after a while, so they decided to come up with some less hurtful words.  The terms "mental retardation" and "mentally retarded" were invented in the middle of the 20th century to replace the previous set of terms, which were deemed to have become offensive.  The idea was that these new words would imply that the people were not stupid, but that their mental development was just delayed.  Thus, we manage not to insult anyone, right?

Somebody went full retard anyway...

The problem is, the words still mean the same thing.  Pretty soon, these words were being used as playground insults.  See, no matter what you call the "special" kids at school, the other kids will learn that word and will then use it to insult each other.  The process is called the "euphemism treadmill,"  which is an excellent term for it.  

So now the word "retarded" is being phased out.  The Sarah Palin Journal  is insisting that it be referred to as "the R-word."  She is an authority on this because she has a son with Downs Syndrome.  I've got bad news for you, though.  Even if no one ever again uses the word 'retarded' in a sentence, your child will still have Downs.  That's the harsh truth.  No matter what euphemism you dream up, it will become the new insult.

The root problem in this case obviously isn't the poor souls who have intellectual disabilities.  It isn't even the mean kids on the playground who are insulting each other.  I think the problem lies in the self-indulgent people who appoint themselves as the high priests of language.  They seek to control people by making them feel guilty, by bullying them with their indignation over common words.  

What's the moral here?  I think it was to point out that words are tied to a meaning, and even if you change the word, the underlying meaning will remain. Getting upset at the word itself is just—retarded.

"A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet," as Juliet put it.