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A very well organised and explained 8-Bit Philosophy video on the effectiveness of PC culture, focusing on its language, by the acclaimed YouTube channel WiseCrack.
A stand-up comedy sketch by the late and legendary George Carlin on the new rising phenomenon (at the time) of PC language and culture, and the mainstream use of euphemisms. He strongly believes in language being largely arbitrary, like the great linguists Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky. He finds language to be descriptive of our belief systems, culture, and cognition - rather than the language itself being prescriptive of behaviour our conventional ethical standards denounce, such as prejudice and discrimination.
It is interesting to note that Carlin does not believe that the language is an issue at all, arguing that the only reasons we focus on PC language and euphemisms is to pretend our problems can be solved by "sugar-coating" the language that describes what we do.
A pro-life African woman protests against the Western forceful construction of the concept "abortion" as a beneficial device to women in her country at a conference. She powerfully argues that this idea was wholly imported from foreign powers to colonize the poor countries. Her argument runs from a home-grown native speaker perspective shows that where abortion seems morally right in Western countries, it sounds apprehensible and morally problematic when it is said in Africa.
Interestingly, this example reflects linguistic relativity where language determines the appropriateness and morality of a thought or action, in which abortion is the material subject. Native tongue is more than a way of expression. It forms a perspective that is unique to those who share the common language and cultural practices.
A Youtuber, Wylie, speaks about her struggles growing up as a Chinese in America. She was not taught English by her parents until pre-school, which made her feel estranged from the other kids. One instance that is particularly relevant to our topic is from her second grade. She brought a lunchbox of pork belly with pickled mustard green to school as she was not used to eating American dishes. All her classmates were so curious about her lunch, but when they heard the name "pork belly", which is indeed in English "bacon", they were all disgusted away. This example demonstrates the idea that language conceptualises the features of an object or a subject, be it food or person. When a described object seems foreign, speakers are predisposed to interpret it according to the closest meaning familiar to themselves, especially for children. This may aggravate prejudice between different cultures and upbringing.
The first-generation immigrants in America do not always have the opportunity to receive formal education in English. Their children, usually bilinguals, are relied on to be the translator of their parents. Prejudice against "broken English", or accented English was strongly felt by these second-generation immigrants. This video shows the traumatizing experiences where broken English was judged against by the locals and the pain of suffering prejudice.
This example is interesting as it sets the stage for the bilinguals to recount the embarrassment and shame in witnessing and understanding well enough the unkind prejudice directed to their monolingual parents. There is an instance at 1:11 where a mom tried to stop a girl from kicking sand at them. Her limited language prompts her to resort to using physical movement as she put her hand over the girl's leg and said "Stop." This instigated a fight between the adults without mom understanding why it happened. This illustrates how two sets of languages, hence different modes of thinking and acting, would drive conflicts between speakers.
The video scales down the original experiment adopted in a large-scale study on the differences between Bilinguals' and Monolinguals' way of thinking by employing the same set of methodology and material but reducing the pool of over a hundred participants to two of the researchers' friends, one monolingual and one bilingual. The study result echoes with the original study, which shows that a bilingual speaker tend to elaborate on what the picture does not show, whereas the monolingual focuses solely on the present continuous action. Despite the low reliability of the small pool of participants, it is a straightforward way of delineating the significant difference in bilingual's use of language and thought.
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