> But beyond what it says about Google itself, the saga of Gemini also demonstrates some things about how educated professional Americans are trying to fight racism in the 2020s. I think what it shows is that there’s a hunger for quick shortcuts that ultimately turn out not to be effective.

From one perspective, the rise of PCE [Politically Correct English] evinces a kind of Lenin-to-Stalinesque irony. That is, the same ideological principles that informed the original Descriptivist revolution---namely, the rejections of traditional authority (born of Vietnam) and of traditional inequality (born of the civil rights movement)---have now actually produced a far more inflexible Prescriptivism, one largely unencumbered by tradition or complexity and backed by the threat of real-world sanctions (termination, litigation) for those who fail to conform. This is funny in a dark way, maybe, and it's true that most criticisms of PCE seem to consist in making fun of its trendiness or vapidity. This reviewer's own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just silly but ideologically confused and harmful to its own cause.

Here is my argument for that opinion. Usage is always political, but it's complexly political. With respect, for instance, to political change, usage conventions can function in two ways: on the one hand they can be a /reflection/ of political change, and on the other they can be an /instrument/ of political change. What's important is that these two functions are different and have to be kept straight. Confusing them---in particular, mistaking for political efficacy what is really just a language's political symbolism---enables the bizarre conviction that America ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using certain vocabulary that is historically associated with elitism and unfairness. This is PCE's core fallacy---that a society's mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes[fn:63]---and of course it's nothing but the obverse of the politically conservative SNOOT's delusion that social change can be retarded by restricting change in standard usage.[fn:64]

Forget Stalinization or Logic 101-level equivocations, though. There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact---in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself---of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were. Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed using taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PC progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as "low-income" or "economically disadvantaged" or "pre-prosperous" rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates. (Not to mention that strict codes of egalitarian euphemism serve to burke the sorts of painful, unpretty, and sometimes offensive discourse that in a pluralistic democracy lead to actual political change rather than symbolic political change. In other words, PCE acts as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.)

[fn:63] (A pithier way to put this is that /politeness/ is not the same as /fairness/.)

[fn:64] E.g., this is the reasoning behind Pop Prescriptivists' complaint that shoddy usage signifies the Decline of Western Civilization.

-- David Foster Wallace, "Authority and American Usage" (1999)