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The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. By Diane Ravitch. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Paper. 272 p. $13.
It is not easy being the language police. You tap the phones, only to hear countless voices. You move in for the arrest, and the suspects themselves have already changed the law. When it comes to language, poets may be unacknowledged legislators, but I, too, am the lower house, and even dictionaries cannot agree on its proceedings. According to Diane Ravitch, however, the police are everywhere, and they have found a dangerously effective strategy: silence discordant voices early, while they are learning to speak. Language may not have cleaned up its act, as anyone who has listened to teenagers knows. The language of elementary and high-school textbooks, however, has been reduced to "mush." In The Language Police, Ravitch shows how pressure groups strip texts of controversial subjects-and the very words to describe them. The right has banned anything that might disturb its complacency. Out go evolution, of course, and such perceived slights to religion as the magic of fairy tales, but also unemployment, poverty, and racism.
Meanwhile, political correctness has targeted stereotypes so fiercely that anything even remotely demeaning hits the dust. Out go any depictions of female nurses or, in turn, male lawyers. Out go such common words as snowman. If this sounds ridiculous, Ravitch believes that it leads to a still more serious loss of public discourse. It eliminates or bowdlerizes the classics, and it leaves an idealized history...