Showbiz gossip site Digitalspy.co.uk is reporting that Salisbury Council has banned the phrase "Singing from the same hymn sheet" in case... wait for it... it offends atheists. I'm an atheist, well, not even an atheist really - I don't think about God enough to qualify - and the only offensive thing about the whole story is the assumption that I need protecting from something so pointlessly inconsequential.
When something as powerful as a local authority is so frightened that their employees may inadvertently cause offence with a common phrase whose meaning is innocent and perfectly well-understood, you have to wonder just how much arbitrary personal power that hands you - without you ever having to lift a finger to earn it. What fun could one have, what resources could one waste using this power for evil? With this kind of pointless language micromanagement and fear-based culture lurking in the coridors of minor elected power, the sky's the limit. It may be double plus non-good, to quote Orwell, but what a ridiculous laugh it would be to use political correctness deliberately against itself to make the point. Pick a phrase in common usage, officially demand that you're offended by it, and stand back to watch the fun.
This reminds me of the short time in 1994 when I worked on the IT support desk of a local water company. I was alone on the early shift one morning when a man from the quality assurance department came in with an apparently urgent need to discuss a few of the support records. This puzzled me. Why were QA looking at the support records. They had no hope of ever understanding them. It turned out that the man was indeed puzzled - about the phrase "the machine is down". I explained that it simply means a machine has locked up or has in some way crashed. The man from QA wanted to know if we could use a different phrase in future. I asked why and he said that "down" sounded a bit sexual. Seriously. No one but the other support staff would ever have cause to read these records, and they all knew what the phrase actually meant, but the man from QA wanted us to use the phrase "rendered inoperable" instead. I referred him to the IT manager, who, if my memory serves me correctly, laughed and asked the man from QA if he had anything better to do. That, perhaps, is the problem. The man from QA was employed to take pointless trivialities seriously, to pursue them and to report back. It was a stupid job, but it paid real money, which in turn paid a real mortgage and real taxes.
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