ABSTRACT
The best-selling right wing text by Mary Katharine Ham and Guy Benson, The End of Discussion, sets forth the premise that political debate and rational argumentation in contemporary United States culture is being threatened by the liberal left’s outrage machine. The distrust of words to line up with intention in a “politically correct” culture produces an ironic tension between language and effect. The focus of “PC” language, and the belief that changing language will change culture presents a “narrow focus on one relatively small part of this pervasive process of cultural and discursive intervention”. Approaching “culture as a ‘signifying system’”, political correctness is a label assigned to a cultural intervention, that, at least in part, sought to change inequity in language and discourse.
