A most telling example of linguistic political correctness appeared in a recent report from Italy on the ruling by the Supreme Court there that a rape victim must have assisted in the removal of her jeans, and that therefore she wasn't raped. Well, most of us have discovered some time in our lives how disagreeably unsheddable jeans can be; on the other hand, terror can induce us to perform tasks far more daunting and complex than the removal of denims. A poor ruling, judges: though they don't seem have been resorting to the barbarous "she was asking for it," mentality, which the headlines in certain cross-channel tabloids suggested.
That aside, there was a term in this particular report which I'm inclined to suspect wasn't employed in his original despatch. It was this: "The role of women in modern Italian society is complex, based on a divided-self type national psyche . . . " Divided-self type national society? You mean "schizophrenic"? Probably, and the writer might well have said as much, but journalists in this country long ago learnt that if they used "schizophrenic" metaphorically, the wrath of the Schizophrenic Society will fall on their heads, with ringing accusations of being indifferent to the agonies of the schizophrenically ill.
Correct and incorrect
This is stupid. There's no reason why the the term "schizophrenic" should be immune to casual and literally incorrect figurative usage anyway: but as it happens, it isn't literally incorrect. Quite the reverse. It means precisely "split mind", from the Greek, skhizein, to split, and phrenos, the mind. It is in fact the diagnostic name, rather than the popular usage of it, which is incorrect. Rather like malaria, caused, it was believed by bad air rather than peckish mosquitoes, the causes of the condition were incorrectly diagnosed, giving us a wholly misleading term for the disease.
Schizophrenia is a dreadfully distressing affliction: but noone is taking it any more lightly by its popular use to describe a divided mind: no other term will do, as that cumbrously laborious locution, "a divided-self type national pysche" exemplifies. When we say our roads are paralysed, we do not make light of the paraplegic: when we casually say someone is paranoid, we are intending no disrespect to those haunted by genuine psychopathologies; when we talk about cancer in societies, we surely mean no levity at the expense of those waging the good fight against malevolent tumours.
"Schizophrenia" - so far as I know - is a home-grown political correctness, which makes it unusual: most PC neologisms come from the US, home of the term "native-American", which has in the past couple of years been sweeping all before it (except in the US, where Indians have decided that they want to keep the Bureau managing their affairs called, well, Indian).
In this country I recently read of someone going to work amongst native Americans in Canada. In where? In Canada. So should they not be native Canadians? And if we are going to salve our consciences terminologically at the abominable fate which befell American Indians, might we not be a little bit more linguistically sensitive? Why should these people be named after one of the very Europeans who brought them ruin, Amerigo Vespucci? If we are going to give them a politically correct name, might it not derive from a term in their own primarily Algonquian or Athabascan languages - from the former, by the way, comes the authentically native word "Canada"? Or is it simpler to import witless Americanisms?
Non-judgmental torpor
Laziness is hardly confined to languages; a kind of non-judgmental moral torpor has increasingly infused journalese in recent years. In order not to offend anybody, in order not to seem to be partisan, the term "terrorist" is virtually outlawed in US-run news agencies. And there's no doubt the one-sided use of the term to describe military irregulars in a civil conflict does give rise to anomalies: who precisely were the terrorists on Bloody Sunday in Derry?
But removing the term terrorist entirely merely diminishes our vocabulary; it certainly doesn't solve our terminological problems. I recently read this enchanting news report from New Delhi about attacks on Christians: "Armed Hindu activists caned and gangraped nuns in a church-run kindergarten in . . . central India. Despite eyewitness identifications, the police made no arrests."
We may briefly pause to contemplate the quite abominable evil here - nuns gangraped and flogged in a kindergarten; pause some more to contemplate the uproar in the Indian Parliament had Hindu holy women been so treated in Europe while the police did nothing; and then finally linger over those sublimely non-judgmental words "Hindu activists."
Philosophical complicity
But far from being non-judgmental, by its embrace of linguistic neutralism with one word, "activist", the doublet has thus contaminated another, "Hindu". These evil men were not acting on behalf of Hinduism, any more than the Shankill butchers were acting on behalf of the Book of Common Prayer, or the perpetrators of the Whitecross massacre were activists for transubstantiation or the Tridentine mass. Such men - men, mark you - Hindu, Protestant or Catholic, were activists for nothing other than tribal hatred, sexual fascism and good old fashioned sectarian terrorism. Their deeds were departures from their religions, not expressions of them. Politically correct linguistical neutrality conceals that greater truth; to seek neutral language for such atrocities inevitably leads to a philosophical complicity with them.