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

PÁL CSONTOS IS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS POLITICALLY CORRECT? A TOUR ALONG THE ALLEYWAYS OF THE SHAMBLES CALLED POLITICAL CORRECTNESS For a start, a word about the adequateness of the sub-title might not be amiss. Anyone who has been in the little meandering street in York, England, that is called The Shambles would associate with this term a meaning that not only refers to the original functional quality of the place but also to its similarity to a maze where one can fairly easily lose their way and become frightened by the condition of seeming "complete disorder or ruin," to use the phrase offered by The American Heritage Dictionary as part of the first meaning.

1 It is in this sense that I thought 'shambles' might constitute a most appropriate term to denote the kind of ambiguity the issue of political correctness evokes in me. By the way, as the reader will have noticed in one of the previous sentences, for want of a more appealing choice, I use the plural third person pronoun when the gender of the general subject is not necessary to be made clear." This might also hint at the fact that the present study is not going to be a hundred per cent politically correct. In fact, what I am going to do is simply pinpoint a 1 Sec meanings 3 and 4 in The American Heritage Dictionary: Second College Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, n.d.): 1126. " This reflects a decision I have made despite the availability of several recommendable ambigenic or epicene pronoun possibilities: one... one; s/hc; etc. The one that might seem most appealing to some radical parties is 'h'orsh'it,' "an artful contraction of 'he or she or it.' offered by Joel Forbes in 1975 as a genderfree pronoun" (Beard 32)—a choice 1 understandably did not want to risk in the present study. 21