by Bill Bryson
Almost everyone cites television as a primary or secondary factor. Without question, American children watch a lot of TV. The average child aged two or older spends four hours a day, about a quarter of his or her waking time, plugged to the box. By the time they are eighteen, American children have been exposed to no fewer than 350,000 commercials.10
Alarmed by such figures, Congress in 1990 introduced the Children’s Television Act, mandating that stations show programmes with some educational value. The result, alas, was not better programming but more creative programme descriptions. One station described GI Joe as ‘a pedagogical tool’ that ‘promoted social consciousness’ and familiarized children with ‘the dangers of mass destruction’. Another described Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers as a valuable demonstration of ‘the rewards of team effort’. The Flintstones, meanwhile, was found to promote initiative and family values. A few stations did provide some more demonstrably educational programmes, but a survey found that the great bulk of these were shown before 7 a.m. ‘After that,’ as The Economist noted drily, ‘the stations got down to the scholarly stuff.’11
While there is no doubt something in all of these considerations, it should also be noted that it is easy to give a distorted impression of educational performance. Consider the matter of the American sixth formers who did so poorly on maths tests. What almost all commentators failed to note is that secondary education in America is, for better or worse, very different from that of most other countries. To begin with, the American system does not encourage – or often even permit – sixth-form students to specialize in a core discipline like science, maths or languages. Moreover, American high schools are open to all young people, not just those who have demonstrated academic proficiency. That England and Wales came third or fourth in all the maths tests is, it may be argued, less a testament to the far-sightedness of the British education system than to the rigorousness with which the less apt are excluded. Yet it was against high-flyers such as these that the American students were in virtually every case being compared.
The fact is that by most measures the American educational system is not at all bad. Almost 90 per cent of Americans finish high school and a quarter earn a college degree – proportions that put most other nations to shame. For minorities especially, improvements in recent years have been significant. Between 1970 and 1990 the proportion of black students who graduated from high school increased from 68 per cent to 78 per cent.12 America is educating more of its young, to a higher level, than almost any other nation in the world.
There is of course huge scope for improvement. Any nation where twenty million people can’t read the back of a cornflakes box, or where almost half of all adults believe that human beings were created sometime in the past ten thousand years,13 clearly has its educational workload cut out for it. But the conclusion that American education is on a steep downward slope is, at the very least, unproven.
II
Early in 1993 Maryland discovered that it had a problem when someone noticed that the state motto – Fatti maschii, parole femine (’Manly deeds, womanly words’) – was not only odd and fatuous, but also patently sexist. The difficulty was that it was embossed on a lot of expensive state stationery, and engraved on buildings and monuments, and anyway it had been around for a long time. After much debate, the state’s legislators hit on an interesting compromise. Rather than change the motto, they decided to change the translation. Now when Marylanders see Fatti maschii, parole femine, they are to think, ‘Strong deeds, gentle words.’14 Everyone went to bed happy.
Would that all issues of sensitivity in language were so easily resolved. In fact, apart from the perceived decline of educational standards, almost nothing in recent years has excited more debate or awakened a greater polarity of views than the vaguely all-embracing issue that has come to be known as political correctness.
Since 1991, when the term appears to have sprung wholly formed into the language, journals and newspapers have devoted much space to reports that have ranged for the most part from the mildly derisive to the openly antagonistic. Some have treated it as a kind of joke (a typical example: a Newsweek report in 1991 that pondered whether restaurant customers could expect soon to be brought a womenu by a waitron or waitperson), while others see it as something much graver. Under leading headlines like ‘The New Ayatollahs’ (US News & World Report), ’Politically Correct Speech: An Oxymoron’ (Editor & Publisher) and ‘The Word Police’ (Library Journal), many publications have assayed the matter with a mixture of outrage and worry.
Most of the arguments distil down to two beliefs: that the English language is being shanghaied by people of linguistically narrow views, threatening one of America’s most valued constitutional freedoms, and that their verbal creations are burdening the nation with ludicrously sanitized neologisms that are an embarrassment to civilized discourse.
Two authors, Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf, have made much capital (in every sense of the word) out of these absurdities with their satirical and popular Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook, which offers several hundred examples of absurd euphemisms designed to free the language of the slightest taint of bias. Among the examples they cite: differently hirsute for bald, custody suite for a prison cell, chemically inconvenienced for intoxicated, alternative dentation for false teeth, and stolen nonhuman animal carrier for milkman. What becomes evident only when the reader troubles to scan the notes on sources is that almost all of these excessively cautious terminologies, including those just listed, were made up by the authors themselves.
