Evolution of Language as it Applies to Political Correctness

[Shinko]

Language. It is an ever-evolving beast, slang terms coming into common use and being formalized words, while other words are dropped as they become obsolete until their meaning is forgotten.

Along the same lines, some words are used in contexts which were not originally intended. Words used as euphemisms for something else entirely- just ask the Medieval game people about brooms. They'll groan. Everyone else will have question marks over their heads.

I bring this up because while watching a video on youtube by a bunch of youtube reviewers who were discussing their personas, a subject was brought up about people in the comments complaining about certain language the reviewers used in eight year old videos. Obvious slurs that they admitted they shouldn't have used at the time, but insisted they no longer used in their current work. But some people still had bones to pick with some of the language the reviewers used.

Words like say... lame. Which people use in modern language to refer to something that underperforms relative to their expecatations, but which historically was an ablest term that referred to someone with a disability. Usually some sort of problem that made it hard for them to walk.

There was also the term "dumb" which people use today as a word for "not smart." Historically "dumb" was a word that was used in reference to people who were deaf.

Another word was "idiot" which is used today to, again, refer to someone who isn't very smart. Once upon a time, idiocy was an actual psychological diagnosis, and it usually resulted in people being thrown into asylums.

The talking point here is, where political correctness is concerned, at what point do we consider a word's history to be an artifact? Do we ever? How does the normalization of these slurs into our language reflect upon our society as a whole?

(Remember that this is a discussion of normalized slurs that have lost their original, historical meaning in modern usage. Words that retain the element of slur and are very much still used in an offensive way to certain groups should not be brought up. Thanks guys. ^^)

[Moni]

Full disclosure: I'm not a fan of being too uptight about political correctness. I view it as a type of slacktivism--if you're really uptight about the use of the world "idiot" or "lame" because of their etymologies, that doesn't actually help the mentally or physically disabled people who are living right here and right now. It's enough to just refer people respectfully by the standards and connotations of today.

A word's history becomes an artifact once people stop implicating its artifact in everyday speech or stop fundementally entwining the two concepts together. That's it. "Dumb" (the modern usage of "dumb" may have been a borrowing from the Geramn "dum" in the 19th century which always meant "stupid" in German) and "lame" are still sometimes used in their original meanings (to be mute/to be crippled), but when people say "that's dumb," or "that's lame," it's no longer connected to these groups of people in the minds of the speaker or most listeners, ergo, it's not important.

"Idiot" has a more complex etymology than what's suggested here--"idiot" in old english law was a term suggesting someone who was born hampered in intellectual capacity, as opposed to a lunatic, who had acquired a lack of capacity later on. However, from Middle English onwards, it basically had the meaning it holds today. The fault lies with people who termed "idiocy" rather than those who use it today.

Language is just a breathing thing and the meanings of words change as society changes--I don't really thing the adoption of slurs (or the making of them from previously innocuous words) says anything positive or negative about society, only that people adapt and change to their linguistic environment.

There are tons of words with less-than-nice origins--for example, "slave" comes from Slav (yes, the Slavic peoples). But no one even thinks of Slavs when they say "slave" today--we have a whole other image in our culture. The word just takes on a life of its own and is re-appropriated to the standards and memories of the underlying concept of slavery today. The history of the sequence of sounds doesn't matter nearly as much as what the sequence of sounds means here and now and the intention of the speaker+listener.

[Huntress]

ohh snap you did not just attract a linguist to the D&D board, no good can come of this.

What you're talking about is a straightforward enough case of linguistic pejoration and melioration, and that's been going on for as long as there've been languages, as one of the central driving engines of language evolution. The example that's nearest and dearest to my heart is the word 'villain', which comes from the French word meaning 'villager' (and prompted me to draw Voldemort with a pitchfork on my class notes once upon a time ten years ago), and the word has arguably gone through some amount of melioration since then because 'villain' was once used as a straightforward enough synonym for 'evil person' but is now associated with literary constructs more than anything. And so on and so forth. Dig into the etymology of any adjective and odds are decently good that you'll find traces of such semantic shifts in there somewhere.

(I should probably put my money where my mouth is, come to think of it. *picked the word 'loud', dug a little* ayep, one of its sources is a Greek word meaning 'praise'.)

The glory of language shift is that it's neither sudden nor uniform. The change in meaning will start in some specific group or circle or jargon, the older meaning will persist longer in other circles. Some people will embrace linguistic changes as soon as they learn of them, others are all "argh what is this stupid newfangled idea" and as long as there's one bingo club left on this planet where old ladies really do use the word 'gay' to mean 'happy', the meaning can be argued to have stayed not-quite-shifted-yet (if, of course, you ascribe to the descriptive approach of linguistics as opposed to the prescriptive, and if you want to stick your head in that particular everlasting battle, I wish you luck xD)

I'm not really a fan of the political correctness described above for much the same reasons Moni said: it tends to become a snooty way to show off one's own Social Awareness and earn cookie points within the peer group that rewards this particular social awareness, with no regard for context, or indeed support for whichever group is ostensibly being defended.

English in particular is kind of screwed for not having a central linguistic authority, not to mention the sprawling behemoth of various Commonwealth Englishes and pidgins and the colorful world of the remnants of the empire on which the sun never sets. It means that "this word has become obsolete" becomes a very bold statement that's more likely to mean "this word has become obsolete in my particular social group and I think this shift should be exacted in all other social groups as well".