Political Correctness
- Created by: Caitriona Doherty
- Created on: 28-03-14 10:24
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Political Correctness (PC)
- Seeks to reduce and remove the offence that language can cause to particular individuals...
- ...through prejudice and discrimination
- Language can play a large part in causing offence and reinforcing inequality
The History
- Emerged in 1970s America and shared ground with the feminist movement
- Gender representation was initially its main focus
- Its profile only grew and its influence spread to the UK
- By the early 1990s it was being used to make language neutral, and any issues of representation in social groupings was being taken into consideration
- PC was heavily satirised and by the late 1990s the term had lost much of its credibility
Swift and Miller
- Noted the absence of a non-gender-marked, third person, singular pronoun
- This resulted in the masculine form being used for everybody
- E.g. "every student must bring a pen to his examination"
- Swift and Miller created pronouns that could refer to either gender - "tey", "ter" and "tem"
- These essentially took the structure of the existing…
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