In some show I saw:

She says, “You’ve got ovaries.”
He says, “I’ll take that in the spirit is was intended.”

On the ‘gay’ thing, I have to keep explaining to my kids that it used to be a word meaning happy, that it was adopted by homosexuals to fight off all the bad words used to describe them, and now, for some unfathomable reason, has been adopted to mean something bad. It seems to me a little more than coincidence that when gays find a positive word for themselves it gets given a bad meaning.

Now, I never thought of Jews or Gypsies in relation to “I’ve been gypped,” which is kind of a hard, jagged word, maybe associated with rock, and sounds like the feeling it’s being applied to. Now I’ll have to think again.

It’s not your logic that is incorrect, it’s the fact that you don’t seem to be following it through to it’s inevitable conclusion. (or, worse, you are not bothered by it)

We say that people with good vision (or that are visually perceptive) have eagle eyes because, well, eagles have good vision.

Following that same logic, to say that people who have courage = people who have balls equates having courage with having balls, ie – being male.

Just as a person with good vision is like an eagle (in certain ways) a person who is courageous is like a man (in certain ways). According to those metaphors anyway.

Which is why the “balls” phrase is FAIL. Because, while eagles have better vision than many other animals, men are not more courageous than women. To use the phrase is to suggest otherwise, no matter whether you think men are more courageous or not.

Patrick – I know lots of people that do that already – as a sort of inside joke.

At a certain point, a metaphor is just a metaphor, a cigar is just a cigar. Do you also get upset when something is described as mother’s milk because fathers cannot produce breast milk?

It’s not offensive, and it’s not likening a subset of people with a stereotypical negative attribute that has nothing to do with them.

2) My non-Jewish friends are always shocked when I refer to myself as a Jew. Apparently the PC term is “Jewish person”. Um, what?

3) I was informed today that “disabled” is impolite. Since my disabled mother uses this word with no tone of self-deprecation, I assume that this is not true. Once again, advocates are getting more PC than the actual “offended” people.

But I don’t want to hijack Justine’s blog, so I’ll stop here.

Characters are another thing entirely, though. Sometimes you have to let them say things that you might never say, or else the story will suffer. Sometimes you have to let them do things you don’t approve of, too… Which makes me wonder how you decided to handle the smoking issue in your ’30s book.

“BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULL!”

“Thundercats, HO!”

“Shazam!”

“Go-go Gadget Arms!”

I do say lame, however, usually to denote something that is broken/underperforming/crippled. That feels totally different to me, but I’m interested in arguments about it. How often is the word “lame” used to mean a physically disabled person anymore?

I feel less compunction, however, to monitor speech when you are actually describing something using a word that means what you are describing. For instance, if something is really illogical and weird and baffling, I don’t feel bad about saying it’s crazy or lunatic. I don’t feel like that is some sort of slam against the mentally ill.

Nor do I have a problem of saying something is ballsy. Just because only males have balls? So what? If I say someone has an eagle eye, am I being discriminatory to owls, who also have great vision? A positive association doesn’t necessarily imply a negative association with something else. I’m a woman and have no balls, and I do hate the whole “like a girl” thing, but I have no problem with the opposite — with going “be a man” or “ballsy.”

You can go way overboard with some of this stuff, IMO, and end up with “herstory” and other improper etymological PC-ing.

And no, you can’t be held responsible for the things your characters say. My characters say all kinds of stuff I’d never say. Villains AND heroes.

I do love the series of ads that this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEpBYKOs3ys is a part of though. Definitely gets the point across.

In fiction, I think it’s definitely important that we do have flawed characters portrayed; because no human is perfect. Only a very strange person would believe that an author approves of everything that their characters do. Not to say anything against religious people as a group, but this makes me think back to an example where I heard a Christian ranting about Harry Potter because (shock, gasp and horror!) he got angry, and sometimes did selfish things. Essentially Harry was a bad person because he wasn’t perfect! But if a character is perfect then they can’t go on a personal journey and develop; which means no novel. After all, one of the main focuses of a story is the development of its characters from people who are not perfect, into people who are still imperfect but might be better or worse because of their experiences. Character arcs are one of, if not the, most important part of a story – and where does one go when one has a perfect character?

As for saying potentially hurtful words generally, I think the trick is to remain flexible and open to change. I knew someone who used the word “Jew” to mean to cheat someone out of money. He didn’t even know it had anything to do with Jewish people. I thought this was strange until I used the word “gyp” to signify the exact same thing. He informed me that this was a reference to gypsies. I didn’t even know.

Now we both know.

Oh and, for the record, I actually like when people of color refer to white folks as “Snowflake.” I think it’s lovely. But not nearly as funny as “Cracker.” But then, being white, I’m not on the hurt side of the color line, so I can afford to be magnanamous about it.