The apology is to Tracy Wuster, whom I mistakenly maligned in an earlier post by ascribing Mark Coburn's posting to her/him. (I'm so glad your name is gender ambiguous, Tracy. I don't know whether to believe Fears or not about who you are, so I'll continue enjoying the ambiguity. I've always hated the way the language forces us to identify gender. At least there are no pronouns designating race, unless Dave Fears can suggest some.) Anyway, Tracy was kind enough to bring the error to my attention off list, and again, I apologize to both Tracy and Mark for the confusion. (no complexity, just confusion.) The addendum is to take advantage of Dave Fears' deployment of the "political correctness" device, as unerringly forecast by Barry Crimmins. I happened to come upon Wikipedia's article on the phrase, and highly recommend it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness Having been brought up, myself, in the kind of ideological environment in which the phrase was born...i.e., as a "red diaper baby" (see the article for clarification), I can personally attest to the origins and transformations that are traced in the article, and am so glad there is a concise source for that fascinating and convoluted history of usage and abusage! But in particular, I want to quote the article's treatment of this latter day usage, to which Fears resorts. I think these brief paragraphs give an excellent account of the way the phrase has been contrived to "distract attention from substantive debates over discrimination and unequal treatment based on race, class, and gender" As engineered term Some commentators argue that the term "political correctness" was engineered by American conservatives around 1980 as a way to reframe political arguments in the United States. According to Hutton: "Political correctness is one of the brilliant tools that the American Right developed in the mid-1980s as part of its demolition of American liberalism....What the sharpest thinkers on the American Right saw quickly was that by declaring war on the cultural manifestations of liberalism - by levelling the charge of political correctness against its exponents - they could discredit the whole political project."[32] Such commentators say that there never was a "Political Correctness movement" in the United States, and that many who use the term are attempting to distract attention from substantive debates over discrimination and unequal treatment based on race, class, and gender (Messer-Davidow 1993, 1994; Schultz 1993; Lauter 1995; Scatamburlo 1998; Glassner 1999). Similarly, Polly Toynbee has argued that "the phrase is an empty rightwing smear designed only to elevate its user".[33] A similar objection to the discourse surrounding "political correctness" is the claim that doctrinaire insistence on the use of approved words is just as prevalent on the political right. In 2004, then Australian Labor leader Mark Latham described conservative calls for civility as "The New Political Correctness [2]. Similar comments were made in relation to the decision to rename French fries as Freedom Fries [3]. Ben