Think about the words you use

Everybody now: "It's political correctness gone mad!" It's odd that such a generic phrase has come to replace language that's considered irritating in part because it's so standard, so predictably PC.

Anyway, this isn't a call to replace vowels in certain words because they reflect patriarchal hegemony or to start using lowercase letters as a protest against the individualistic-cum-narcissistic nature of our language, blah blah. It's just about not being, well, a douchebag. (This is one word I cling to, because it's so delightfully disgusting. In the interests of variety, though, we should start mixing it up with things like "colostomy bag", "enema bag", "urethra cleaning bag", etc.) 

It's not hard to see that a lot of common usage has plainly sexist, racist or other problematic origins. "Stop being such a pussy!", for instance, is pretty clear: women are cowards + women have pussies = cowards are pussies. "Nappy" might be more ambiguous; it's sometimes used as a catch-all term to refer to anything dirty, but its most frequent use is as a descriptor of black people's hair. Certain people's conflation of the two is a bit worrisome. Happily, though, it seems that most people who use terms in these ways aren't actively racist, sexist, etc.; they're just parroting what they hear without questioning how those terms came into use. So the suggestion for the day is to do just that. This might just improve our vocabularies a smidge as well.

Effort involved: no heavy lifting, as this one's all mental.


Image from http://blog.charleslloydfitness.com/2009/03/20/douche-bag-top-10-ways/