Political correctness, euphemism, and language change: The case of ‘people first’

Abstract

The early 1990s saw the proposal for ‘people first’ language: premodified nouns ( disabled people) were to be replaced by postmodified nouns ( people with disabilities). This usage was widely adopted in the fields of education and psychology. This article examines the distribution of both patterns in the electronic archives of the Houston Chronicle from 2002 to 2007, well after the suggestion for postmodification euphemism was launched, to investigate how widely the pattern has been adopted in everyday language use. The data from the Houston Chronicle are compared to the usage patterns in Google News ( http://news.google.com/). Contrary to the usage in contemporary educational and psychological literature, the Houston Chronicle seems to favor the ‘non-PC’ usage: over 70% of the phrases resort to premodification. The distribution of ‘non-PC’ vs. ‘PC’ phrases, however, is not random: premodification refers to ‘undesirable’ societal elements (e.g., prisoners) or, for instance, to fictional characters in movie descriptions; by contrast, postmodification is reserved for children or non-criminal adults. The juxtaposition of these patterns in contemporary newspaper articles, and their deliberate separation in terms of the semantics of the referent (premodification for ‘undesirable’ or fictional referents; postmodification for ‘vulnerable’ referents) is likely to block the broader adoption of the ‘PC’ syntactic pattern and will ultimately fuel a desire for further euphemisms dependent on lexical innovations. The same patterns appear in Google News; however, lexically ‘non-PC’ usage, together with metalinguistic discussions of how to refer to the target group are much more prevalent in Google News than in the Houston Chronicle.