When the topic of political correctness comes up in casual conversation, one of two things tends to happen. One, your conversation partner takes another sip of their artisanal tea as they complacently nod and murmur, “Yes, yes, that is good.” Or two, they bare their sharpened teeth at you, hissing like a feral cat and growling incoherently, “You — goddamn — hippietrash — scum — !”

Yes, lately it seems as though language has become one of the most divisive political issues to date. Everywhere we turn there appears a fresh new article (or collegehumor video) about taking political correctness too far — an occurrence recorded almost exclusively on college campuses. In fact, “language policing” is quite an old phenomenon, constantly rebirthing and presenting itself anew with each generation. I believe that political correctness takes as an assumption the idea that, in changing our words, we can change the way we think, and thus influence the world around us for the better.

On the other hand, besides the fact that trying to casually say the phrase “houseless persons” in any conversation makes you sound like the linguistic equivalent of a vegan, the backlash against politically correct language is either based on legitimate Orwellian concerns about individual freedoms or the fatigue of having to constantly filter your words and, God forbid, think before you speak. Let’s explore these things for a minute.

In the world of George Orwell’s popular dystopian novel, 1984, a new kind of language has developed called “Newspeak”. It was created by the novel’s totalitarian government in order to further their “Ingsoc” political agenda by limiting the English vocabulary, stripping speakers of words formerly used to express concepts of political equality and freedom, thus eliminating these concepts altogether.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” — George Orwell, 1984

The functionality of Orwell’s Newspeak, then, is solely dependent upon the idea that language — its very grammatical structure and vocabulary — determines the way we think. The birth of this idea can be traced back to the 1930s and the studies conducted by linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (encouraged by his mentor, Edward Sapir) on the Hopi peoples; Whorf arrived at the conclusion that the Hopi have a different concept of time because of the way the Hopi language expresses time, which became the basis for Whorf’s theory of linguistic relativity; or, as it is more commonly known, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

Alluring conclusion, yes? Whorf’s theory gained much popularity in the decade following its publication (1984 was published in 1949)... only to be violently criticized, upon further inspection, by linguists in the ‘50s. And I mean, come on. The realities we can perceive are limited by the language(s) we speak? If you think about it hard enough (that's what scientists do, crazy enough), it’s a bit of a reach.

Let me provide an example from home to illustrate. In Tagalog, an official language of the Philippines, speakers do not make the distinction between gender in pronoun use. There is simply one word for “he” or “she”: siya. And so on: The gendered spousal terms “husband” and “wife” are encompassed under a single word, asawa; “son” or “daughter” becomes simply anak, “brother” or “sister”, kapatid. Following the logic of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, should we then conclude that the entire Tagalog-speaking community — the population of an archipelago larger than Great Britain, plus millions of souls dispersed around the world besides — has no concept of gender difference, and is thus more progressive in terms of gender equality?

Absurd.

Yet, Whorf lives on, both in the legacy of Orwell and in Orwell’s seeming nemesis, political correctness. Why does linguistic determinism still captivate the minds of the mainstream today? We hold, steadfast, onto the hope that we can start eradicating trans- and homophobia if we stop using offensive, outdated slurs; that saying "persons with mental illness" will help us to understand these individuals better than the phrase "mentally ill"; that through our personal linguistic choices, we have the means to change the world, right at the tips of our tongues. Crazy, right? What does the absurdity of Sapir and Whorf tell us about the power of language to ignite social change? Surely it must be limited.

Personally, I would love for someone to use these arguments against me. That's a conversation I'd be here for. Tell me about the attempts to salvage linguistic relativity and save Benjamin Whorf's reputation in the field of linguistics. Ask me about censorship and the intersection of language and politics, that disastrous yet unavoidable frontier. Cite Orwell.

Because it's true, sometimes, it does go too far. While political politeness should absolutely be the goal here, no question, it is far too easy to use political correctness as a weapon to tell people how to think, and to label them incorrect if they disagree with you. I'd be happy to discuss this with anyone.

But please, do not speak to me of losing your long-prized ability to offend. I don't want to hear any more nostalgia about when you could jokingly call someone such-and-such and get away with it back in your youth — a time when these such-and-such's and have-nots and whosoevers were openly persecuted, beaten, oppressed, while the rest of the world, equipped with a language that allowed them to turn a blind eye, remained silent.

I don't want to hear another MC Hammer-aged fellow whine about not being able to say anything anymore, because you could be offending anyone nowadays, blah blah blah. I don't want to hear another out-of-touch bloke use the First Amendment (wow, so original) as a paper-thin shield to hide the fact that they're simply too lazy to empathize, to care. The arguments are as stale as the day-old quaker oats you probably had for breakfast; but if they're all you've got, then don't be surprised when some man-bearded hippietrash millennial kindly asks you to please put the pacifier back in your mouth, or else, watch your petulant tongue.