“Changing what counts as acceptable public behaviour is one of the ways you go about changing prevailing attitudes; ask anyone who still smokes cigarettes.”- Deborah Cameron (Verbal Hygiene, 143)
Verbal Hygiene (1995) is a brilliant book by the linguist Deborah Cameron exploring society’s attitudes towards language and our drive to label some language “good’ or “bad.” This quote is from her chapter on language and political correctness, which explores the “explosive” controversy of the PC language movement, and its implications to feminism and power structures.
HermitCrab 