Free When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? by George Carlin Page B

the fact that people can be defective? Then what would be wrong with calling those people the physically defective? At what point in life does a person with a birth defect become a person who is differently abled? And why does it happen? I’m confused.
    UGLY LANGUAGE
    Then there are those who don’t quite measure up to society’s accepted standards of physical attractiveness. The worst of that group are called ugly. Or at
    least they used to be. The P.C. lingo cops have been working on this, too.
    And to demonstrate how far all this politically correct, evasive language has gone, some psychologists are actually now referring to ugly people as “those with severe appearance deficits.” Okay? Severe appearance deficits. So tell me, psychologist, how well does that sort of language qualify for “being in denial”? These allegedly well-intentioned people have strayed so far from reality that it will not be a surprise for me to someday hear a rape victim referred to as an unwilling sperm recipient.
    Back to ugly. Regarding people’s appearance, the political-language police already have in place one comically distorted term: lookism. They say that when you judge a person, or rather, size them up (wouldn’t want to judge someone; that would be judgmental) if you take their looks into account, you’re guilty of lookism. You’re a lookist.
    And those valiant people who fight lookism (many of them unattractive themselves) tell us that one problem is that in our society, those who get to be called beautiful and those who are called ugly are determined by standards arbitrarily set by us. Somehow, there is some fault attached to the idea that we, the people, are the ones who set the standards of beauty. Well, we’re the ones who have to look at one another, so why shouldn’t we be the ones who set the standards? I’m confused. I would say the whole thing was stupid, but that’s my next topic, and it would sound like a cheap transition.
    STUPID PEOPLE
    So, stupid. It’s important to face one thing about stupidity: We can’t get away from it. It’s all around us. It doesn’t take a team of professional investigators to discover that there are stupid people in the world. Their presence (and its effects) speaks for itself.
    But where do these stupid people come from? Well, they come from
    American schools. But while they’re attending these schools, they’re never identified as stupid. That comes later, when they grow up. When they’re kids, you can’t call them stupid. Which may be contributing to the problem. Unfortunately, kids, stupid or otherwise, come under a sort of protective umbrella we’ve established that prevents them from being exposed to the real world until, at eighteen, their parents spring them on the rest of us, full grown.
    There are stupid kids. And I do wish to be careful here how I negotiate the minefield of the learning disabled and the developmentally disadvantagedin other words, “those with special needs” (All of these being more examples of this tiresome and ridiculous language.) I just want to talk about kids who are stupid; not the ones with dings.
    One of the terms now used to describe these stupid kids is minimally exceptional. Can you handle that? Minimally exceptional? Whatever happened to the old, reliable explanation, uThe boy is slow”? Was that so bad? Really? “The boy is slow. Some of the other children are quick; they think quickly. Not this boy. He’s slow.’ It seems humane enough to me. But no. He his minimally exceptional.
    How would you like to be told that about your child? “He’s minimally exceptional.” “Oh, thank God for that! We thought he was just kind of, I don’t know, slow. But minimally exceptional! Wow! Wait’ll I tell our friends.”
    Political correctness cripples discourse, creates ugly language and is generally stupid.
    I haven’t quite finished this section. (I’m sure I needn t remind you P.C. people that “The opera isn’t concluded until