Sunday, November 27, 2016

Language Police Liberals Serve Political Ends with Politically Correct Terms

Language Police Liberals Serve Political Ends with Politically Correct Terms | National Review:
"What would happen if conservatives started to change the words we use for political ends? Throughout history, revolutionaries of all stripes have warped the meaning of words to subvert reality.
And now here we go again, with another effort — spearheaded by the media and universities — to use any linguistic means necessary to achieve political ends.
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  • “Sanctuary city” is a euphemism for the local and state nullification of federal law — a subversive tactic that dates back to the nullification crises during the Andrew Jackson administration and, later, in the years leading up to the Civil War.  
This makes a mockery of the simple constitutional principle that cities and states cannot subversively pick and choose which federal laws to obey.
The term “sanctuary” would never apply to conservative jurisdictions that in similar fashion sought to offer “sanctuary” to those dissidents who disobeyed federal gun registration, income tax, or environmental laws.
College administrators boast of offering counseling and therapeutic help to students and faculty members distraught over the recent election.
They use terms like “divisive” and “polarizing” in describing the election, when in truth they wish to hide from their donors, alumni, and half the country their own abject and one-sided contempt for incoming president-elect Donald Trump.
Note that in the highly emotional elections of 2008 and 2012, universities did not offer commensurate counseling services — because their own preferred candidate won and was thus his victory was not “polarizing.” 
  • Campus “safe space” is another vocabulary distortion... 
  • “Microaggression” is certainly not aggression as usually defined...
Both right-wing Nazi Germany and the left-wing Soviet Union banned old words and created new words that furthered political agendas and warped reality.
Both right-wing Nazi Germany and the left-wing Soviet Union banned old words and created new words that furthered political agendas and warped reality.
  • “Trigger warning” should mean that readers or viewers are advised that literature or media could be obscene or threatening... 
  • Next came the term “undocumented immigrant” — on the theory that the ancient word “alien” (from the Latin word alienus, meaning “belonging to another”) is offensive and also unhelpful to the open-borders project. 
  • Finally, the ambiguous word “migrant” is being used to suggest that there is really no difference between entering and exiting a country under any circumstances. 
The danger of destroying rules of language is that revolutionaries of any stripe can join this crooked game. 
What if a right-wing movement wished to redefine “sanctuary cites” as “subversive cities”? 
Would it be any more biased to call the sites of university post-election counseling services “progressive lamentation centers”?
...To prevent this endless cycle of corrupting words, members of the media and academia should act as our linguistic guardians.
Instead, for short-term political gain, they have abandoned their professional responsibilities to become our worst subverters of language."

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