The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 266 No 7153 p852-856
June 23, 2001

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Onlooker

Truth has many sides

From Mr P. A. Hardy, MRPharmS

In deriding political correctness for diminishing language and communication (PJ, June 9, p768), “Onlooker” aligns with the American right. Whether this gives him comfort may depend on whether he concurs with the accompanying analysis made in America that political correctness is a Marxist revolution.

It is a shame then that his examples seem largely to be unconnected with political correctness. The occupational titles surely date from the 1975 Equal Opportunities Act 1975, and “senior citizen” predates 1990 by a long margin.

The argument that political correctness is designed to obscure truth is specious; when Anita Roddick insists on speaking of the “majority world” it confronts us with a human truth which the economic term “Third World” overlooks. Political correctness should not proscribe language but should challenge lazy stereotypes of the kind Findlay Hickey points out (PJ, June 16, p820).

But most importantly his own desire to be able to call a spade a spade demonstrates that language cannot have its meaning confined. When Aristophanes wrote of calling “a fig a fig”, and a “kneading-trough a kneading-trough” (Erasmus translated “kneading-trough” as “digging-tool” and thus was our usage born), the connotation was always a negative one, for example to describe the “rude and clownish” Macedonians. Over time this association with the vice of brusqueness has become the virtue of frankness, perhaps demonstrating that every truth can have many sides.

Paul Hardy
Wakefield, West Yorkshire

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