A Politically Correct Dictionary and Guide
by Dr Kevin Donnelly with illustrations by Johannes Leak,
Connor Court Brisbane, 2009.
ISBN: 978-1-925826-72-2
(purchase copies at kevindonnelly.com.au).
Spoof dictionaries and reference books have delighted us for nearly 150 years since the appearance of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary in the late nineteenth century. The one I’ve enjoyed most so far has been playwright Alex Buzo’s A Dictionary of the Almost Obvious(1998). Buzo’s tart but delicious humour spares nobody, though New Zealanders, South Australians and sensation-seeking media practitioners come in for the harshest treatment. A couple of my favourite entries are these:
Backflip. Any perceived change of heart or mind, any degree of flexibility, any change of policy occasioned by revelation of new facts, but above all any kind of personal growth and maturing.
Bitser. A mongrel in Oz, but a gambling term in Kiwese. E.g. ‘The horse dropped did, so all bitser off,’ said the bookie.
In the interest of decency, I won’t quote Buzo’s wonderful entry on Kant. Interested readers are encouraged to look it up for themselves.
It is against this background that I approach the pleasurable task of reviewing my friend Kevin Donnelly’s latest book. At the outset an obvious difference between the two is that Buzo wrote primarily to amuse, though he was clearly engaged emotionally with some of the issues that particularly irritated or vexed him.
By contrast, Donnelly’s book is driven in the first instance by a kind of righteous anger about some of the delusional follies of modern thought (I use the term loosely), yet he knows how important it is to sugar the pill, charmingly and wittily. So we’re dealing here with a serious book, a critique of modern life, couched in and relieved by some very entertaining language.
After a foreword by Peta Credlin and the author’s own introduction, the book falls into two principal parts, the first a dictionary of 218 entries and the second a collection of seven essays on the impact of PC in various departments of our lives.
One of the things that impressed me about the first part, the dictionary proper, was its fairness. Entry 45 Cultural appropriation, for example, provides a definition and reports the views of individuals so crisply that, if read out of context, one would not have any sense of the writer’s own viewpoint. 132 Marriage, to my mind, was also exemplary in its statement of the current range of opinions, without overtly ruling in favour of one or the other. The same thing may be said of the articles on Patriarchy, Safe Schools and Sexuality.
Even-handedness is all very well, but you can’t keep it up for ever, especially in the face of the kind of mass mania that has so transformed public life. In his long article 197 TransphobiaDonnelly can no longer contain himself: this whole gender thing is a nonsense so breathtakingly crazy as to make the Emperor’s New Clothes actually look chic, and our author doesn’t pull his punches. There are other peculiar dogmas of our time that we might describe as self-satirising: no effort required, just summarise them and their hilarious absurdity speaks for itself. Good examples are 199 Trigger Warnings and 210 Whiteness.
Deliberate humour may play a secondary role in this serious work, but it’s there all the same, and in abundance. The following entries are particularly good fun: 49 Deaf as a Post, 59 Dunny man, 113 In bed with a wog, 148 Nip in the air, 150 Non-animalist language.
On the debit side I thought 133 Meme could have been clearer and I would like to have seen a definition of the prefix Cis-. In origin it’s a Latin preposition meaning ‘on this side’ (its opposite is ultra) but I struggle to understand terms such as cisgender. Perhaps that’s the point – they may not be susceptible to rational understanding.
The book’s second part, comprising essays on Political Correctness and the cultural-Left’s so-called ‘Long March through the Institutions’, nicely unites the various strands. For me the most charming was The Past is a Foreign Country, reflections on growing up in the 50s and 60s. The concluding essay (What’s to be done?) sadly but inevitably falls short of offering a sure remedy – apart from just mockery. And mockery may turn out to be our best defensive weapon: after all, the mind that succumbs to PC ideas is essentially a humourless one. It cannot bear mirth. But the capacity to smile and laugh is one of the distinguishing marks of our humanity and in the long run, at least, it will prevail. Johannes Leak’s splendid illustrations lend support to that campaign too. I warmly recommend this book as a powerful aid to social recuperation!
David Daintree