Daniel's been chewing on this one for a while, I think. He points out we're in a volatile stretch, wars, the usual, and that the English-speaking world keeps having these bruising fights about language. Specifically, he wants to know when the term politically correct actually started showing up, what the first contexts were, and how the concept has changed shape. Then he wants the live debate, the one happening right now around gender identity, where people say certain everyday expressions are gendered and should be avoided, and the pushback that this has overreached and made frank speech mentally taxing for people who are trying to engage in good faith. So it's a history question and a live-debate question. And the history answer is not what most people assume.
It really isn't. Most people, if you ask them, will point to the 1990s, campus speech codes, maybe a specific protest. But the phrase is much older, and it started on the opposite side of the political spectrum from where it ended up.
It's a strange trajectory. A term that began as a kind of earnest self-description among people who thought being politically correct was a virtue, and now it's almost exclusively a pejorative, a thing you call your opponent. That's a full inversion.
And the inversion happened fast, historically speaking. The phrase moved from Marxist party discipline to feminist and New Left circles, then got picked up by conservative critics and detonated. And once it detonated, the people it described stopped using it about themselves. That's the key linguistic event. Ownership changed hands.
So let's trace it, because the origin story is obscure. Where does politically correct actually come from?
Early twentieth century, Marxist-Leninist vocabulary. The idea was that a comrade's line on any given question had to be correct in the doctrinal sense, not just sincere or well-intentioned. You could be personally devoted to the revolution and still hold a politically incorrect position on, say, the peasant question or the national question. The phrase was about internal party discipline. It wasn't about politeness at all. It was about whether your analysis matched the party line.
So the original meaning was closer to heretical than rude.
Yes. If your position was politically incorrect, you were deviating from orthodoxy. And this usage carried through Soviet and American communist circles for decades. It was insider vocabulary. You'd hear it in party meetings, in theoretical journals, in the kind of publication that had a circulation of maybe two thousand and an argument about Trotsky on every other page.
The kind of publication where the letters section was more dangerous than the articles.
And then something interesting happened. In the 1970s and 1980s, the phrase migrated into English-speaking feminist and New Left movements. It kept the structure, the idea that certain positions are correct and others aren't, but the content shifted. Now it was about language. Sexist language, racist language, homophobic language. You'd say that's not politically correct to a fellow activist, as a kind of half-serious correction. It was still insider talk. You didn't say it to an opponent. You said it to someone on your own side who'd slipped up.
That's the part people miss. It was almost a joke, a nudge. Like saying that's not very Marxist of you. The phrase had a self-aware quality. These were people who knew they were policing each other's vocabulary and could still laugh about it.
And that's the version of the phrase that existed right up until the late 1980s. Then the whole thing gets weaponized. Allan Bloom publishes The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, which is a broad critique of American higher education, and he uses the phrase. But the real detonation comes a few years later. Dinesh D'Souza publishes Illiberal Education in 1991, and the subtitle is literally The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. That book makes political correctness a national scandal.
And there's a specific flashpoint. Stanford, 1990, 1991. The Western Culture curriculum fight.
Right. Stanford had a required course called Western Culture, and there was a push to replace it with something called Culture, Ideas, and Values, which would include more non-Western and non-white voices. Students protested. There was a chant, hey hey, ho ho, Western culture's got to go. That chant got replayed endlessly on news programs. It was the perfect soundbite for critics.
It rhymed. That may have been the most damaging thing about it. You can't argue with a rhyme.
And then George H.W. Bush goes to the University of Michigan in 1991 and gives a commencement address where he explicitly warns that political correctness threatens free speech. That's the moment the term goes presidential. A sitting president is using it as a warning. After that, the phrase is everywhere. It's on magazine covers, it's in op-eds, it's the subject of congressional hearings.
So the flip happens somewhere in that stretch. 1987 to 1991. The term goes from something activists said about each other, semi-ironically, to something critics say about activists, with total seriousness.
And once critics adopt it as mockery, the people it described stop using it about themselves. You don't hear a feminist in 1995 saying, well, that's not politically correct. She'd say inclusive, or respectful, or just not racist. The term became radioactive to the people who'd originally used it. They abandoned it. But the critics kept it, because it was useful. It was a way to frame any speech code, any sensitivity, any linguistic change as a threat to free expression.
The ownership flip. That's the analytical core of this whole story. A term's meaning doesn't just drift. Sometimes it gets captured.
And here's the thing that makes it especially interesting. The same structure happened again, almost exactly, with the word woke. Woke starts in Black American vernacular as a call to awareness, stay woke, stay alert to injustice. It's earnest, it's self-descriptive, it's used within a community. Then it gets picked up by critics, used as mockery, and becomes a pejorative. By the mid-2010s, woke is functioning in the exact same rhetorical slot that politically correct occupied in the 1990s.
