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Sunday, December 17, 2006
‘Macaca’ named most politically incorrect word of 2006LOS ANGELES: The Global Language Monitor on Friday named “macaca” as the most politically incorrect word of the year.
The non-profit group, which studies word usage, picked the word after it was used by outgoing United States Republican Senator George Allen of Virginia, in the run-up to last month’s Congressional elections, to describe a Democrat activist of Indian descent.
According to Global Language Monitor chief, Paul JJ Payack: “The word might have changed the political balance of the US Senate, since Allen’s utterance (an offensive slang term for Indians from the Subcontinent) surely impacted his election bid.”
The second most politically incorrect term was “Global Warming Denier,” used for someone who believes that climate change has moved from scientific theory to dogma.
“There are now proposals that ‘global warming deniers’ be treated the same as Holocaust deniers: professional ostracism, belittlement, ridicule and, even, jail,” Payack said.
In third place was “Herstory”, a substitute for “History”. As Payack explained, there were nearly 900,000 Google citations for “Herstory”, all based on a mistaken assumption that “history” was a sexist word.“When Herodotus wrote the first history, the word meant simply an ‘inquiry,’” he said.
In August, Global Language Monitor picked “truthiness” and “Wikiality” - two words popularised by political satirist Stephen Colbert on his television show “The Colbert Report” - as the top television buzzwords of the year.
The group defined “truthiness”, as used by Colbert, as meaning “truth unencumbered by the facts”. “Wikiality,” derived from the user-compiled Wikipedia information Web site, was defined as “reality as determined by majority vote”.
Last year, the group dubbed “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”, as President George W Bush’s most memorable phrase of 2005.
Bush made the comment to Michael Brown, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, before Brown resigned over the administration’s handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. reuters
Courtesy DailyTimes.com.pk