Grammatically Incorrect

During Radio Five Live's rather interesting World Cup coverage, there was a discussion yesterday about the correct way to refer to Ukraine, which has given me much food for thought. Apparently, it is regarded as offensive to describe it as "The Ukraine", which was an invention of Soviet propaganda, and was designed to reduce the country to the status of a region, such as "The Dordogne". This, of course, reminds me of the ongoing debate about the all-too-frequent use of the term "the disabled" to refer to disabled people.

Linguists tend to give political correctness rather short shrift. Many commentators, such as Steven Pinker, argue that it does not matter whether we describe black people as "black", "coloured", or "African-American" because, just as they do for Humpty Dumpty, words mean whatever we want them to mean. Therefore, if the word "coloured" is offensive, this is a reflection of a problem with our attitudes rather than the term itself. This argument has some support from modern linguistic theory. The structure of language seems to be hardwired into our brains, to some degree, and so the extent to which it can be shaped by culture is limited. Meanings are assumed to be taken from our collective memory and slotted passively into a fixed syntactic framework, thus having no effect upon our existing beliefs. From this perspective, it would be plausible to suggest that any adjective can be used to describe people with dark skin without any ill effects.

However, this logic does not apply to the examples given in the first paragraph. Grammar does have an effect upon the meaning of words, otherwise "man bites dog" would be equivalent to "dog bites man". When the word "the" was placed in front of Ukraine's name, there is a case for saying that it was weakened from being an unambiguous proper noun and became little more than an ordinary functional noun. Now it could feel that "going to the Ukraine" was no different from "going to the supermarket" or "going to the toilet". In the disability example, the change is even more profound - what was an adjective in "disabled people" is turned into a noun in "the disabled". Even the most hardened disciple of Noam Chomsky would struggle to justify claiming that its meaning has not changed. Because adjectives tend to describe less central features of individuals than nouns, the effect of saying "the disabled" is to reduce us to our disablement, and so to reinforce in listeners the making of generalisations across the group.

That is why, from now on, I shall always be describing the country whose capital is Kiev as "Ukraine", without a definite article in sight.