Road to ruin a PC quagmire

The term politically correct has confused me for some considerable time.

Essentially, given the vagaries of the political world, it could best be said that what one person describes as correct, the other will argue against forever.

I am not generally concerned with what might or mightn’t be politically correct, but my mind was turned to the subject by two recent events.

The first occurred at a sports stadium, where I was sitting behind a man who was wearing a T-shirt upon which was printed POLITICALLY CORRECT: A term for whingeing cowards who want their manure sugar coated.

There was something appealing about this lack of understatement.

The second was in a book written by John Cleese, he of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers fame, who was describing someone as fat.

To paraphrase Cleese, to call this person obese or overweight would have been inaccurate as the person in question was simply fat.

And come to think of it, one of my early childhood mates was “Fatty” Taylor, a boy from down the road.

In any case he wasn’t fat, not even “Tubby” like the former Australian cricket captain of the same nickname.

And the same could be said of my high school English teacher “Tubby” Trenberth.

Mr Trenberth’s first name was forever a mystery. “Tubby” was a term of endearment.

I’m sure if he’d been called anything else he would have been disappointed.

The best example of political correctness I’ve encountered recently was a government sign on a road, not in WA I hasten to add, that indicated that the Men’s Colony was the next turn to the right.

Rounding a corner and looking over to my right, I saw the unmistakable colony in question. It was in fact the local prison.

Political correctness is turning our language into a quagmire.

We get too easily bogged down trying to be polite to the lunatics who are gaining the ascendancy in our once plain-speaking world.

As a skinny young man, it was said of me I was so thin even if I ran around, I would not get wet in a thunderstorm.

Of course, it scarred me for life, and even now, some many years later, I rush outside at the first sound of thunder hoping to make my critics eat their words.

Alas, I am not so good at running these days, as I have grown too fat and lazy, lying around the house like a sleeping mongrel dog.