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Hi, everyone. And welcome back to America Under the Microscope. 欢迎回来. 闲话美国. Hi, James.
Hi, Lulu. Hi everyone.
So what are we gonna talk about today?
Right. So I have a question for you. And it is have you ever noticed how some Americans are always very careful about how they address or refer to other people?
What do you mean?
Let me give me an example. So a lot of students, when they learn English, they learn words like businessman, but we don't use that word anymore. It's now business person.
Oh, ok. So you don't say businessman, you say business person. I know what you're talking about, are you talking about political correctness? PC.
Yes, PC, political correctness is the topic of the day.
PC直译的话就叫政治正确.
I think if you watch a lot of American TV shows or talk shows, you definitely, definitely have heard of this expression, but I think many of our listeners probably don't really know the ins and outs of it. So first of all, James, give us a definition, what exactly is political correctness.
Okay. So in simple terms, think of it as a way of using English that tries its best to avoid offending other people.
就是尽量不要冒犯别人的这种用词. So the original goal of this is try to be polite, not to offend. Right?
It's kind of a combination of that. So it's about things like to avoid generalization or grouping people together or assuming things about others. It's even if it's talking about positive stereotypes. So if we take like a very common positive stereotype, like Asians are good at math that is not technically politically correct.
Because it's a stereotype.
That's a stereotype and a generalization, even though it's considered a positive stereotype, it's still not politically correct. It's about avoiding implying anything based on somebody's gender, race, nationality and so on.
I see. When did this whole PC trend start?
That's really kind of difficult to point down, but generally it got kind of big in the late 80s and 90s, and it's really big now.
Yeah, and it's just constantly evolving as well. I think is it fair to say even for native speakers, even for Americans, not everyone's fully aware of all the PC terms that you should be using.
This is quite complex, partially because the PC terms do change from time to time. I mean it's hard to keep up with what is or is not. Okay. Also, there is no agreement completely of what is or is not okay, because it's about not offending others. If you think about it, is it ever really possible to avoid not offending everybody?
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