by Theodore Dalrymple
I do not think that The Journal of the American Medical Association intends to be funny, but sometimes it is.
For example, I recently saw on its website a paper titled A Young Pregnant Person With Old Myocardial Infarction. Evidently, the journal is now so misogynist that it considers the word woman an insult in itself.
To the N-word must now be added the W-word; soon, if the linguistic Savonarolas have their way, there won’t be enough letters in the alphabet to designate words which must never be pronounced on pain of excommunication by the monstrous regiment of the righteous. Frailty, thy name is person!
Then there was a paper titled An Uncommon Cause of Acute Chest Pain. It began as follows: “A patient in their 50s presented to the emergency department with 20 minutes of substernal chest pain … ”
Obviously, the doctors looking after the patient were agnostic as to whether the patient was a man or a woman. The use of the plural possessive adjective to describe what belongs to one person is now not only common, but de rigueur, if not outright obligatory: his and her will soon be the two H-words.
Interestingly, the second paper came from China, where of course they are fully accustomed to ideological lying. Perhaps, then, the Chinese are becoming as tediously decadent and trivial-minded as we in the West, which would be good news inasmuch as it would save our bacon; but possibly also, the editors of the journal insisted on intersex language as a condition of publication.
There is a giant ideological lie behind the locutions used in both papers, which is that the sex of a person is simply a matter of choice or of random allocation at birth, an unimportant detail medically. If people choose to believe such rubbish, it is up to them; but when the repetition of such a lie is imposed as a condition of employment or advancement, when everyone must assent in public to what he knows to be false, then has totalitarianism arrived.
Who won the Cold War? Certainly, it was not the West.
First published in The Critic.
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3 Responses
If this carries on there will have to be a wholesale revamping of the French, Spanish and Italian languages because almost every single noun is either male or female.
Just one niggly point about Chinese, they don’t generally distinguish between male and female in their conversations (although they do in their pictographs, “Hanzi” as they’re known).. everybody is just an “it”
And by the way, our Provincial Government here in “British” Columbia has now decided that “British” is offensive and that we should be referred to as “People living in B.C.”.. so if the word is hidden it’s OK?
Want more? You can’t have homeless or drug addicts in our society, so call them something else.
It’s a turn of phrase similar to prior government-sponsored revamps of the words “homeless people” or “drug addicts.”
The new government-approved terms — in B.C. and other provinces — are now “people experiencing homelessness” and “people who use drugs.”
Wouldn’t you just love to sit in on a meeting where these insane policies are discussed and approved?
When ALL is forbidden will there be punishments for violators?
Is forbidance included in ALL?
When we come to a fork in our logic, will we apply Yogi Berra’s selected choice?
“Frailty, thy name is person!” That’s priceless. I’m not leaving home without it.