ABSTRACT
Although the phrase ‘political correctness’ came from Mao Tse Tung’s Little Red Book, the political correctness movement sprang up in the USA in the late 1960s and grew rapidly (Dunant 1994). It developed out of a debate within American university campus culture, and addressed the complex issue of how we unconsciously discriminate against certain kinds of people by embedding discrimination in the way we speak and write. It attempted to find linguistic routes by which people would not be labelled pejoratively. Thus someone who was small was vertically challenged, or a person of diminished stature; bald men became follicly challenged or hair disadvantaged; fat people were said to be possessing an alternative body image; people were neither crippled nor disabled, they were differently abled; blind people became visually impaired; slums became inner city areas, poor people became disadvantaged; drunks became chemically inconvenienced, drug addicts became drug dependent;
prostitutes became sex workers, sex care providers and physical welfare workers; evil became morally different (Beard and Cerf 1992).