This might be excused as a bit of harmless, if fundamentally pointless, fun except that these entries have often been picked up by others and transmitted as gospel – for example in a 1992 article in the Nation, which referred to the ‘grotesque neologisms’ of the political correctness movement, and included several examples – involuntarily domiciled for homeless, vocally challenged for mute – that in fact never existed before Beard and Cerf concocted them as amusing padding for their curious book.15
Most of the genuine examples of contrived neologisms that the authors cite are in fact either justifiable on grounds of sensitivity (developmentally challenged for mentally retarded), widely accepted (date rape, pro-choice), never intended by the creator to be taken seriously (terminological inexactitude for lie), the creations of jargon-loving bodies like sociologists or the military (temporary cessation of hostilities for peace), drawn from secondary sources of uncertain reliability (personipulate for manipulate, taken from another book on political correctness, but not otherwise verified), or become ridiculous only when given a barbed definition (suggesting that wildlife management is a common euphemism for ‘killing, or permitting the hunting, of animals’).
What remain after all this are no more than a few – a very few – scattered examples of genuine ridiculousness by extremist users of English, mostly from the women’s movement and mostly involving the removal of ‘man’ from a variety of common terms turning manhole into femhole, menstruate into femstruate, and so on.
I don’t deny that there is much that is worthy of ridicule in the PC movement – name me a sphere of human activity where there is not – and I shall cite some questionable uses presently, but it seems to me that this is a matter that deserves rather more in the way of thoughtful debate and less in the way of dismissive harrumphing or feeble jokes about waitrons and womenus.
All too often overlooked in discussions of the matter is that at the root of the bias-free language movement lies a commendable sentiment: to make language less wounding or demeaning to those whose sex, race, physical condition or circumstances leave them vulnerable to the raw power of words. No reasonable person argues for the general social acceptance of words like nigger, chink, spazz or queer. Virtually everyone agrees that such words are crass, insensitive and hurtful. But when the argument is carried to a more subtle level, where intolerance or contempt is merely implied, the consensus falls to pieces.
In 1992 US News & World Report, in an article headlined ‘A Political Correctness Roundup’, noted that ‘an anti-PC backlash is underway, but there are still plenty of cases of institutionalized silliness’. Among the ‘silliness’ that attracted the magazine’s attention was the case of students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee being encouraged ‘to go to a toy store and investigate the availability of racially diverse dolls’, and of a New York lawyer being censured for calling an adversary in court ‘a little lady’ and ‘little mouse’.16
That students should be encouraged to investigate the availability of racially diverse dolls in a racially diverse society seems to me not the least bit silly. Nor does it seem to me unreasonable that a lawyer should be compelled to treat his courtroom adversaries with a certain measure of respect. (I wonder whether the parties at US News & World Report might have perceived a need for courtesy had the opposing counsel been a male and the words employed been ‘bub’ or ‘dick-head’.) But that of course is no more than my opinion. And that in turn is the overweening problem with any discussion of bias-free usage, that it is fearfully subjective, a minefield of opinions. What follows are, necessarily and inescapably, mine.
That a subtle and pervasive sexual bias exists in English seems to me unarguable. Consider any number of paired sets of words master/ mistress, bachelor/spinster, governor/governess, courtier/courtesan – and you can see in an instant that male words generally denote power and eminence, and that their female counterparts just as generally convey a sense of sub-missiveness or inconsequence. That many of the conventions of English usage referring to all humans as mankind, using a male pronoun in constructions like ‘to each his own’ and ‘everyone has his own view on the matter’ – show a similar tilt towards the male is also, I think, beyond question. The extent of this is not to be underestimated. As Rosalie Maggio points out in her thoughtful Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage, when Minnesota expunged gender-specific language from its law-books, it removed 301 feminine references from state statutes, but almost 20,000 references to men.17 There is no question that English is historically a male-oriented language.
The difficulty, as many critics of political correctness have pointed out, is that the avoidance of gender-specific constructions contorts the language, flouts historical precedent, and deprives us of terms of long-standing utility. People have been using man, mankind, forefathers, founding fathers, a man’s home is his castle, and other such expressions for centuries. Why should we stop now?
For two reasons. First, because venerability is no defence. Ninety years ago moron was an unexceptionable term – indeed, it was a medically precise designation for a particular level of mental acuity. Its loose, and eventually cruel, application banished it from polite society in respect of the subnormal. Dozens of other words that were once unselfconsciously bandied about – piss, cretin, nigger – no longer meet the measure of respectability. Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity.
Moreover, such words are often easily replaced. People, humanity, human beings, society, civilization and many others provide the same service as mankind without ignoring half the populace. Since 1987 the Roman Catholic Church in the United States has used a text, the Revised New Testament of the New American Bible, that is entirely non-sexist. In it, Matthew 4:4 changes from ‘Not on bread alone is man to live’ to ‘One does not live by bread alone.’ Matthew 16:23, ‘You are not judging by God’s standards, but by man’s,’ becomes instead ‘You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.’18 So seamlessly have these changes been incorporated that I daresay few people reading this version of the New Testament would even notice that it is scrupulously non-sexist. Certainly it has not been deprived of any of its beauty or power.
