As I’m gradually winding down to retirement, I’m looking forward to watching Everton home and away and becoming a Labour Party activist again. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but in the seventies I sang The Red Flag lustily. Speaking of lust, I thoroughly appreciated my wonderful female fellow activists who cheerfully lived by the Marxist principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”*. I had a lot of needs in those days. However, It will be forty years since I last understood what was Politically Correct and am desperately in need of an update.

More specifically, how do I talk to lefty women, most likely feminists**, without causing offence? Recently, there have two threads that upset my equilibrium. One featured that charming old lawyer (roughly my age) complimenting a young up & coming solicitor (roughly my daughter’s age) with the sexist adjective “stunning”. The second was full of profanity, the most powerful of which was a term for a vagina. All the masculine ones were far less effective and possibly a compliment.

As a result, I am increasingly wary of using adjectives, which, surreptitiously, have a developed their own gender. For example, when » Continue Reading.