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Let me say this about that.

American poet James Riley is credited with creating the so-called “duck test” when he wrote: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, you probably got yourself a duck.”  Riley, who died in 1916, worried about the overuse of weasel-words decades before America became paranoid about calling things what they really are and spawning the age of political correctness.

Use of politically correct language in America has reached epidemic proportions.  We are so terrified of offending anyone that we have made up a completely different    language to describe common traits.  Nowadays it seems that we are perfectly willing to bomb the bejeezus out of anyone, but God help us if we hurt their feelings.

When I started this blog, my goal was to promote the use of your brain for something other than as a “spacer” to keep your ears from flapping together in a high wind.  To accomplish this goal, I have initiated a campaign to call things what they are.  Part of this campaign is aimed at identifying the hidden meaning behind politically correct bull-crap (uh, I mean, bovine bio-mass).

You would think that some of the hardest people to offend would be the dead ones.  Apparently not.  The mortuary industry has coined a number of ways to describe their clientele.  The most sensitive one seems to be “terminally inconvenienced”.  The insurance industry describes these dead folks as “actuarially mature”.

One of the primary goals of politically correct terms is to describe losers in such a way as to make them sound like winners.  There are two groups of people that are particularly prone to this aspect of political correctness….horse breeders and parents of stupid kids.

Two competing horse breeders in Kentucky had race horses they were trying to sell to a wealthy Saudi prince.  The prince notified both owners that he had no time to come to Kentucky to see the horses in person and asked them to hold a race.  The winning horse would be purchased and shipped back to Saudi Arabia.  The race was held and one of the horses won by five lengths.  When the Saudi prince called to see who won the race, he happened to get the owner of the losing horse.  “Sir, what was the outcome of the race?”  the prince asked.  The owner of the losing horse replied  “Your highness, my horse came in second and the other fellow’s horse came in next to last.”

No American parent will admit they have a stupid kid, even though most of them do.  They explain their offspring’s failures in terminology of  success such as “achievement of deficiencies”  and their stupidity as “self paced cognitive ability”. 

My wife has no compunction about using descriptive terms, especially when it comes to her description of me.  She calls me her “Old Fart”.  This is a highly politically incorrect term, of course, so I have constructed a politically correct substitution : “Chronologically Gifted Male Having Unleashed ‘Puff’ the Methane Dragon.”

And, that’s all I have to say about that.

Shambo