“Political correctness gone mad” goes mad

article written by Heather.

It is rare to read the free bus paper – the Metro – without seeing at least one letter with a rant about “political correctness gone mad.”

Experiment: Counting the number of readers’ letters containing the phrase and working out a daily average, maybe comparing the result to the occurrence of some other nonsense phrase like “air conditioning walnuts.”

However, that would be a bit too much of a time and consciousness commitment, so I took the easy way out and googled.

Amazingly, google could only find 681 occurrences. Impossible. Doh, I misspelled the word and missed the first “i” out. Which makes the 681 occurrences quite impressive. (A truly dedicated social researcher would try every possible misspelling. Sorry.)

The correct tally is actually “about 61,000.” Even this seems a little on the low side, given the existence of the Daily Mail and the BBC’s Have your Say. I suspect I have been too specific to get a true picture of how often “Ranting Bigot” reaches for the conceptual green ink.

I put the phrase “political correctness gone mad” in quotes. This is an English usage. I’m not sure how thinking-constricted Americans say it. How do I make a direct translation of “gone mad” into US English, in which mad means “angry” rather than insane?

“political correctness run amok” gets 21,400. Quite a respectable tally but I don’t think I’m still getting the full flavour of it.
“political correctness run amuck” garners a further 4,230.
“political correctness gone insane” gets a modest 3,090.
“political correctness gone berserk” gets only 510, (plus one result for “political correctness gone bersek”, my misspelling again.)

Ok, I’m going for the big ones: The bald phrase “political correctness” gets about 5,060,000.
The phrase “politically correct” brings up 6,150,000 entries. There is some duplication here, though. Is anyone adding these up?

Oh Buggar. “air conditioning walnuts” – the control phrase in my experiment – brings up “about 1,240,000″ google hits. I kid you not.

Undaunted, I have to conclude that this might just show that there is no nonsense phrase too ridiculous to bring up millions of google hits. (And, at least, “air conditioning walnuts” doesn’t have me snarling when it appears on a web page.)

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9 Responses to ““Political correctness gone mad” goes mad”

  1. Heather Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8 wrote:

    DOH, again
    I missed off the quotes, There are only 5 results for “air-conditioning walnuts”, one of which is this post…….. I can’t change it now. I fear that the stress might break Google.

    This comment was written at September 2nd, 2008 at 19:33,

  2. K Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.16 wrote:

    Don’t be daft, we use “mad” to mean “barmy” in the US too.

    This comment was written at September 2nd, 2008 at 20:04,

  3. Alun Mac OS X Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 wrote:

    Score one for the “PC brigade” (66,500 – 323 from the dailymail.co.uk alone)

    This comment was written at September 2nd, 2008 at 20:51,

  4. Heather Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8 wrote:

    K
    Doh again. Thanks..
    Alun
    I’m really impressed that you took the research torch and ran with it.
    I didn’t even think of using “PC.” You’ve given me a whole new area of things to search for.

    “PC brigade” is possibly the most perfectly-formed manifestation of its use. You can always rely on the Daily Mail.

    This comment was written at September 2nd, 2008 at 21:25,

  5. Alun Windows XP Google Chrome 0.2.149.27 wrote:

    The problem with “PC madness” (22,000) is that it could be a phrase used by smug Apple owners, or just anything to do with PCs. Still, you’ll never guess which paparazzi publishing paper is number one for the phrase :wink:

    This comment was written at September 2nd, 2008 at 22:32,

  6. Tom Donald Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 wrote:

    Hey Heather, there’s only 171 hits for “the daily mail is shit”, but by god, they’re a better class of hit…

    This comment was written at September 3rd, 2008 at 9:31,

  7. Heather Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8 wrote:

    Tom
    But, being the simple truth, that isn’t a nonsense phrase, so it breaches the experimental guidelines.

    This comment was written at September 3rd, 2008 at 19:38,

  8. Cold metal » Why Dont You Blog? WordPress 2.6.2 wrote:

    [...] the big test, then. I’m going for my favourite indicator that a human twat-a-tron is at work. “Political correctness gone mad” gets 3,420 print archive hits. Wait. I run it again, [...]

    This comment was written at September 9th, 2008 at 23:13,

  9. EU to make the word ‘Gullible’ illegal (if you believe BBC Leicester) « Archaeoastronomy WordPress MU wrote:

    [...] has caused Tory MEPs Roger Helmers and Chris Heaton-Harris to throw their toys out of the pram. It’s political correctness gone mad. Umm… why? Do they really need to know if they can have homosexual relationships with police [...]

    This comment was written at April 7th, 2009 at 15:04,