Tips for non-politically correct speech

Psst. Wanna learn how to talk un-PC? This VFR discussion from 2002 offers some suggestions.

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Russell W. writes:

When I started law school almost 3 years ago, I was just baffled at the way the legal world used “she” and “her” as the generic pronoun. Professors in class, scholarly legal articles, many recent court opinions, and generally everything connected with legal academia followed this rule. I found it quite outrageous. Not so much because of the fact that saying “she” and not “he” was in some way inherently wrong in and of itself, but because of the startlingly conscious and disturbing social engineering which I saw in it. I never protested, but never used when I spoke. I would have felt ridiculous doing so. And throughout school I never failed to notice when it when someone used it. It always created a slight buzz of cognitive dissonance.

Fast forward to the current day. I’m currently studying for the California Bar exam, and I’m taking one of the many commercially offered review classes. It was just last week as a professor was giving a lecture that he was using the “she” generic pronoun rule, and I hadn’t been noticing it. I’m not sure for how long, but I had come to unconsciously accept it as the natural way of speaking! Just plain creepy.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 05, 2006 07:19 PM | Send