From "First Things" magazine some time ago . . .
As a folksinger once sang, “How many roads must an individual walk down before you can call them an adult?” Well, that’s not exactly the line from Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” but it gets the job done and avoids offending the excruciatingly sensitive. A couple of years ago, the New York State Education Department became a laughingstock when it was revealed they had bowdlerized even classics such as Mark Twain, Franz Kafka, and Walt Whitman to remove potentially offensive words from textbooks. Candace de Russy, a trustee of the State University, investigated and found out that the censors had a definite policy: “We may not always understand why a certain word hurts. We don’t have to. It is enough that someone says, ‘That language doesn’t respect me.’ That is, if any word or phrase is likely to give offense, no matter how far-fetched, it should be deleted.” Among excisions are any reference to a person’s age, ancestry, disability, ethnicity, nationality, physical appearance, race, religion, sex, or sexual proclivities. Also to be replaced: “grandfather clause,” “ghetto,” “alumna,” “alumni,” “alumnus,” “white collar,” “blue collar,” “pink collar,” “teenager,” “senior citizen,” “underprivileged,” “unmarried,” “widow,” “widower,” and, of course, “man.” One oddity here is that some of those terms, such as “underprivileged” and “senior citizen,” not so long ago entered the language in order to avoid hurting the feelings of, in these instances, the poor and old. But it gets even odder, as explained by Diane Ravitch, author of The Language Police: “Thus the great irony of bias and sensitivity reviewing. It began with the hope of encouraging diversity, ensuring that our educational materials would include people of different experiences and social backgrounds. It has evolved into a bureaucratic system that removes all evidence of diversity and reduces everyone to interchangeable beings whose differences we must not learn about—making nonsense of literature and history along the way.”
it's all just nuts. reminds me of what we thought of the red chineese 4 decades ago all dressing the same and saying the same things because clothing, thought, and speech were proscribed.
hap 
