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Anorak News | Mind Your Ps and QCs

Mind Your Ps and QCs

by | 13th, May 2004

‘IT’S amazing to think that a man who spends his working life dressed in a whipped wig, flowing robes and stockings is viewed by many as being less than enlightened.

You can always trust a man who tucks his blouse into his tights

He might even be seen in some quarters as square, out-of-touch with modern thinking and stuck in his ways.

So helping judges to become more in step with the world beyond their club’s wainscoted walls, the judiciary’s Equal Treatment Bench has issued a handbook.

The Mail has seen the work and concluded that this is just more tinkering from what it calls the “PC lobby”, a group of Blairites and Tony’s cronies who seek to “purge the English language”.

Critics, to whom the Mail is happy to give full throat, are unhappy.

Ruth Lea, of the Centre For Policy Studies think-tank, says: ”Some of the material is outrageously offensive to women, some of it is just wrong, and the people who produce it should be exposed as the charlatans they are.”

Strong words from Ms whatshername of some place of other, served up as by the Mail, as being in some way typical of popular opinion.

But is Ms Lea right to be appalled? Let’s take a look at some of what the Mail’s “language police” have ruled.

Judges are advised to not say “half-caste” but to refer to the person before them as being of “mixed parentage”.

“Coloured” is deemed “offensive”, and the term “West Indian” is frowned upon for its “colonial overtones”.

What were the “wheelchair bound” become “wheelchair users” (suggesting they have some choice in the matter); “people who “suffer” from an illness now merely “have” an illness, “and those with a “mental handicap” are experiencing “mental health problems”.

And “given the history of marriage in the subordination of women it should come as no surprise that many women find it offensive to be referred to by reference to their marital status or their husband’s name” – especially if the woman has just hacked her husband to death with a meat cleaver.

Or is the eternal Mrs Beckham.’



Posted: 13th, May 2004 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink