Last month NASA ended the career of the Galileo space probe by smashing it into Jupiter. As a reporter on National Public Radio noted, Galileo was an "unpersonned" space craft. Only language was injured.
An "unmanned" spacecraft would, of course, be accurate but not politically correct. This sort of nonsense proceeds from militant feminism, which sees gender bias lurking on every hand, and regards the English language as an instrument of repression. The extent to which this ideology has permeated educational institutions is evident in The Language Police, a recent book by historian Diane Ravitch.
She documents how the National Organization for Women, founded in 1966, began testifying against books they deemed unacceptable and lobbied publishers to strike what they called "sexist" language from textbooks. The feminists demanded that girls and boys, men and women, be represented on a 50-50 basis.
In 1972, the group Women on Words and Images issued the pamphlet Dick and Jane as Victims: Sex Stereotyping in Children's Readers, purporting to document the bias. The following year, feminists attacked every reading textbook considered for adoption in California. Textbook publishers proved remarkably compliant with the gender warriors, much more so than with conservative critics, whose complaints the author also documents.
Soon books were showing males cooking, reading poetry, chasing butterflies, and paying fastidious attention to their appearance. Females were shown working with electricity, solving math problems, and driving trucks. New York even trained and certified word police through the New York State Education Department Sensitivity Reviewers.
One of these sensitive types wanted to drop the word "score" from "fourscore and seven years ago" in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address because "score" suggests winners and losers. The term "founding fathers" was considered sexist and there was a push to drop "conceived in liberty" because it suggested birth and death. Works of literature did not fare well either.
Aesop's fable "The Fox and the Crow" drew fire because the crow is female, vain, and foolish while the fox is male, intelligent, and clever. So a reading committee proposed to switch the gender of the fox and crow.
Writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Robert W. Service, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shakespeare, and Mark Twain have given way to Sandra Cisneros, Toni Cade Bambara, Julia Alvarez, and Naomi Shihab Nye, mostly unknown to the public but politically correct in the lucrative world of textbooks. The Language Police also helpfully compiles a glossary of banned words, usages, stereotypes, and topics.
Actress and anchorman are banned as sexist, replaced by actor, anchor person, or newscaster. Seaman, seamstress, and songstress suffer similar attacks. Regatta and yacht are banned as elitist. Mentally retarded becomes "person with mental retardation." The rule seems to be never use two words where four will do.
Snow cone falls victim to strictures of regional bias, and should be replaced with "flavored ice." Snowman becomes "snowperson." A story about someone in the mountains supposedly discriminates against those in the flatlands.
By current standards, references to great men in history should be "people who make history." Book titles such as Man and His World are unacceptable. Images to avoid include a mother running a vacuum cleaner, cooking, doing laundry, or carrying food. Also to be avoided is a mother comforting children and giving sympathy. Men are not to be shown working in construction, as police, lawyers, plumbers, or physicians.
What drives this distortion is militant feminism, shock troops of the larger division of political correctness. Contrary to this orthodoxy, no one is repressed if an announcer refers to an unmanned spacecraft or writes My Fair Lady or Of Mice and Men. One can have some fun mocking this sort of thing but, ultimately, it's no joke.
Ideology has consequences. In this case, they are a shrinking vocabulary, a distorted view of history, insensitivity to reality, and impoverishment of the mind. I join Diane Ravitch in her call for us to "fire the language police."
Sally Pipes is President and CEO at the California-based Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. She can be reached via email at spipes@pacificresearch.org.