It's the same playbook. Find a term a movement uses about itself, adopt it, and make it sound ridiculous. The term does the work for you.
And the people who used woke sincerely have largely abandoned it too. You don't hear many people describing themselves as woke now. It's a term of abuse. The cycle completed in about a decade, which is faster than politically correct took.
So we've got the history. The phrase starts in Marxist-Leninist party discipline, migrates into movement vocabulary, gets weaponized by critics, flips to pejorative, and then gets replaced by woke, which follows the same arc. That brings us to the present, because the fight didn't end. It changed targets.
It changed targets and it changed texture. The current debate is mostly about gender identity and gendered language. Pronouns, obviously. But also phrases like pregnant people versus women, chestfeeding versus breastfeeding, the broader question of whether gendered terms should be avoided by default in medical, policy, and everyday contexts.
And Daniel specifically flagged the argument that this has overreached, that political correctness is now making frank speech mentally taxing for people who are trying to engage in good faith. I want to take that seriously, because it's easy to dismiss, and I think dismissing it is a mistake.
The strongest version of the argument is not just about politeness. It's about cognitive load. Every time you speak, you're running a background process, checking your vocabulary against a list of terms that have been flagged. Is this the right pronoun? Is this term still current, or did it get updated last year? Is the person I'm talking to going to read this word as a signal about my politics? That self-monitoring is real attentional work. It slows you down. It makes ordinary conversation feel like navigating a minefield.
And the cost isn't evenly distributed. If you're sixty years old and you learned to say chairman in 1975, and now you're supposed to say chair, and also you're supposed to remember that some people prefer different pronouns, and also the medical term you learned in nursing school has been replaced, that's a lot of updating. The person who's exhausted by this is often not a bigot. They're just old, or busy, or not particularly online.
And there's a real asymmetry problem here. One side is asking for recognition. They want to be seen, to have their identity acknowledged in the language people use about them. That's a genuine good. The other side is asking for relief from effort. They want to be able to speak without running a compliance check on every sentence. That's also a genuine good. And these two goods trade off against each other. It's not a case where one side is simply right.
The good faith question is the hard one. Daniel said people who are trying to engage in good faith. Is the exhaustion felt by genuine allies who keep getting the terminology wrong? Or is that a rationalization? And I think the honest answer is both. Some people are trying and tired. Some people are using I'm exhausted by all this as a way to avoid doing the work. Both things are true at the same time.
They're hard to tell apart, even from the inside. You can't always know your own motives. The person who says I'm tired of watching my language might be a decent person who's updated his vocabulary fifty times and is just worn out. Or he might be someone who never wanted to change in the first place and has found a socially acceptable way to say so.
The counter-argument deserves equal force too. Proponents of inclusive language say language shapes perception. The words you use aren't neutral. If you say chairman, you're reinforcing the idea that the person in charge is a man. If you say pregnant women, you're erasing trans men and nonbinary people who can be pregnant. And the cost to the speaker is small, while the benefit to the listener can be enormous. Being called the right pronoun is not a minor thing for someone who's spent their whole life being called the wrong one.
There's a historical point that I think lands hard. Every generation has had this fight. People complained about having to say Black instead of Negro. People complained about having to say chair instead of chairman. People complained about having to say Ms. instead of Miss or Mrs. The complaint is always the same. This is exhausting, this is unnatural, this is political correctness. And then the new term becomes normal, and the next generation can't imagine why anyone fought about it.
That's the strongest response to the cognitive load argument. The load is real, but it's temporary. It's the load of learning a new habit. Once the habit is learned, it stops being load. You don't think about saying Black now. You just say it. The person who says this is mentally taxing is describing the learning curve, not the destination.
Though I want to be careful here, because the current moment is different in one respect. The rate of change has accelerated. It used to be that terminology shifted once a generation. Now it feels like it shifts every few years. The term that was correct in 2018 is outdated in 2022. That's a real difference. The learning curve is steeper, and it keeps getting reset.
The stakes feel higher. Getting someone's pronoun wrong in 1995 was a minor social error. Getting it wrong now can end a career, or at least a reputation. The enforcement mechanism is different. Social media means a mistake can be captured, amplified, and punished within hours. That raises the cognitive load enormously, because the cost of error is no longer just a moment of awkwardness.
Which is why the term politically correct is itself now so loaded that using it signals tribal affiliation. If you say that's not politically correct, people immediately know which side you're on. If you say that's not inclusive, they know the other side. The debate about language has become a debate about which words you use to describe the debate. It's a hall of mirrors.
