Re: "politically correct," we're both wrong, buy you may be righter than I am.
>>Politically Correct
Another urban myth of our times is that the concept of politically correct was invented in the 1990s by conservatives who wished to lambaste liberals. The term and the concept are both actually much older.
The original sense of politically correct was as a term used to address mixed bodies of people so as not to offend. In 1793, Justice James Wilson in Chisholm v. Georgia used the term to distinguish between the phrases United States and people of the United States (he believed the latter to be politically correct). In 1936, H.V. Morton's In the Steps of Saint Paul referred to the term Galatians as a politically correct way to address anyone subject to Roman rule. In 1955, a translator for Czeslaw Milosz, applied the term to orthodox interpretations of the holocaust in the English version of one of Milosz's works.
The second, and current, definition arose in 1970. This sense the OED2 defines as:
a body of liberal or radical opinion, esp. on social matters, characterized by the advocacy of approved causes or views, and often by the rejection of language, behaviour, etc. considered discriminatory or offensive.
The first cite of this second sense is in 1970's Black Woman by T.Cade. Other early cites include 1975's P.Gerber's Willa Cather and a Facts on File entry regarding lesbian politics. 1978 saw the National Journal use the term. In 1984 it was the Women's Studies International Forum VII that used the term. 1987 saw the Nation pick it up. 1991 it was the Village Voice and 1993 the Utne Reader. The OED2 does not even include a use of the term from a conservative source.
The converse politically incorrect first appeared in 1947, in Nabokov's Bend Sinister. In 1977 the Washington Post used it to paraphrase as statement by the African Liberation Day Coalition.
The abbreviation PC first appeared in the New York Times in 1986.<<
wordorigins.org
Nevertheless, I never hear anybody but conservatives use the term, and always as a sneer. |
