Dangerous Dictionaries
28th December 2022
For decades, progressives have focussed their attention on the restriction of free speech. This is crucial when you favour emotion over facts, because it helps to deny the others access to, well, facts. Since the 1990s, political correctness has shrunk the ever-narrowing boundaries of ‘acceptable speech,’ under the guise of not causing offense, naturally. Fast-forward 30 years, and such compassion has morphed into ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crime’ laws, for anyone brave enough to test such matters out in court. For those who doubt the seriousness of the matter, Europe is currently awash with such sham trials—the latest being the investigation and possible 3-year imprisonment of filmmaker Tonje Gjevjon, for the crime of saying that “Men cannot be lesbians.”
More recently, the Left have shifted tactics, infiltrating the lexicon with political alternatives to existing words which require no updating. Consider the rivers of ‘neopronouns’ (e.g. ‘ze’ and ‘zir’), which lend ill-warranted authority to the notion that biological sex is not binary; aided and abetted by the fact that one in five of us already know someone who uses these newly invented pronouns seriously. Or how about the umbrella term ‘people of colour,’ which purports to be an inoffensive term for non-whites, but is in fact heavily-loaded to secure priority status without having to earn it. This is perhaps best exemplified by the outraged objections of ‘racism’ to legitimate criticism of Meghan Markle (a woman you’d be hard-pushed to pick out of a Downton Abbey line-up), while identical criticism of Prince Harry goes unchallenged.