W is for - Warning! When Wise, Witty, and Wonderful Words are Wasted and Wrecked by Witless Wingnuts, and Wacky Wonks Who Would Wrest and Wrench them from our Working Word stock and replace them With Worthless Weasel Words, our Writing is Weakened. We are Worsened When our Wisdom Wanes,.

I remember one day about 40 years ago when I was a partner in a contracting business with my father.  We were sitting on the ground having lunch when he told me that a new law had just been enacted that made employers personally responsible and liable for the “hate speech” of their employees while at work.

I told him he was crazy. This is America and we have freedom of speech. There’s no way that we could be responsible for what our employees say.  Well, he wasn’t crazy; he was right.

All this Politically Corrected stuff has me freaking out. Think about how nutty it is. Today we are all allowed to say, “the N word,” but we are not allowed to actually say the “N” word (that is unless you ARE an N word, then it’s okay.  It’s like the Q word.  We aren’t allowed to use the perfectly good word that, for at least a couple hundred years, meant strange or odd in reference to something or someone that is "strange or odd."  Instead, we are now forced to use another word that used to mean happy or merry but has been stolen from us and redefined.  However, if you are a person who is now described as happy or merry (even though you probably aren’t really happy or merry), then you are allowed to use the Q word in reference to yourself and other strange or odd people. Get it?  I didn’t think so; neither do I.

The result of modern, Politically Correct speech, regardless of all the good intentions, is that we are losing our language and our ability to communicate effectively. It has been estimated that William Shakespeare had a working vocabulary of about 54,000 words. In comparison, most people in America today have a vocabulary of fewer than 2500 words (and I think that might be a very generous overstatement). A dumbed down system of education coupled together with a dumbed down language has resulted in a plethora of perfectly good words being lost.

A couple decades ago, David Howard, head of the Office of Public Advocate for D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, made the national news for describing his own administration of a particular fund as "niggardly" in the presence of two of his staff members. The dumbed down products of our dumbed down system of public education came unglued. The race-baiting reverends piled on and exploited the opportunity to turn the comment into hate speech. In the end, Howard lost his job, and the English language lost a perfectly good word.

Was the word, niggardly, a racist word?  No, it just sounds like another word. The word "niggard" predated the N-word in the English language by at least a couple hundred years. The most speculated origin is Scandinavian, and the root is conjectured to imply closing, tightening, or pinching.  That could be related to the origin of phrases like “tight fisted” or “penny pinching.”

Regardless, truth doesn't matter much to the PC crowd and Howard’s intentions (along with the fact that he is not racist) were irrelevant.  The word has been redefined, senselessly and incorrectly, and is now considered hate speech and can get you fired simply because some illiterate people are always looking for some reason to feel offended.

And the list of words, banned by the PC Nazis, continues to grow.  When you begin to imagine how thin-skinned, and uneducated people might “feel offended,” there is no end to the nonsensical speculations about insensitive words. A few years ago, a New York public school educator named Dennis Walcott, compiled a new list of 50 words that He wants banned from public school tests. The word list contains really, REALLY awful, hurtful words like “birthday, vacations, swimming pools, rock and roll, television, and video games.”  Fortunately, for the time being, public outrage thwarted his attempt to vilify those words. Ironically though, the vulgar F word and the S word, among other shocking vulgarities are not outlawed.

Personally, I have made a deliberate decision to reject PC speech as much as possible because "Words Mean Things."  And if that offends some people, I don’t care.

Probably the biggest problem is that much Truth from and about the Word of God has been deemed to be offensive and therefore inappropriate, and in some cases, illegal speech.

Don’t be fearful. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.”  Colossians 3:16

 

(Ralph M. Petersen and his wife, Kathy, are the owners of the OLDE TOWNE EMPORIUM at 212 E. Main St. in Rogersville, Tennessee.  Your comments are welcome. You may contact him at ralphmpetersen@gmail.com or by phone at (951) 321 9235.)