Just What is (and what is wrong with) Political Correctness?

According to Wiki, we all have a peg to hang a hat on. The first usage is purportedly the SCOTUS in 1793. Since about 1980, the right has used it as a ridiculing club.

The contemporary use of the term political correctness is said to derived from Marxist-Leninist vocabulary to describe the Party Line. ^{[1][1] Ellis, Frank (2004). Political correctness and the theoretical struggle. Auckland: Maxim Institute.}

The term was transformed and used jokingly within the Left by the early 1980s, possibly earlier. ^{[citation needed]} In this context, the phrase was applied to either an over-commitment to various left-wing political causes, especially within Marxism or the feminist movement; or to a tendency by some of those dedicated to these causes to be more concerned with rhetoric and vocabulary than with substance.The term again became popular in the early 1990s as part of a conservative challenge to curriculum and teaching methods on college campuses in the United States (D'Souza 1991; Berman 1992; Schultz 1993; Messer Davidow 1993, 1994; Scatamburlo 1998).

Robin, do you feel oppressed to the de-gendering of words, like using "chair" or "chairperson" instead of "chairman", "mail carrier" instead of "mail man", "police officer" instead of "police man", or "flight attendant" instead of "stewardess"?

In Early English MAN was gender neutral. For indicating a particular gender it had to be marked with a gender noun[Examples removed]MAN was also used in such indefinite expressions as no man, any man and every man, in which it was gradually replaced by one or body in Middle and Early Modern English when the meaning of MAN as referring to a ”human being of male sex’ gained more currency than the parallel neutral meaning ”human being’ (see Raumolin-Brunberg and Kahlas-Tarkka 1997: 72-73).As the second element in compound nouns, -MAN seems to have been well on the way to developing into a gender-neutral suffix, with its vowel weakening into a schwa. This is said to happen particularly in combinations of type 1a (fireman, etc.), which indicate a member of a specific professional group and which are said to be very productive (Quirk et al. 1986: 1574). This applies particularly to combinations of early origin which have become more established. As a suffix, -MAN would have rivalled other agent suffixes of native and foreign origin (-er, -or, -ist, etc.), cf. in combinations with a native N1 (fishman vs. fisher, etc.).The development was halted when the feminist movement started to pay extra attention to the masculinity of the element -MAN around the middle of the 20th century. This movement has been occupied particularly with trying to establish female counterparts and gender-neutral equivalents to MAN-compounds. Some of these, both earnest and jocular, are listed in Table 2, as given by Beard and Cerf for American English.

"flight attendant" instead of "stewardess"

So am I, but calling a female law enforcement offical a "policeman" is ignoring the modern meaning of "man".She's not a man as we use the word today.

"Man" and "guy", and "he" are not gender neutral terms, regardless of how either of them were used in the past.

In 1972, two sociologists at Drake University, Joseph Schneider and Sally Hacker, decided to test the hypothesis that man is generally understood to embrace woman.

Half the students were assigned chapter headings like ``Social Man'', ``Industrial Man'', and ``Political Man''.

Analysis of the pictures selected revealed that in the minds of students of both sexes use of the word man evoked, to a statistically significant degree, images of males only

The authors concluded, `This is rather convincing evidence that when you use the word man generically, people do tend to think male, and tend not to think female.

Drake University