That's pretty much the point I'm at all the time. Fuck politeness. Also, I don't think it's just a 'disguise'--I think it can be hugely condescending, too. And, well, this:
"Forget Stalinization or Logic 101-level equivocations, though. There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact--in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for equality itself--of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions [which is 'correct' (prescriptions = prescriptions of correctness, b/c in actuality it's pretty arbitrary) English usage, which is actually a dialect of English that is basically middle or upper class, white, written English] ever were. Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed using taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PC progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as 'low-income' or 'economically disadvantaged' or pre-prosperous' rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates. (Not to mention that strict codes of egalitarian euphemism serve to burke the sorts of painful, unpretty, and sometimes offensive discourse that in a pluralistic democracy lead to actual political change rather than symbolic political change. In other words, PCE acts as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.)
"As a practical matter, I strongly doubt whether a guy who has four small kids and makes $12,000 a year feels more empowered or less ill-used by a society that carefully refers to him as 'economically disadvantaged' rather than 'poor.' Were I he, in fact, I'd probably find the PCE term insulting--not just because it's patronizing (which it is) but because it's hypocritical and self-serving in a way that oft-patronized people tend to have really good subliminal antennae for. The basic hypocrisy about usages like 'economically disadvantaged' and 'differently abled' is that PCE advocates believe the beneficiaries of these terms' compassion and generosity to be poor people and people in wheelchairs, which again omits something that everyone knows but nobody except the scary vocabulary-tape ads' [ads for improving your vocab to sound like an elite college grad] announcer ever mentions--that part of any speaker's motive for using a certain vocabulary is always the desire to communicate stuff about himself. Like many forms of Vogue Usage, PCE functions primarily to signal and congratulate certain virtues in the speaker--scrupulous egalitarianism, concern for the dignity of all people, sophistication about the political implications of language--and so serves the self-regarding interests of PC far more than it serves any of the persons or groups renamed." -DFW
no subject
"Forget Stalinization or Logic 101-level equivocations, though. There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact--in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for equality itself--of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions [which is 'correct' (prescriptions = prescriptions of correctness, b/c in actuality it's pretty arbitrary) English usage, which is actually a dialect of English that is basically middle or upper class, white, written English] ever were. Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed using taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PC progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as 'low-income' or 'economically disadvantaged' or pre-prosperous' rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates. (Not to mention that strict codes of egalitarian euphemism serve to burke the sorts of painful, unpretty, and sometimes offensive discourse that in a pluralistic democracy lead to actual political change rather than symbolic political change. In other words, PCE acts as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.)
"As a practical matter, I strongly doubt whether a guy who has four small kids and makes $12,000 a year feels more empowered or less ill-used by a society that carefully refers to him as 'economically disadvantaged' rather than 'poor.' Were I he, in fact, I'd probably find the PCE term insulting--not just because it's patronizing (which it is) but because it's hypocritical and self-serving in a way that oft-patronized people tend to have really good subliminal antennae for. The basic hypocrisy about usages like 'economically disadvantaged' and 'differently abled' is that PCE advocates believe the beneficiaries of these terms' compassion and generosity to be poor people and people in wheelchairs, which again omits something that everyone knows but nobody except the scary vocabulary-tape ads' [ads for improving your vocab to sound like an elite college grad] announcer ever mentions--that part of any speaker's motive for using a certain vocabulary is always the desire to communicate stuff about himself. Like many forms of Vogue Usage, PCE functions primarily to signal and congratulate certain virtues in the speaker--scrupulous egalitarianism, concern for the dignity of all people, sophistication about the political implications of language--and so serves the self-regarding interests of PC far more than it serves any of the persons or groups renamed."
-DFW