As the actor said to the woman bishop: Why CAN’T a chairman be a woman?

WORDS that w ere once considered neutral — such as spas tic or cripple or idiot or lunatic — ha ve become pejorative because of their adoption by unfeeling people as terms of abuse. However, there is alw ays someone seeking to ratchet up sensitivities, or looking for offence where it is often very hard to find.

Thus political correctness goes be yond the pursuit of good manners b y seeking to manufacture reasons for offence. For example, no handicapped person w as aware, until recently , that he w as supposed to be offended b y such terms as ‘the blind’, ‘the deaf’ or ‘the disabled’.

Yet many groups working with the public are now informed, by those who make it their business to set the s tandard for such things, that the references have to be to ‘blind people’, ‘deaf people’ or ‘disabled people’. There are euphemisms for each of these too, though the y are so clunking the y ha ve hardly caught on: ‘ sight- impaired’, ‘ hard of hearing’, ‘people of restricted mobility’. Are we lacking in sympathy if we fail to comply? Not so: it is one thing to s top using words that are generally accepted as offensive, but quite another to invent a whole new vocabulary to replace words that ser ve their purpose clearly and effectively.

The politically correct, however, continue to find fresh causes for concern. For instance, a correspondent in The New Yorker (January 4, 2010), writing about disabled athletes, used the phr ase ‘a challenged-runner’. It appears that ‘disabled’ itself is now considered offensive. How long will it be before ‘challenged’ is, too?

Gender is a particular problem. The apostles of political correctness have decreed that a word used for centuries to describe a piece of furniture — a chair — is now routinely used to describe the person who leads a board or a committee.

Yet it has ne ver been satisfactorily explained why a woman cannot be a chairman. As the dictionary will tell you, the definition of man is ‘a human being, irrespective of sex or age’.

Ironically, female terms are increasingly being ditched in favour of male ones. It is now the fashion, for example, to refer to actresses as actors — a word no less masculine than ‘chairman’.