I could never understand or tolerate PC verbiage anyway, and since I don't live in the US, I don't have to live with it either. The "new" words eventually become slurs or jokes themselves, so it is a total waste of time.
The people at the Washington Post are being smartless about this. The strip doesn't seem offensive at all.
Just as an aside, where I live (Puerto Rico) took a small dose of the PC revolution of the 90's, but only a small dose. Because Spanish is a language with grammatical gender for all things, not just those with a biological or self-identifying gender, the change went in the opposite direction. Words that had not previously had a feminine version like doctor (doctor) or judge (juez) were given doctora and jueza. The other crap that came along with the PC revolution like the criminalizing of hun, sweetie and dear (a class of words that is much larger in Spanish than in English) never took place, thank goodness.
It's because English no longer has grammatical gender (it once did), so neutrality is seen as the majority norm for nouns, but in languages that have gender as a grammatical and syntactic function of each and every single noun - animate, inanimate, doesn't matter - you can't go gender-neutral without altering the function of the entire language.
looove 'smartless'! nifty coinage, whoever came up with it... makes me consider adding 'happyless' and 'sadless' and a raft of other useful 'less'es to my private lexicon...
The same happened in Serbia. But once a verb 'psychologist' aka psiholog became psihološkinja in the feminine, everybody started to take the piss. There are other traditional male and female verbs that always existed though, such as 'doctor' - doktor (masculine) and doktorka (feminine) or actor/actress - glumac (m.) and glumica (f.)
THAT IS SEXIST! I demand a male noun for my house! Casa is sexist! And my computadora? Why can't my computer just be a guy? Also John Mulaney has something great to say about the use of "midget".
Interestingly, in Chinese (not just Mandarin since all dialects use the same script) the equivalent of "he" or "she" is spoken (in Mandarin) as "Ta" and is ungendered in speech. But, when written, the "Ta" for a man and the "Ta" for a woman have gender identifiers even though they are read exactly the same (including tone).
The comic made a common mistake. It assumes that PC is the only influence on changing terminology. Things like "stewardess" becoming "airline attended" have more to do with the phenomenon that changed "cup" to "glassware" and "selling" to "merchandising", which is a faulty middle-class perception that that makes things sound better than they are and that that is how upper-class people speak. They are wrong on both counts, of course.
Everyone should read "Class" by Paul Fussell. It is a very informative book about class status symbols in the US. A bit out of date now but still very relevant.
erm, we have Pearls Before the Swine here, and its fine... its published in a free newspaper and no-one bats an eyelid...
Yeah, I rather say midget as little person seems to more like the equivalent of calling a disabled person a cripple. Technically both are correct but one just sounds more offensive due to how it's been used. Little person is just too on the nose, I guess. I'll never, ever, say administrative assistant. It's just sounds like a fancy title. Too many people cry over being politically correct because some person with major confidence issues will make a fuss about it. Like calling a black skinned individual African-American even though they live a 100% American lifestyle and the last time his genes saw Africa was five generations ago. They aren't African-American.. just American. Unless they recently got off the boat (like their parents or, borderline, their grandparents)
Well in most cases the people you would commonly call midgets aren't midgets at all. Midgets are proportional dwarfs, and the vast majority of dwarfs are disproportionate. It's really like learning that German's can be called "krouts" then calling every nonwhite person you see a krout.
It's like when "Oriental" became derogatory to describe an Asian person. "What? are we ornaments, now?" I really liked Oriental too... you couldn't be wrong.
Smartless is intelligence-centric. It suggests that intelligence is something desirable that one is lacking. The proper term is "smartfree." (Yes, I suppose I'm parodying myself, because I refer to myself as childfree, not childless. And I'm going to keep on doing that.)
That made me chuckle, pulled an entire strip because of the word midget. Are all American newspapers like that? Meanwhile in the UK:
I don't understand offense too much. I don't think I've ever be offended by anything, only disappointed.
pastry based fornication. I love it! Hopefully, the common sense law will apply and that smartless won't get a penny.
