Sunday, January 4, 2009

Political correctness gone mad??

In the UK, we are now very careful to be politically correct because we don't like to offend anybody. For example, teachers are now not allow to say to a student that they have failed, but instead are supposed to say they have had deferred success.

The latest case is of a primary school in Sheffield, that refuses to call itself a "school", but rather "A PLACE FOR LEARNING".

See the whole story here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/south_yorkshire/7809481.stm

What do you think about this? Personally, I think it is ridiculous!!
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4 comments:

  1. AnaJanuary 4, 2009 at 8:49 PM

    It is stupid!
    In Spain is happening something similar with the words. In spanish we have masculine, femenine and neutral words. If you speak for people in general, you use the masculine form. But some people think that it is sexist, so we should say the two forms, the masculine and the femenine.

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  2. UnknownJanuary 8, 2009 at 1:27 PM

    I agree with Ana. In Spain we are being forced to say the two forms instead of only the neutral word. It is such a stupid thing but if you don´t say boys and girls, women and men, each time you make a speech in front of an audience you will be considered as a sexist kind of person. I don´t know why but....people seem to be ready to swallow with the new "gramatical rule".

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  3. KayleighJanuary 11, 2009 at 11:59 AM

    Yeah, but in the UK it has extended to even objects instead of people. There is NOTHING offensive with the word "school", it is neither masculine nor femenine, it is just a school for goodness sake, but now some people say that it has to be called "a place for learning" instead.

    I remember years ago, the word "firemen" or "fireman" was taken out of use, because women complained that they could also do the job. So, it changed to "firefighter".

    The question is, where do we stop with these changes? When is enough enough?

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  4. JudithJanuary 12, 2009 at 7:29 PM

    I'm just freaking out!! It looks like changing the words we'll change the World!. I think we should take more care of what to do in schools and how to do it and less about names.

    And how they exactly interpreted the word school? Because I don't catch the possible "wrong" meaning of the word... I could be able to understand problems with gender even if I don't agree but "school"...

    I don't think this is going to stop, not yet.

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