In these days of political correctness

> "I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’. That’s just treating other people with respect.”

No, being respectful and being politically correct are very different things.

* Respectful would be to say, "I don't care whether you're a man or a woman, white or black, Jewish or Catholic, I only care that you can code!"

* Politically correct makes a manhole cover into a person-hole cover.

* Politically correct turned "dumb" into "retarded", optimistically suggesting hope for a change in the future, and finally into "developmentally delayed", the current euphemism. But that isn't about respect, because each new euphemism carries the same meaning as the word it replaces, and people often turn well-intentioned euphemisms into insults, as with "retard", the short version of "retarded", the usage of which caused "developmentally delayed" to replace "retarded". Stay tuned for more replacements.

* Politically correct turns any number of politically incorrect student descriptions into "special-needs student", which, in the name of correctness, undermines any meaningful communication.

* A school in Seattle renamed its Easter eggs 'spring spheres' to avoid causing offence to people who did not celebrate Easter. This isn't respect, this is paranoia and overreaction.

* A recent zealous effort to replace the engineering terms "master" and "slave" (used to describe the relationship between storage devices, network elements and other things) has been provisionally abandoned for lack of a meaningful substitute. Again, stay tuned.

It's not about respect, it's about politics and the bizarre power of law in service of popular fads.