Political correctness as an object of investigation

Abstract

The terms political correctness or PC were not used until the late 1970s. According to James Wilson (1995), a judge in Georgia, in 1973 the US Supreme Court first mentioned the term “politically correct”. Thus, the doctrine of political correctness was based on the concept of “neutral language”. It is this language, free from expressions that offend the feelings and dignity of the person, violate his human rights, must oppose hate speech (Phumsiri N., 2018). The relevance of the work is due to the interest of studying the political correctness in the modern dimension, which is explained by the growing interest in society and spread in the media. Political correctness (PC) – a term that describes the style of behavior, speech, lifestyle, preferences, but at the same time does not violate the personal boundaries of people in religious, racial, political, cultural fields (Stephen Richer, Lorna Weir, 1995). Political correctness is a kind of voluntary social code of conduct, which provides for the inadmissibility of humiliating mentions of physical or mental disabilities of third parties, about their racial, religious or national affiliation, observance of gender equality in public and private life. The term “political correctness” began to be widely used only in the 80s of the 20th centuries. It was then that conservatives from American universities began to use it to denote social movements that advocated the establishment of codes of conduct that would exclude manifestations of racism, sexism, homophobia or other unacceptable forms of behavior. Politically correct terms are a special group of neologisms that are deliberately created by native speakers to replace lexical units that, for one or another political or social reason, begin to be perceived as derogatory. A number of researchers consider political correctness as one of the manifestations of euphemism, as an integral component of its linguistic aspect (Anna Monashnenko, Svitlana Amelina, Vasyl Shynkaruk, 2021). They consider euphemisms and politically correct units as identical concepts: euphemism is one of the most effective means of expressing politically correct vocabulary.