A Call to Arms Against Militant Word Assassins

D on Juan is offensive. Casanova seems to be perfectly OK.

Lad y requires extreme caution. As for gentleman , nobody seems to care.

Dutch treat “implies that Dutch people are cheap.” Scot-free merits no mention whatsoever.

Today’s topic is the dangers of communication--a subject so volatile that the paragraph you are reading was rewritten on deadline. An earlier version featured a word that might have offended people with roots in a particular region of the British Isles who shall remain anonymous. (I just work here.)

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. The language has always been its own battlefield, but this is especially true in this socially diverse and sensitive age. Words and phrases that seem innocuous have an uncanny way of ricocheting and striking innocent bystanders. But efforts to police the language always produce contradictions and double standards. The examples (and omissions) noted above derive from a multicultural management guide produced under the auspices of the American Newspaper Editors Assn. And this was back in 1989, when P.C. was more likely to mean personal computer than politically correct.

My concern has nothing to do with the fact that yours truly is a Scott of Scotch-Irish heritage. Webster’s New World Dictionary defines scot-free as “free from payment of scot, or tax,” and “unharmed or unpunished; clear, safe.” Let’s get this straight: I pay my taxes and will soon suffer a day in traffic school. So maybe scot-free should offend me, but it doesn’t.

But then, my ancestors were tough enough to wear kilts.

So why are those tulip-sniffers so touchy? Wooden shoes?

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The problem isn’t in avoiding words that are clearly racist, sexist or otherwise derogatory to groups. The gray area is where the battle rages. That’s where you’ll find the squiggly line that separates the sensitive from the hypersensitive.

Certainly language is fraught with peril. In the struggle to say what we mean and mean what we say, it behooves us to be sensitive to words and their meaning. But we also need to protect our ability to communicate.

Thank goodness that, so far, nobody has perfected a P.C. P.C.--a little laptop that would erase Don Juan and insert not Casanova , for that surely must offend a few Italians, but something like “a sexually prolific man.”

But that doesn’t mean somebody won’t try.

It just so happens that a committee of editors and reporters at The Times is working up a new style guide to help us navigate such verbal minefields as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion and people with disabilities. I’m told that there’s really nothing to worry about. But when editors tell you not to worry, it’s hard not to.

They reassured me that they are not trying to be thought police, and that much-maligned cause of political correctness really isn’t their guiding light. Rather, they tell me that the goal is to come up with terminology that is both accurate and sensitive, no small feat.

The editor who chairs the committee says a crusade has been waged against P.C. absurdities as physically challenged to describe people with disabilities. (Joel Greenberg, The Times’ science editor, will tell you that Einstein isn’t dead; he’s just metabolically challenged. )

The committee, it’s good to hear, reserves special disdain for special , a word that is at once vague, euphemistic and patronizing.

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But in other areas, the P.C. influence is profound, not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.

In the racial arena, for example, it was determined that black and African-American are both valid, depending on context. (Not all blacks are American citizens, of course.) A debate raged over whether Anglo is a valid synonym for white . It’s been used this way for years, and though Anglo doesn’t bother this white guy, neither am I bothered that it received a thumbs-down vote on the grounds of inaccuracy. (European-Americans, I’m happy to report, has been rejected as an artificial term that has not achieved common usage.)

We can only wait and hope that the P.C. movement will succeed in sensitizing us to the language and not in censoring our expressions.

Meanwhile, the masses should resist the militant word assassins who would conspire to do away with terms that have been in common usage for years.

The words belong to all of us. It would be interesting for a pollster to find out how many Latinos are really put out by Don Juan. It would be nice to know how many Dutch-Americans would really want to take Dutch treat away from the rest of us. Does Dutch treat make Amsterdamers seem cheap--or progressive?

Feel free to write. If I could, I’d split the postage with you.