Good point. I think our nation can be a little oversensitive sometimes in our efforts not to insult people. It’s not that refering to G.W. Bush as a redneck is an insult, it’s simply the truth. What’s so wrong about the truth?

Maybe GW Bush is a bad example of PC. He’s actually not a redneck, but he is a “good ole boy”. Learn the difference before you offend someone.

Is political correctness dying or is it evolving? Think about it. In order to not offend people, everyone is inventing new ways of describing themselves. The American Idol hermaphrodite could be called “gender challenged”, “sexually balanced”, “metrosexual”(like it has sex WITH A CITY!), or “Ryan Seacrest”.

I agree, i have had that problem before, where i didn’t know how to address the perosn because i didn’t know if they were a boy or girl. Although i didn’t really understand your blog name (people are idiots).

I totally agree. Sometimes one wants to say something like, hey because you are so fat, you would really look better wearing this because it looks more natural on you. However, some people, like a co-worker I once had, are so sensitive about this trait of being fat that even when it is clearly obvious to everyone that she is fat, it is somehow an insult to even mention it or talk about fatness around the person. She thought the movie Shallow Hal was just about ridiculing fat people, for instance. She didn’t get the greater point they were making or have any appreciation for the ability to laugh at the ridiculous way we exaggerate the trait. It is true that I often see extremely fat people as disgusting looking, but I found her attractive. She had a pretty face, usually wore nice clothes, and had a pleasing personality that was mostly complementary to mine. It is true that she was more than just fatness. It is a denial of that fact to give special treatment to the fatness as though mentioning it would ruin her day. It probably would, though. That is why I think we need to quit stigmatizing it by making it taboo to even talk about. Of course, people talk about it and joke about it all the time, just not with someone they care about if that person could possibly be perceived as sensitive to it. I think people need to get over all their worries about themselves and start dealing with it. Retards are people with slow or difficult mental development. Jews are Jewish people. Blacks or Negros are African-Americans. Skinny people are very thin and narrow boned. I used to be somewhat afraid to describe someone as Asian for god sakes! Sure, the use of the word nigger should probably be left alone, but call a spade a spade, please.

I wasn’t refering to YOUR mother specifically… I just meant it in a general sense.

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To describe someone’s physical or mental attributes can help identify that person or thing much more quickly and cut down on most of the confusion there might be, I myself like knowing whatever as quickly and clearly as possible and my crystal ball might be in the repair that week! If someone gets bent of shape because what was said to reference someone or something because it isn’t or wasn’t P.C. thats their problem, most people do use abit of tact most of the time, I hope the P.C. era is coming to an end as the correct way to say or be, it to me puts up many barriers that some folks will avoid dealing with then dealing with and that causes much more confusion I think!

G.W. may or may not be a “redneck”, or whatever term you choose to use. But he is The President of The United States, and as such deserves more respect than you’ve shown. You don’t have to respect the man, but you do have to respect the office which he occupies. He has a difficult job and is constrained by what Congress will allow him to do. If you or anyone else thinks for one moment that you can do the job better, by all means try.

You have a realy cool blog but these colors are horible. Not good for the eyes!!

Then there was the time when I was in a conversation with a black guy in the army. We had been having a nice conversation about differences, until I asked him if blacks had dandruff.

He laughed loudly until he realized that I was serious and then he got mad. Now I thought it to be a pretty good question. It was the 70′s and I had never seen a black person in a dandruff shampoo commercial, so I wondered.

I didn’t get an answer that day, because he was too upset. So maybe some caution is in order.

I couldn’t agree with you more. Being tactful and being PC are two completely different things.

If someone is black, he should be described as black. If someone is fat, he should be described as fat (or at least rotund).

Here in Australia we got of PC fairly quickly. For a while our Crime Stoppers programme couldnt describe perpetrators by their race because it was seen as evoking some kind of generalisation or stereotype. We cottoned on pretty quickly that that was quite ludicrous, and that ignoring characteristics such as race is just another form of marginalisation.

Now don’t get me wrong, I believe in tact. There is a time and a place for obvious descriptions. However, lets not destroy our ability to communicate by forcing ourselves to qualify descriptions to spare the feelings of somebody that probably doesnt care.

Wow, that was more of a rant than I intended…

I have some confusion with my sexual orientation these days.

what I want to know is, why can a fat person describe someone else as fat but a thinner person can’t? I have found myself describing someone as fat or big to a larger person…upon the realization of my faux paus…I simply said “I mean, they were bigger than you!” They are still speaking to me, so it must be okay. Geez…the first three questions I ask people when describing someone is black/white, tall/short, fat/thin. I guess I didn’t get the PC memo.