Satire Project Update

My group and I will be doing a skit about that topic of man becoming slave to technology. So far we have decided that a few students in our group will be in a video that will be shown it in class and a few will be presenting in class. We plan to film the video sometime this week, hopefully on Thursday in class. My group started working on our script on a google docs, which is shared with everyone in the group. We need to edit it and add a few lines so that our presentation is a little longer but it's more or less finished. We have also decided on costumes and what everyone will be wearing, both in class and in the video and are in the process of making props and signs that we will need for the video and class. We still need to do the group reflection essay but we know what we should write.

The Word Police 3/5/17

"The Word Police", written by Michiko Kakutani, is an article about the rise of political correctness and its impact on language and society. Kakutani describes the people who advocate for P.C. as the "self appointed language police" and says they believe that by enforcing new rules, regarding what words are politically correct to use, they will be able to fix some of the world's biggest issues, racism and sexism. The author uses irony, sarcasm, and mockery to express how ridiculous she finds the efforts of the P.C. police. She feels that their efforts are exaggerated to the point that they become a distraction from the real issues. As political correctness grows, euphemisms grow with it and it allows people to hide their true identities and the inequalities of life. As Orwell said, euphemisms are "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Kakutani says that by changing "testimony" to "ovarimony" or "women" to "womyn" to avoid the suggestion of sexism, or getting upset over phrases like "bullish on America" or "the city of brotherly love", it "tends to distract attention from the real problems of prejudice and injustice that exist in society at large." I felt that Kakutani's biggest point was that actions speak louder than words. She said "Calling the homeless 'the underhoused' doesn't give them a place to live; calling the poor 'the economically marginalized' doesn't help them pay the bills". If you want to fix the world's problems, you don't do it by changing the usage of words. Like Kakutani said, do you really think  making such changes will remove the prejudice in people's minds?