"The Word Police" by Michiko Kakutani, 3/4/2017

In the NYT article “The Word Police”, Michiko Kakutani discusses political correctness, the intentions behind it, and the toll it could take on American society. The impulse behind politically correct language, Kakutani points out, is honorable. It represents an ultimate dream of a more just, inclusive society without racism, sexism, and prejudice. However, the methods the word police uses to accomplish this utopia is, ironically, discriminative and ridiculous. The center of Kakutani’s critique is “The Bias-Free Word Finder, a Dictionary of Nondiscriminative Language” by Rosaline Maggio. Kakutani provides examples from the volume of how language activists advice people to speak and write. Then, she ridicules these suggestions by using rhetorical questioning and sarcasm. As the word “lion” becomes the “monarch of the jungle” and the “black eye” get preplaces with “mouse”, Kakutani questions whether the classics, such as “Pet Sematary”, would meet a similar fate as “Animal Companion Graves.” By maintaining a sarcastic tone, Kakutani encourages the audience to question word police’s actions. Why does language police allow one group of people to use a word, but denies another group the same opportunity? Who gets to decide which words are offensive and need to be substituted? Is the practice of “word correction” depriving people of their freedom of speech? These are some of the questions that Kakutani considers in her critique, and in the end, arrives at this conclusion -- political correctness is nothing more than a comical attempt at controlling the way people express themselves. It is a form of censorship, she argues, a way of suppressing what one finds inappropriate in the name of inclusive utopia. At the end of the article, Kakutani includes a list of bias-free substitutions to give the audience an opportunity to consider – is politically correct language really the future they want for American society?