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Firstly, true democracy has already perished without the help of political correctness so that argument as far as I'm concerned is moot. Political correctness simply serves to restrict what's left of open and free speech. The concept belongs in the same dustbin as feminism and Health and Safety executives.

The idea that every word I utter must be so carefully thought out so as not to cause offense to the multitude of diverse cultures, skin colours, dialects, languages, demographics etcetera, etcetera causes me great offence in itself. Whilst I certainly do not differentiate between the inherent human qualities of different cultures - I have no qualms about accepting that a black man (and when I say man, I mean it in the general human sense) is different to me a white man, in that he has different coloured skin. Calling him (ok, or her) black just acknowledges that fact, in the same way that I would verbally differentiate between a cup and a mug with no implied prejudice. I'm not saying that one is better than the other, I'm simply stating a difference, and that we are actually different. It's a sad society that we live in where it is considered prejudicial to say that you are different from somebody else.

The problem is that common sense has been thrown out of the window. No, it has actually been launched into deep space. Surely as a complex society we should be able to take intention into the argument and form intelligent, spur of the moment opinions as to whether something is or is not meant to cause umbrage and make value judgments upon that!
Where a football fan shouts racial abuse from the stands, yes, he should be banned for life and punished. Where a woman is given less pay because of her sex then absolutely, that should be tackled head on and stopped. But there is a big difference between that, and say using the words 'nitty gritty' as one government minister was critisized for, simply because it is an incredibly obscure reference to slavery dating back a couple of hundred years, but one which hasn't been used in that context for almost as long.
The thought of having to tiptoe on eggshells through life without upsetting anyone in the slightest though is absolutely ridiculous. When did we become so oversensitive?

Maybe one solution is perhaps to have an approval system on the dictionary. When a word is invented, we could pass it through all of the world's theological, cultural and academic colleges and have that word given clearance to be entered into the

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