The meta-debate. We're not arguing about whether a term is respectful. We're arguing about whether the people who object to the term are reasonable or bigoted, based entirely on which word they use to describe their objection.
That's where the exhaustion comes from, I think. It's not just the vocabulary. It's the constant awareness that every word is being read as a signal. You can't just talk. You're always performing a political identity, whether you want to or not.
Let me push on the good faith question from the other direction. The person who says I'm trying to engage in good faith but this is exhausting. What is he actually asking for? Is he asking for permission to make mistakes? Because that seems reasonable. Or is he asking for permission to stop trying? Because that's different.
I think in most cases he's asking for the first thing. Permission to make mistakes without being destroyed for them. And that's a legitimate ask. The problem is that the enforcement mechanism doesn't distinguish between a mistake and a deliberate provocation. Both get the same response. So the person who made an honest error feels like he's being treated as a bigot, and he gets defensive, and then he says something actually offensive, and the cycle continues.
The asymmetry cuts both ways. The person asking for recognition is also bearing a cost. They have to correct people constantly. They have to decide, every single time, whether to let a mispronouning slide or to speak up. And if they speak up, they risk being called oversensitive or difficult. That's also exhausting. The cognitive load isn't only on the speaker who's trying to be careful. It's on the person who's waiting to see if they'll be recognized.
We've got two groups, both exhausted, both feeling like the other side doesn't understand their exhaustion. And the term politically correct is the weapon one side uses to describe the other's requests. That's the live debate, and it's not going anywhere.
The pregnant people versus women thing is a good case study, because it's not just about politeness. It's about who gets to be the default subject of medical language. If a health agency says pregnant women, they're making a claim about who pregnancy is for. If they say pregnant people, they're making a different claim. Both claims are political. Neither is neutral.
The people who object to pregnant people are not necessarily saying trans men don't exist. Some of them are saying, look, pregnancy is overwhelmingly a female experience, and using a gender-neutral term for it feels like erasing women. That's a real argument. It's not just bigotry. It's a dispute about whether the exception should reshape the rule.
The counter is that the exception is a person, not a statistical anomaly. The trans man who's pregnant isn't an edge case to be rounded off. He's a patient, and the language should include him. That's also a real argument. And the two arguments don't resolve. They just sit there, both true, both incompatible.
The cognitive load framing is useful here, because it explains why this specific fight feels so exhausting. It's not just that you have to remember a new term. It's that the new term requires you to hold a conceptual shift in your head every time you use it. Pregnant people isn't just a word substitution. It's a claim about the relationship between sex and gender, and you have to carry that claim with you into every sentence.
That's the real cost. It's not the syllable count. It's the constant re-litigation of a philosophical question every time you talk about something concrete. No wonder people find it mentally taxing. They're not just speaking. They're doing philosophy under time pressure.
Here's the knock-on effect I keep coming back to. The term politically correct is now so thoroughly poisoned that even discussing this issue requires you to choose a side before you've said anything substantive. If I say the phrase politically correct, I've already signaled something. If I say inclusive language, I've signaled the opposite. The frame is the fight.
Which means the argument about which words are permissible may matter more than the words themselves. We're not really fighting about pronouns. We're fighting about who gets to set the terms of the fight.
That's why the history matters. Because if you know that politically correct started as Marxist party discipline, then migrated to movement vocabulary, then got weaponized, you can see the current fight as another iteration of the same cycle. The specific terms change. The structure doesn't.
The structure is: a group develops internal vocabulary to police itself, critics adopt the vocabulary as mockery, the group abandons the vocabulary, the critics keep it as a weapon, and then the whole thing starts again with new words. We're on the third or fourth iteration of this in living memory.
Each iteration is faster than the last. Politically correct took sixty years to go from party discipline to national controversy. Woke took about a decade. Whatever the next term is, it'll probably take five years.
The open question, the thing I keep turning over, is whether this cycle is just how political vocabulary works. Every term a movement uses to describe itself eventually gets captured by its opponents. Is that inevitable? Or is there something about the current media environment that makes it worse?
I think the speed of capture is new. The mechanism is old. Opponents have always mocked the language of movements. But social media means the mockery can become the dominant meaning within months, not years. The term doesn't get time to settle into neutral usage before it's already a weapon.
The people who coined the term don't get time to defend it. By the time they realize it's been captured, it's already gone. They're using a word that now means the opposite of what they intended, and they don't even know it.
Which is a strange kind of linguistic disenfranchisement. A community loses control of its own vocabulary, and then gets blamed for the vocabulary it no longer controls.
Hilbert: I was copy editing in Ann Arbor when all this was blowing up. Late eighties. Small academic press, left-leaning, the kind of place where the coffee machine was unionized. My job was to enforce the house style guide. And the style guide had a section on non-sexist language that ran eleven pages.
