Holy frisbees, political correctness gone mad

"P.C. caresses bigots and big brother, read Leviticus,
learnt censorship, pro-life equals anti-choice, to be scared of, of feathers"

- PCP, Manic Street Preachers.

It's 14 years since the Manic Street Preachers released the lines of this song about the crippling and often contradictory effects of political correctness upon society.

While it is fair that certain words and phrases inextricably linked to the horrific acts linked to discrimination on the basis of race, creed and religion should be wiped out, there is a fine line between protection and preventing the use of certain words as to restrict rational and intellectual thought.

On one hand, for example, in a recent interview in the Telegraph, BBC presenter Edward Stourton recalls a conversation with the Queen Mother which could rightly offend right-minded individuals.

After he told her he was back from a European summit, Mr Stourton said the matriarch said:

"It will never work, you know . . . It will never work with all those Huns, wops and dagos."

Says Stourton:

"The words were delivered with the eyes on maximum tiara-strength twinkle, but I am afraid I froze. The Nation's Favourite Grandmother was, I thought, in fact a ghastly old bigot, a prey to precisely the kind of prejudice which had driven the conflicts the European project had been designed to prevent . . . I thought that what she had said was nasty and ugly."

These references to German, Italians and Hispanic people drip with historic racism and rightly have no place in the modern English language, alongside other clearly pejorative terms like nigger, gollywog and nips.

On the other you can go too far. For example, Staffordshire University has ordered frisbee team to change its name from the Mental Discs - a name which the group has had since it formed in 2002.

The university's Student Union acted after a complaint that the word 'mental' had 'potentially offensive' conotations and now the team must come up with a new moniker. Which frankly is ridiculous - a certain case of P.C.-ness gone mad.

Of course, you could argue, as the Hanley-based mental health group Brighter Futures does, that there is a stigma to mental health, and taking it to the logical conclusion, that every reference could make it more difficult for people to admit they are suffering from such problems if the word is always used in a pejorative sense.

But the difference is in the context.

Whereas the words above have few, if any, positive uses except to denigrate another human being, a word like mental has taken on a range of meanings for different contexts.

Mental, according to Wikipedia, can refer to:

* Mind, the collective aspects of intellect and consciousness
* The Mental nerve, part of the peripheral nervous system in the face
* The Mental scale, a snake scale pertaining to the chin or lower
jaw that is addressed by the mental nerve
* "Mental" is used as an adjective slang term, meaning "extremely
stupid" or "insanity", referring to mental illness
* "Mental" is a slang term used within youth culture, meaning
"awesome" - it can be used in many contexts, similar to that of the
word "cool"
* Mental can refer to Mental accounting. The science of behavioral finance.

To look at the debate at www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk, it is clear that I'm among many like-minded individuals who believe this is clearly a case of P.C. gone mad.

The trouble is, to return to the Manic Street Preachers, 'When I was young, PC meant police constable' - officers who are generally guided by the law to act in a certain way.

Officers of political correctness, by contrast, have been able to introduce strictures on what can be said and done, not by what is set down in law, but by convention, and by the tolerance of people unwilling to challenge these views.