Political Correctness is worse than a lie.
A lie is a straightforward attempt to deceive a victim. It almost honest by contrast. Political Correctness is a corrupt attempt to poison thought and speech, and to impose upon the nobility and courtesy of its victims to get them to deceive themselves. A frequent side effect of PC jargon is that it renders rational conversation difficult, indirect, or even impossible.
Innocent and well meaning people are actually fooled by this simple trick. Sad to say, most people think like magicians. They believe in the rule of true names. They think (or rather, they feel) that when they are calling one thing by another name, that the actual nature of reality changes. They put themselves in a position where they can no longer talk about real things. Words are severed from referents.
Worse yet, magicians of this type resist any attempt to define their terms, because their ego and self-esteem are built into their false (often deliberately false) verbal models of the surrounding world. I speak from sad experience: an examination of recent entries on this journal will display the verbal magicians in all their smoggy evasions and self-righteous self-satisfaction.
Every thinker since Confucius and Socrates emphasized that calling things by their right names is the basis not only of logic, but of morality. Attempts to substitute euphemism or misleading expressions for the right names of things are not only deceptive, but illogical. It is both a moral and an intellectual error.
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