Jeff from Beautiful Atrocities has a few things to say about political faddishness in language that are quite near and dear to my heart.

Keith Jackson posted a ridiculous piece this week, in which someone takes him to task for using the word ‘homosexual,’ suggesting it’s a pejorative word. Give me a break. I’m so over this Soviet fad of renaming things every few years according to the latest political fashions.
I don’t use the term African American because I think it’s meaningless. Black Americans have no ties to Africa. None. If my ancestors were press-ganged onto a steamer in Liverpool, does that make me an Anglo-American? Such an idea only has relevance to the commissars of identity politics, whose game is divide, divide, divide.

Thank you! I’ve never expressed my very real disgust at which language and words have been co-opted by our yearly upheavals, so perhaps it’s time I made my mind known. Scared of our own shadows (or “reduced illumination in area resulting from opaque objects which come between light source and said area”), we make up terms like “African Americans”, discard perfectly acceptable terms like “homosexual”, and subvert obvious and undiluted definitions in favour of obfuscation, inoffensive terminology, and witless reductionism. Damn this practice!
Language is many things, but one thing it should not be a mill to process the almost daily fashions and fads produced by the cultural sludge of PC-era dimestore movements. Yet that has become almost its sole purpose, second only to the preemption of all meaning and definition to the detriment of reason.
I usually make it a point to say “black” instead of “African American”, “homosexual” instead of “gay”, “Indian” instead of “Native American”, and “cultural cheesedick” instead of “PC-obsessed person”. Thankfully, this has, over the years, isolated me from most people — good for me, good for them. In all seriousness, this practice needs to stop. If I’m guilty of perjorative terminology, it’s in the service of the more important purpose of keeping linguistic correctness a notch above political correctness. The former has been and will be around a lot longer than the latter, and I just like being on the winning team. Screw the short timing bastards and their insistence on watering down virgin oil from the slopes of Tuscany into mere Crisco. I’ve got better things to cook with, thank you.