Unfortunately, there remains in English a large body of gender-specific terms – gamesmanship, busman’s holiday, manhole, freshman, fisherman, manslaughter, manmade, first baseman, and others beyond counting – that are far less susceptible to modification. Maggio notes that many such ‘man’ words are in fact unexceptionable because their etymology is unconnected to man the male. Manacle, manicure and manufacture, for example, come from the Latin for hand, and thus are only coincidentally ‘sexist’.19 Tallboy similarly passes muster because the closing syllable comes from the French for wood, ‘bois’. But in many scores of others the link with gender is explicit and irrefutable.
This poses two problems. First there is the consideration that although many gender-based words do admit of alternatives mail carrier for mailman, flight attendant for stewardess – for many others the suggested replacements are ambiguous, unfamiliar, or clumsy, and often all three. No matter how you approach them, utility access hole and sewer hole do not offer the immediacy of recognition that manhole does. Gamestership is not a comfortable replacement for gamesmanship. Frosh, frosher, novice, newcomer, greenhorn, tenderfoot and the other many proposed variants for freshman suffer from either excessive coyness or uncertain comprehensibility.20
That is not to say that this must always be so. Twenty years ago, chair for chairman sounded laughable to most people. Ms, if not absurd, was certainly contentious. Most newspapers adopted it only fitfully and over the protests of white-haired men in visors. Today, both appear routinely in publications throughout the English-speaking world and no one thinks anything of it. There is no reason that gamester-ship and frosh and sewer hole should not equally take up a neutral position in the language. But these things take time. Ms was coined as far back as 1949, but most people had never heard of it, much less begun to use it, until some twenty years later.
More pertinently there is the question of whether such words can always be legitimately termed sexist. Surely the notion that one must investigate a word’s etymology before deciding whether it is permissible suggests that there is something inadequate in this approach. I would submit (though I concede that I can sometimes feel the ice shifting beneath my feet) that just as ‘man’ is not sexist in manipulate or mandible so it is not in any meaningful sense sexist in manhole or Walkman or gamesmanship.
A word that imparts no overt sense of gender – that doesn’t say, ‘Look, this is a word for guys only’ – is effectively neuter. Words after all have only the meanings we give them. Piss is infra dig in polite company not because there is something intrinsically shocking in that particular arrangement of letters but because of the associations with which we have endowed the word. Surely it is excessive to regard a word as ipso facto objectionable because of the historical background of a syllable embedded in it, particularly when that word does not fire gender-sensitive synapses in most people’s minds.
My point becomes somewhat clearer, I hope, when we look at what I think is the greatest weakness of the bias-free usage movement – namely, that often it doesn’t know where to stop. The admirable urge to rid the language of its capacity to harm can lead to a zealousness that is little short of patronizing. Maggio, for instance, cautions us not to ‘use lefthanded metaphorically; it perpetuates subtle but age-old negative associations for those who are physically left-handed’. I would submit that a left-handed person (and I speak as one myself) would have to be sensitive to the point of neurosis to feel personally demeaned by a term like ‘left-handed compliment’.
Similarly she cautions against using black in a general sense – black humour, black eye, black mark, blacksmith (though not, oddly, blackout) – on the grounds that most black words have a negative connotation that subtly reinforces prejudice. Or as she puts it: ‘Avoiding words that reinforce negative connotations of black will not do away with racism, but it can lessen the everyday pain these expressions cause readers.’ I cannot pretend to speak for black people, but it seems to me unlikely that many can have experienced much ‘everyday pain’ from knowing that the person who shoes horses is called a blacksmith.
Even ‘violent expressions and metaphors’ – to kill two birds with one stone, how does that strike you, to knock some
one dead, smash hit, one thing triggers another, to kick around an idea – are to be excluded from our speech on the grounds that they help to perpetuate a culture sympathetic to violence.
Such assertions, I would submit, are not only an excessive distraction from the main issues, but dangerously counterproductive. They invite ridicule, and, as we have seen, there is no shortage of people who ache to provide it.
A final charge often laid against the bias-free speech movement – that it promotes a bias of its own – is also not always easy to refute. Maggio outlaws many expressions like a man’s home is his castle (and rightly in my view) but defends a woman’s work is never done on the grounds that ‘this is particularly true and usually more true than of a man with a paid job and a family’. Just because a sentiment is true doesn’t make it non-sexist. (And anyway it isn’t true.) Others take matters much further. When the University of Hawaii proposed a speech code for students and staff, Mari Matsuda, a professor of law, endorsed the idea but added the truly arresting belief that ‘Hateful verbal attacks upon dominant group members by victims is permissible.’21
With respect, I would suggest that consideration, reasonableness and a sense of fairness are qualities that apply to all members of a speech community, not just to those who hold the reins.
III
So where now for America and its distinctive strain of English? One of the few certainties about the future for America is that it will continue to become, far more than any other developed nation, a multiracial society. By the end of this decade, only about half of Americans entering the workforce will be native born and of European stock. By 2020, if present trends continue, the proportion of non-white and Hispanic Americans will have doubled, while the white population will have remained almost unchanged. By 2050 the number of Asian Americans will have quintupled.
