As some of you may know I'm English. As some of you may also know I came to the USA over a year ago, and very shortly now I'll be moving from Ohio to Virginia to begin a new job there.
My wife is American, and the degree to which we can use the same words while completely misunderstanding each other has surprised us both.
Take the word 'fag'. In England a 'fag' is a cigarette. To say 'I smoked three fags on the way to church' means 'I smoked three cigarettes' not 'I killed three homosexuals'. Such confusions have been a source of unfailing amusement to us both in the last year or so, but last night she made a very important point that I'm going to have to bear in mind constantly when I begin my new job.
Imagine you are at work and one of your co-workers were to say, casually, that he was going to 'smoke a fag' on his break. If you were a tolerant sort (and knew that Europen English had idiosyncrasies that might cause unintentional offence to Americans) you might take your co-worker aside and suggest changing the phrase to 'I'm going out to smoke a cigarette'.
But in a time when 'sensitivity' has become a politically correct watchword you might just decide that such a comment, no matter the innocence of its intention, was so offensive that the speaker ought to get his ass kicked - legally and metaphorically if not physically and actually.
Such is the hypocisy of 'liberalism' in America. One must be forever sensitive to the 'cultural needs' of gays or blacks (or to those of any other social group with wit enough to launch nuisance law-suits); but that supposed 'sensitivity' is actually a form of intolerance. Intolerance sanctioned and supported by law, an intolerance that means I cannot make use of the forms of speech which are natural to me, which means my cultural heritage must be suppressed in favor of the idiocy which insists that no speech which might in any way be offensive to anyone, for whatever reason, may be uttered.
The uber-sensitivity of supposed 'liberals' toward the tender feelings of minorities (any minority) has produced a situation which 'liberals' themselves profess to despise - a situation in which one cannot speak one's mind without fear of persecution, where an incautious slip of the tongue can ruin careers and blight lives, where anyone with a grudge and a lawyer may make a mockery of 'free-speech' and profit enormously from doing so.
Personally, I'd just as soon smoke a 'liberal' as a fag. Fags don't squeal like 'liberals' do.