Eleven pages.
Hilbert: Eleven. And everyone assumes it was written by some committee of ideologues. It wasn't. It was written by a woman named Margaret. She'd been editing since the 1950s. She thought chairman was just sloppy. Not politically incorrect. Sloppy. Like using a dangling modifier. She'd mark it in red pencil and write see style guide, page seven. She wasn't trying to change the world. She was trying to get the manuscript to press by Tuesday.
The grassroots reality was often just fussy editorial standards.
Hilbert: That's what I'm saying. The press wasn't run by radicals. It was run by Margaret, who was sixty-something and had strong opinions about the serial comma and thought fireman was inaccurate because women could fight fires. She'd been saying that since before anyone called it political correctness. She just thought words should mean what they mean.
That's why it was so easy to mock. Because when you take eleven pages of editorial rules and hold them up to the light, they look absurd. But the person who wrote them wasn't trying to be political. She was trying to be precise.
Hilbert: I still have the style guide. It's in a box. I've moved it to four different apartments. Can't throw it away, can't open it. Because if I open it, I'll find out I've been violating it for thirty-five years. I probably still write chairman. I know I write mankind. Margaret would be furious.
The thing that strikes me is that Margaret's rules were probably more effective than any protest. She changed the language of every book that press published, one red pencil mark at a time. No news coverage, no presidential speech. Just an editor doing her job.
Hilbert: Nobody remembers her. They remember the chant. Hey hey, ho ho. That's what made the news. But the actual language change happened in quiet rooms, with people like Margaret marking up page proofs. The culture war was loud. The language change was quiet.
That's a useful distinction. The fight about political correctness was always louder than the actual linguistic shift. The shift happened because people like Margaret made it a matter of professional standards. The fight happened because other people found that threatening and made it a matter of national politics.
Hilbert: The style guide had a whole subsection on job titles. Firefighter, police officer, flight attendant. Seems obvious now. In 1988, it was controversial. Margaret got letters. Angry letters, from authors who said she was ruining their prose. She'd write back, one sentence. Dear author, the word is flight attendant. Sincerely, Margaret.
Did she ever lose a fight?
Hilbert: She lost plenty. Some authors dug in, and the publisher would cave because they needed the book. Margaret would fume for a week and then mark up the next manuscript. She wasn't a crusader. She was an editor. She just had a very clear idea of what words meant.
The overreach argument Daniel raised, the mental taxing thing, I think Margaret would have found it baffling. For her, the rules weren't a burden. They were just how you did the job correctly. The cognitive load argument only makes sense if you experience the rules as external, as something imposed on you. If you internalize them, they stop being load.
Hilbert: That's the difference. Margaret internalized them in 1955. For her, chairman was just wrong, like spelling separate with three e's. She didn't think about it. She just corrected it. The people who find this exhausting are the ones who haven't internalized it yet. They're still translating.
The people who find it exhausting will eventually either internalize it or stop caring. The language will move on. The fight will move to new terms. And someone else's Margaret will be marking up page proofs with the next set of rules.
Hilbert: The box is in my hall closet. Under the winter coats. I know exactly where it is. I walk past it every day.
You could just throw it away.
Hilbert: I could. I won't. It's Margaret's. She's probably dead now. But the style guide is still there, eleven pages, waiting for me to open it and find out I've been wrong about everything.
There's a metaphor in there somewhere.
Hilbert: Probably. I'm not opening the box to find out.
The misconception I'd want to correct is the one that started this whole thing. Most people think politically correct was invented by 1980s campus activists. It wasn't. It came out of early twentieth-century Marxist party discipline, migrated through social movements, and only became a national controversy when critics picked it up and made it a weapon.
The correction is that the term has never been stable. It started as self-description, flipped to pejorative, and now functions as a tribal marker. The fight over what it means is the fight over who owns the language. And that fight is older than any of the specific terms.
The open question I'm left with is whether woke is just the latest iteration of the same cycle, or whether something different is happening now. The speed is different. The enforcement is different. But the structure looks the same. A term born in a community, captured by opponents, abandoned by its originators. If that's just how political vocabulary works, then we should expect the next term to follow the same arc. And the one after that.
The -debate, the fight about which words you use to describe the fight, that's where the real energy is now. We're not arguing about pronouns. We're arguing about whether the people who object to pronouns are reasonable. The frame is the fight. And the frame keeps shifting.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing, and for the eleven-page style guide he will never open.
This has been My Weird Prompts, the human-AI collaboration podcast. If you've got a question like Daniel's, something you've always wondered about but never chased down, email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon.
