Isobel Grundy: "Every sentence makes assumptions I'd wish to argue against. "

Correctness and power connect originally through Latin: first from the verb regere, regens, regent, which means to rule or to make straight; and then, from corregere: to correct or to straighten together. Who would have imagined that political correctness flirts with redundancy?

Well, Miss Colbeck must have known how to apply Latin because she eventually straightened out the boys in our class. And now, in the Colbeck mode, many women, some men and most minorities want to straighten out a few power systems in various Canadian establishments.

So here's the point. Why has the meaning of this innocuous expression turned itself inside out? In keeping with laudable Colbeckian goals, the expression political correctness should carry happy and positive connotations. But it doesn't. And it doesn't to the extent that those who pepper their remarks with it usually mean exactly the opposite of what they say: they mean political incorrectness, also mistake, hidden agenda, incompetence, doom, corruption. You know, scare-tactic words left over from the list of excuses some folks give when they don't want other folks to vote.

Anyway, for help on the matter of political correctness, I turn to three women in the English department at the University of Alberta Shirley Neuman, chair, Isobel Grundy, professor, and Dianne Chisholm, assistant professor.

At the university, all of these women agree that hearing the expression politically correct to describe a department's program signals that the department has added courses on women and/or racial minorities to its curriculum.

I ask the professors whether they can conclude anything about the attitude of a person who uses this expression: Would someone who chooses "politically correct" to describe a department feel pleased or displeased about courses on women's perspectives? The professors' tendency is to say, no, such a person isn't delighted about the addition of women's perspectives. But Isobel Grundy and Dianne Chisholm caution against hasty deductions.

"Of course it depends on the speaker," explains Grundy, recalling an article by Ruth Perry who points out that "the phrase was first used with irony, in the 1960s, by left-wing people about themselves." Still, when I press and ask who most often uses the term political correctness and why, Grundy admits that the words pass frequently over the lips of "people who wish to discredit those with a feminist, or any kind of egalitarian or socially committed agenda."

To the same question, Shirley Neuman comments, "those whose values rest on a 'canonical' curriculum or those opposed to 'equity policies' in hiring" will be the most likely to trot out political correctness as part of their descriptive lexicon.

When I ask Neuman about her expectations regarding the speaker women or man?--she qualifies her response: "I don't," she says, "expect the person to be one or the other. I observe, however, that men use the term more often in an un ironic way; that some though not all women using this term ironize it."