Prosecutors in Manhattan and the Bronx have recently liberated hundreds of justice-involved youths who faced potential legal consequences for their participation last year in mostly peaceful protests aimed at dismantling systems of oppression. If you don’t speak “woke” — the new name for the same old scourge of political correctness — all that piffle means the city let looters off the hook. Meanwhile, prosecutors are preparing to hold insurrectionists and traitors accountable for their attempted coup d’état at the Capitol on January 6 — or, in English, the feds are throwing the book at trespassers in horn helmets who made a mess of Nancy Pelosi’s desk and stole her lectern.

The power of political correctness lies not merely in what leftists insist we cannot say but also what they make us say instead. Polite societies use euphemisms. We refer to old women as “women of a certain age.” We mourn those who have “passed away” rather than those who died. In prior ages, ladies went to “powder their nose” and still use the “bathroom” or the “restroom” rather than the toilet. Those euphemisms soften harsh realities, but they don’t contradict them. The old woman is indeed a woman of a certain age. The poetical “passing away” describes the spiritual fact of death. Women may indeed powder their noses after they’ve done whatever else they would do in rooms that often include a bath and in which anyone might rest.

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