Reply #26: The original usage was among Marxists [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

They used it to describe any action or attitude that was not in line with strict Marxist ideology. "No, it isn't politically correct to support this piece of legislation, because it will lull the working class away from their revolutionary mission." That sort of thing.

By the time I was teaching, it was kind of a joke. We referred to coffee from Nicaragua as "politically correct coffee."

The Republican usage came about in the mid to late 1980s with Christopher Cerf's book Political Correctness, which was about the substitution of inoffensive words for offensive ones. Some of the examples cited (e.g. "vertically challenged" for "short") were never actually used, but they became the stuff of urban legends, especially Republican urban legends.

Now Republicans and those deceived by them scream "politcal correctness!" every time someone calls them on acting like insensitive assholes.