From: ant.mcwatt@ntlworld.com
Date: Thu Sep 02 2004 - 09:34:01 BST
Ant McWatt stated to Mel August 31st 2004:
> Well, that takes us back to the 70s if indeed the professors and students mentioned were using the term "politically correct".
>
> I wonder if anyone else knows of any earlier references?
Rick Valence kindly sent me the following article which certainly goes some way to answer this:
Another urban myth of our times is that the concept of politically correct
was invented in the 1990s by conservatives who wished to lambaste liberals.
The term and the concept are both actually much older.
The original sense of politically correct was as a term used to address
mixed bodies of people so as not to offend. In 1793, Justice James Wilson in
Chisholm v. Georgia used the term to distinguish between the phrases United
States and people of the United States (he believed the latter to be
politically correct). In 1936, H.V. Morton's In the Steps of Saint Paul
referred to the term Galatians as a politically correct way to address
anyone subject to Roman rule. In 1955, a translator for Czeslaw Milosz,
applied the term to orthodox interpretations of the holocaust in the English
version of one of Milosz's works.
The second, and current, definition arose in 1970. This sense the OED2
defines as:
a body of liberal or radical opinion, esp. on social matters, characterized
by the advocacy of approved causes or views, and often by the rejection of
language, behaviour, etc. considered discriminatory or offensive.
The first cite of this second sense is in 1970's Black Woman by T.Cade.
Other early cites include 1975's P.Gerber's Willa Cather and a Facts on File
entry regarding lesbian politics. 1978 saw the National Journal use the
term. In 1984 it was the Women's Studies International Forum VII that used
the term. 1987 saw the Nation pick it up. 1991 it was the Village Voice and
1993 the Utne Reader. The OED2 does not even include a use of the term from
a conservative source.
The converse politically incorrect first appeared in 1947, in Nabokov's Bend
Sinister. In 1977 the Washington Post used it to paraphrase as statement by
the African Liberation Day Coalition.
The abbreviation PC first appeared in the New York Times in 1986.
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