Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. [Vol. 5.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 25)

Studies - Pál Csontos: Is Political Correctness Politically Correct? A Tour along the Alleyways of the Shambles Called Political Correctness

traditional exclusive usage of masculine third person personal pronoun forms [someone... he], gender-specific nouns [businessman; mailman], false generic terms [mankind; "all men are created equal"], the biassed and unfair connotations attached to noun-pairs like [bachelor-spinster], etc. The term "sexism" was coined in the late sixties, and it was the first step in acknowledging the existence and extent of the phenomenon.

3 Efforts to eradicate sexist manifestations and to revise a sizable proportion of language rules and customs have been around since the same time, but have been on the increase recently, which I plan to illustrate further down.

4 In order to demonstrate what hazards there might occur in the revision of certain language rules and customs, I will go back to Mind you, Hungarian, despite its gender-free personal pronouns, is also sexist to a considerable extent. (Cf. collocations of the kind "férjhez megy;" "feleségül vesz;" "az ember...;" "Uramisten;" etc.) 1 Let me just refer here to the Newsweek article "Religion: God Gets the He-ho" and a reader's response it elicited. In the article author Kenneth L. Woodward, in a seemingly rejoiceful tone, announces that "readers who find the Bible sexist, racist, elitist and insensitive to the physically challenged, [should] take heart" because OUP's new inclusive language version of the New Testament and Psalms has "cleaned up God's act." In the new version, "God is no longer 'Father' and Jesus is no longer 'Son.' The hierarchical title of 'Lord' is excised as an archaic way to address God. Nor does God (male pronouns for the deity have been abolished) rule a 'kingdom'; as the editors explain, the word has a 'blatantly androcentric and patriarchal character.' darkness has been banished in connection with evil because the editors fear it may remind some of the readers of 'darkies.' Even God's metaphorical right hand has been amputated out of deference to the left-handed." The uneasy feeling one is left with about the further examples Woodward cites is that he might or might not be quite earnest in staling that "[t]he King James Bible never looked so good" (52). The Reverend J. Steven Reynolds letter to the editor in the October 9, 1995 issue of the same magazine opts for the former choice and purports to put things into the right perspective when it contends that this "is another example of political correctness gone amok." In it the reverend reasons that "[fjirst of all, Jesus was male. Being God in human form, he had to come to earth as one sex or ihe other, and it just so happened that was male fy/c]

—just as his mother was female. Second, the term 'darkness' has nothing to do with racism. The concept of light and dark are major themes in describing the spiritual realities of good versus evil. Light was used in representing good because one could see and was more prone to tripping over the effects of evil. This has nothing to do with the color of a person's skin" (10B). 23