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第363期:夸人数学好也是歧视?在这说话可“真·小心翼翼”

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Hi, everyone. And welcome back to America Under the Microscope. 欢迎回来. 闲话美国. Hi, James.

Hi, Lulu. Hi everyone.

So what are we gonna talk about today?

Right. So I have a question for you. And it is have you ever noticed how some Americans are always very careful about how they address or refer to other people?

What do you mean?

Let me give me an example. So a lot of students, when they learn English, they learn words like businessman, but we don't use that word anymore. It's now business person.

Oh, ok. So you don't say businessman, you say business person. I know what you're talking about, are you talking about political correctness? PC.

Yes, PC, political correctness is the topic of the day.

PC直译的话就叫政治正确.

I think if you watch a lot of American TV shows or talk shows, you definitely, definitely have heard of this expression, but I think many of our listeners probably don't really know the ins and outs of it. So first of all, James, give us a definition, what exactly is political correctness.

Okay. So in simple terms, think of it as a way of using English that tries its best to avoid offending other people.

就是尽量不要冒犯别人的这种用词. So the original goal of this is try to be polite, not to offend. Right?

It's kind of a combination of that. So it's about things like to avoid generalization or grouping people together or assuming things about others. It's even if it's talking about positive stereotypes. So if we take like a very common positive stereotype, like Asians are good at math that is not technically politically correct.

Because it's a stereotype.

That's a stereotype and a generalization, even though it's considered a positive stereotype, it's still not politically correct. It's about avoiding implying anything based on somebody's gender, race, nationality and so on.

I see. When did this whole PC trend start?

That's really kind of difficult to point down, but generally it got kind of big in the late 80s and 90s, and it's really big now.

Yeah, and it's just constantly evolving as well. I think is it fair to say even for native speakers, even for Americans, not everyone's fully aware of all the PC terms that you should be using.

This is quite complex, partially because the PC terms do change from time to time. I mean it's hard to keep up with what is or is not. Okay. Also, there is no agreement completely of what is or is not okay, because it's about not offending others. If you think about it, is it ever really possible to avoid not offending everybody?

And also it depends on whoever is listening to you, whoever you are talking to. Same language, some people will feel offended, others won't. Correct. But nonetheless let's share with our listeners some common examples.


Certainly.

We start off with gender related. So this very, very common businessman, business person; policeman is police officer, right?

Policeman would be police officer. Then you have a lot of these words that are something man, like mailman should be like postal worker, or mail carrier;

Fire man?

Firefighter. But it's also like stopping like gender stereotyping professions like saying all nurses are women. Like there are plenty of male nurses too.

Lately I've also heard that people who don't want to be gender…like they call themselves nonbinary. They don't wanna be called she or he. I don't even know what the term is, ‘they’.

Okay, ‘they’ is a neutral pronoun in English.

Yeah, that is a bit confusing, but it's not just about gender. PC language is also about race. For example, instead of black, say, African American?

Well that one right there, that's a complicated one. Because that one there's a good example of the lack of agreement because you ask some people, they'll say black is PC, some people say, no, African American is PC. And then some people say, what about Egyptians? Egypt is in Africa and Egyptians become American is an Egyptian American and African American, or what about a South African who is white, are they also African American? This is where it starts to get really complicated, isn't it?

It is very complex.

But then you say it's okay to call white people white people, right? But in like Asia, so like in China, I hear Chinese people refer to themselves as yellow people, but in English using that is not politically correct.

I think a lot of this is also linked with historical reasons. So each of these, the reason why they're offensive or why they're accepted or acceptable is linked with history. This is the complexity of language. Language in itself does not have any intrinsic preferences. However, when this language is linked with how you use, with the cultural and historical background, and then it has immense power, either positive or negative.

My grandma had good advice on that. My grandma said it's not the words you say, it's how you say them.

Very true. But it's not just race and gender. It's anything to do with somewhat a minority group, for example, sexual minority. You know this whole…once I was teaching students and I had a hard time explaining to them why it is okay to say ‘he is gay’, but it's not okay to say ‘he is a gay’. One is PC, the other is not so PC.

It's also, at least in American English, the second one ‘he is a gay’ is incorrect grammar.

Yeah. And also it's okay to say he is homosexual but is not okay to say he is a homo.

Correct, gets complicated.

It is complicated. I've also been caught out for saying disabled because to PC terms should be people with disability or differently abled, I’ve heard?

I've heard that too, that one is like again with the black and African American. People are very… have different views on the terms. A person with the disability probably is the most PC accepted. I haven't heard many people use the term differently abled.

One time I was joking about PC language and I said because I'm very short, maybe I should just call myself vertically challenged.

That would be a very PC way of putting that.

Because as it evolves, it's sort of expands into all fields or all aspects of life.

It's certainly… this is something that Americans deal with every day and that leads to Americans, many Americans policing their own language when they're speaking in public or using social media.

Policing your language means you're watching out for what you're saying.

Yeah, you're trying to avoid being offensive basically. Like the common example you'll hear is like most Americans do not use curse words in public. Okay, not like in the movies then. Not like in the movies. It's considered to be pretty bad form in America to use them in public. You do hear it, but that would be a common example policing language. But also, like in general, Americans do try to go out of the way to be non-offensive, but not always successfully.

Especially I guess with all the PC rules around.

It's pretty tough. The reason they're policing themselves is if they do say something bad and they have social media presence, people on Twitter and Facebook and all the other social medias will jump on them and say bad things about them. And this has caused people to lose jobs and even be kicked out of school.

I see, so there's a really a lot of pressure to be PC especially if you have any form of public presence. Or if you have a public profession like being a teacher, really important.


I see.

Ok, more on that in our advanced episode when we go into the controversial side of PC obviously people have disagreement over has PC language have been taken too far. And we're gonna talk about that in the advanced episode. Thank you, James, for coming to the studio.

Thank you for having me today. Thank you for listening, everyone.

We'll see you next time. Bye.

重点单词   查看全部解释    
confusing [kən'fju:ziŋ]

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adj. 使人困惑的,令人费解的 动词confuse的现

 
trend [trend]

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n. 趋势,倾向,方位
vi. 倾向,转向

联想记忆
offensive [ə'fensiv]

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adj. 令人不快的,侮辱的,攻击用的
n.

 
microscope ['maikrəskəup]

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n. 显微镜

联想记忆
address [ə'dres]

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n. 住址,致词,讲话,谈吐,(处理问题的)技巧

 
complicated ['kɔmplikeitid]

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adj. 复杂的,难懂的
动词complica

 
disagreement [.disə'gri:mənt]

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n. 不合,争论,不一致

 
acceptable [ək'septəbl]

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adj. 合意的,受欢迎的,可接受的

联想记忆
related [ri'leitid]

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adj. 相关的,有亲属关系的

 
partially ['pɑ:ʃəli]

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adv. 部份地,一部份地,不公平地

 

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