THE OFFICIAL POLITICALLY CORRECT DICTIONARY AND HANDBOOK...

THE OFFICIAL POLITICALLY CORRECT DICTIONARY AND HANDBOOK by Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf (Villard/Random House: $10, illustrated). Beard and Cerf offer a sardonic but ultimately disturbing look at the linguistic shenanigans of the far left. In this semantic cloud cuckoo-land, housewives are called domestic incarceration survivors; fat people are turned into persons of substance who are victims of sizeism, fatism or weightism , and a woman becomes a person of gender (what ever became of the masculine gender?). Many of these entries seem very funny until the reader begins checking the citations and discovers that presumably rational people who occupy important positions are the perpetrators of these weird mixtures of euphemism, reverse stereotyping and rhetorical overkill--including the professor at the University of Pennsylvania who declared, “Reading and writing are merely technologies of control. (They are) martial law made academic.” As Alice said to Humpty Dumpty, “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.”