ABSTRACT
There is much to support the claim that whatever becomes big in the US will arrive in the UK a few years later – from standardized testing in schools and colleges to the McDonaldization of society at large (for a fuller discussion see Hyland 1994 and Ritzer 2000 respectively). With regard to political correctness there is no doubt that discussions of the appropriateness of speech codes and codes of conduct have made their way to the UK. There has also been much discussion of political correctness in the leading weekly newspaper for academics, the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES), and some authors (e.g. Furedi 1997; Hayes, in Lea et al. 2003) have invoked much of the conceptual language found in earlier literature in the US, such as in A Nation of Victims (Sykes 1992) and Culture of Complaint (Hughes 1993). The tone of much of the discussion is disparaging, and, in the case of some popular media articles, implies that political correctness is as unwelcome an import to the UK as a McDonald’s restaurant would be in a leafy English village.
