I remember a few years ago someone posted a link here to a guy that had built a clever off-road wheelchair so that people with disabilities could enjoy hiking, and some people got upset with him because he used the wrong euphemisms.
I recall one such poster getting upset over the word 'Chinaman'. Something this Englishman, sharing an office with two Irishman, a Frenchman and a Dane, found rather bizarre, particularly as the chap complaining was not Chinese themselves!
Such virtue signalling is at its worst when used to pile-on a speaker or post for uttering some perceived slight, or daring to suggest an unpopular idea or political view. It is bad for open discourse, even open society, and needs to stop.
As I see it, the US - the first place with a supposed egalitarian bent on the cosmopolitan society - created a system whereby people from all backgrounds and ethnicites could interact in the public sphere without tripping each other's emotional wires - that is the basis for Political Correctness. Keep your baggage at home, and out in the real world and in the market you can interact with everyone as equals (so, Mike Munger's "the answer is trasaction costs!").
The system worked pretty well for a time (fine, it's called the 90s). The problem is that the edifice kept on being built up, as more voices raised more touchy subjects that needed to be sanitized in public, enough that it began to bother people. I think that as alternative means of communication allowed people to more be "themselves" in the digital, if not real, public domain, the discrepancy between public discourse and private thought became more glaring.
Now, for every system, there are those who naturally like to uphold norms, and these are the ones you say are "virtue signalling" - I think they're just norm upholders. But for the rest of us, it takes only one euphemism that hits us the wrong way to get us questioning the whole over-built edifice. The fact that one political side arbitrarily took it up as a cause, of course, made the other side all the more dogmatic in its application.
So it will be eventually torn down and replaced by something identical and the cycle will continue anew. ~fin~
I think the Englishman comparison is not very smart. With the same logic, it's fine to use pedophile to refer to someone because it's grammatically constructed similarly to audiophile and no one never complained when associated to the word audiophile. I don't think a pejorative word (recognized as such in all modern dictionaries) stops to be pejorative because it exists a similar construction that is not pejorative.
And I don't think you need to be the one accused to be a pedophile to be offended when you see someone uselessly accusing someone else to be a pedophile. (but again, I would probably not have reacted, and have given the benefice of the doubt to the interlocutor, assuming they were unaware of the pejorative connotation)
And yet "Chinaman" is considered derogatory. If you believe the Wikipedia page, it has been considered so since at least 1965 in British English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman
You might not consider it logical for "Chinaman" to be considered derogatory when similarly structured words like "Frenchman" are not, but the reality is that if you use the term then you will be evoking the current meaning.
> and needs to stop
The point of the article is that you can't stop the euphemism treadmill, no matter how emphatically you request it.
It's one of those words you certainly shouldn't be offended at finding in an old book, or not even if an elderly person uses it, but if a young person uses it then he's probably dug it up deliberately for questionable political reasons.
To me, this set of words would already lean negative and imply someone hopelessly devoted to a specific country, not someone of that nationality, even if "Chinaman" didn't also already have a pejorative history.
It's a bit similar to how some people just posit that "The Ukraine" or "The Congo" is somehow pejorative just because most countries don't have a definite article.
The term that does exist, Chinaman, already has its own pejorative sense. It doesn't need that from me.
All I'm saying is that these other words (again, words that I didn't "make up," but also that nobody actually uses) would sound negative too, and are the actual parallels to the term in the parent's example.
By using the name of the country rather than the demonym for its inhabitants, it implies some sort of preference for the country as country, to the degree that a person defines themselves by it, rather than a simple point of history about a person's ethnic heritage, over which the person had no control.
Not that any normal person thinks that there is anything negative with "some sort of preference for the country as country, to the degree that a person defines themselves by it". It's politically quite extreme to see that as "pejorative".
I'm having real trouble coming up with a single country that has the demonym "[Country name]man."
There is a meaningful difference between the name of a country and the term for someone from that country. The second is inherently neutral, because no one controls where they're born. The first connotes that someone defines themselves by their connection to the country as a country (or that the person calling them that sees that as their primary identity, subordinate to the identity of the country itself).
People who claim that "The Congo" is offensive don't say that because it's not the official name (which it is), I guess they just presume that there must be some colonial racist reason, and not just the fact that it's named after a river.
"Republic of the Congo", or "République du Congo" in French, "du" being a shortened form of "de le", "of the". Other French speaking republics just have "République de N".
Except it isn't. Not without "The Republic of ..." (or "The Democratic Republic of ..." if we're talking about that other much larger country the phrase usually refers to) in front. And given that there are two such countries -- there's absolutely no modern use case for "The Congo" as a country name in any case.
which is clearly untrue.
Yes, there are two Congos. Both of them have "the" in their official name:
-République du Congo (The smaller one, with Brazzaville)
-République démocratique du Congo (The larger one, with Kinchasa)
It is true that the official "Republic of the Congo" is typically shortened to just Congo" in everyday speech, my original point was just that there is nothing "racist" or colonial about say "The Congo". It is not called that as a slur because it's somehow lesser than e.g. Namibia, it is just that it's named after the Congo river. But I have heard many people who like to be offended have a vague idea that the "the" is somehow offensive because most countries don't have it.
As regards the river basin. When applied to the respective countries individually (and without the "Republic of" qualifier), which are after all the context we're talking about here (not the river basin) it has an entirely different connotation. And again, there's simply no modern use case for "The Congo", by itself, as a name for either of these countries.
Whatsoever.
What connotation is that exactly? Does "The Virgin Islands", or "The Hague" for that matter, also have that connotation in your mind?
I am again just saying that there is nothing racist about the "the" in "The Congo". It is just a natural way to shorten "Republic of the Congo". It might be unusual nowadays, but that does not mean that there is anything pejorative about "The".
"Use case" has nothing to do with it, nothing about language use is fully "rational" or "optimal". It is obviously _possible_ to make do without the article, but what I am getting at is the misdirected anger some people seem to feel towards it.
The connotation of intentionally ignoring their very, very, very clearly stated preference as to what their official name is. Neither of these countries refer to themselves as "The Congo" as such, and they've made it known that they would prefer that you not do so as well. That's all there is to it.
"Use case" has nothing to do with it,
Au contraire. Language is all about use cases.
It's use cases über alles, in fact.
A Dane, a Swede, a Norwegian (Norseman brings to mind beards and battle-axes), a German, a Welshman, a Luxembourger.
English is weird!
Source: An native English speaker of His Majesty the Kings English, not one of those weird leftpondian dialects :-)
It is usually easy to understand if you just look into it.