With apologies to James Whitcomb Riley: "The word police will git ya if ya don't watch out."
Just ask the chief of staff of the White House, Rahm Emanuel, and the secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, who have spent as much time apologizing for perceived serious violations of political correctness than trying to figure out how to make things better in the good old USA.
It may just be a coincidence that both hail from Chicago, where apparently words like retarded and other hideous examples of insensitivity are still in everyday use, having not been replaced by the euphemisms that are so much in vogue today whether or not they are as exact in describing a problem. Not for nothing is the Gotham of the Midwest called the Windy City.
Emanuel made the horrible mistake in a private meeting of referring to liberal critics as being "retarded." There it was the dreaded R word, which has taken its place alongside a host of other descriptive nouns and verbs and adjectives in our often difficult language that are now only uttered publicly or privately with the possibility of dire consequences. And, boy, oops, man, did he find that out quickly.
The former congressman who has a reputation for scatological utterances unmatched in polite society quickly groveled in front of such organizations as the Special Olympics Committee, which apparently didn't want the word retarded used in the same breath with liberal.
Duncan, meanwhile, was admitting to uttering a "dumb" remark by suggesting that the best thing that ever happened to education in the city of New Orleans was hurricane Katrina. Now any intellectually challenged person would understand what he meant given the sorry state of that city's schools before the catastrophic storm and flood. What he was trying to say was that at least something good, a new system, has come out of all that misery.
Over the last five decades, political slips of the tongue have brought down more than one high ranking official, including an Agriculture secretary who told an off color joke that was clearly racist. He, like Emanuel, thought he was talking in private. Any veteran politician, however, should realize there is no such thing as privacy in public life, especially in an electronic age where it takes only nanoseconds to spread a burp around the globe. Going viral, I believe is the expression. There is always someone with a gadget poised to record every faux pas for posterity and to the embarrassment of the perpetrator.
