politically correct

politically correctadj

• 1

  governmentpoliticsPossessing or conforming to the correct political positions; following the official policies of the government or a political party.

  • Sentiments and expressions of this inaccurate kind prevail in our common, even in our convivial, language. Is a toast asked? ‘The United States’, instead of the ‘People of the United States’, is the toast given. This is not politically correct.
  • [On] the one hand we should demand that the poet's work conform to the correct political tendency, on the other hand we have the right to expect that his work be of high quality. … I want to show you that the political tendency of a work can only be politically correct if it is also literarily correct. That means that the correct political tendency includes a literary tendency. For, just to clarify things right away, this literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct political tendency – that, and nothing else constitutes the quality of a work.
• 2

  derogatorySensitive to giving offense on the grounds of race, sex, etc.

  • A man cannot be politically correct and a chauvinist too.
  • Why do they call camels "Ships-of-the-desert" ? [...] Because they're full of Iranian seamen. (NOW, being politically correct you must, of course, substitute "martian" What a clever joke this becomes! Hopefully, there are no martians listening. )
• 3

  derogatorygovernmentpoliticsStereotypically left-wing; possessing or conforming to stereotypical left-wing social views.

  • Don Imus, Bernard McGuirk, Trent Lott, Larry Summers, the Duke lacrosse team, Jimmy the Greek, the kid who yelled "water buffalo" at Penn, Howard Cosell, Jon Stewart, Chief Illiniwek, Jackie Mason and "South Park" all have in common only one thing: They have not been Politically Correct.
  • From foie gras produced without making birds suffer to "sustainable" fish, British retailers and restaurants are fast embracing politically correct food, helped by celebrity-fuelled pressure.

politically correctverb

• 1

  To modify in a way that is considered more respectful to minorities.

  • There is nothing new or progressive in the politically corrected vocabularies that now amuse the prejudiced.
  • Thus, although Pastoral Paul contradicts, updates, and politically corrects Paul of the authentic letters in accordance with the horizontalized, non-sectarian interest of the Pastorals, he does this as an extension of a decidedly this-worldly, conservative paraenesis which may be seen as Paul's own contradiction of his apocalyptic eschatological interpretation.
• 2

  To modify in a way that conforms more to the official position of a government or political party.

  • Even a senior Chinese scholar-official who had been politically correcting my arguments and opinions throughout the conference smiled and accepted that the academic standards to which we both had to comply were quite different—I would be ridiculed by my own colleagues were I to adopt the standards of China, which he nonetheless deemed the (officially sanctioned) correct ones.