Made In America (67 page)

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.

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.