Book Review: Verbal Hygiene (1995) by Deborah Cameron

A feminist and linguist attempts fecklessly to square the impossible circle

U.S. Government printing office style manual, system of marking proofs (2008)

I. Intro

I’ll be honest: I shouldn’t have read this entire book. It first came to my attention from a linguistics textbook for college students many years ago, which cited it as a creditable attempt to engage seriously with linguistic prescriptivism — in other words, to try to understand it, explain it as a universal human phenomenon, and show what it gets right and wrong in its assumptions. And given that it was released in 1995, a time in which linguists were more on-the-same-page than they are now, I figured Deborah Cameron’s Verbal Hygiene might constitute a valid and helpful study.

For those of you who don’t know, linguistic prescriptivism is a mode of analyzing language with an aim to prescribe how to use it, in both written and spoken contexts. Think of style guides, pronunciation keys, and seemingly arbitrary syntax rules from back in seventh grade grammar class. Prescriptivism is something that academic linguists frown upon because they feel that their own profession is about analyzing language as it actually functions, as a natural (or at least quasi-natural) phenomenon. Prescriptivism, in other words, amounts to an unnatural attempt “from above” to control what ought to, at least in theory, be a cultural practice that evolves due to changes “from below.” So for that reason, linguists have a reputation for making silly excuses on behalf of people who deviate from standard English grammar, and for even mocking those who are concerned about that sort of thing. Steven Pinker, in his The Language Instinct (1994), dedicates quite a bit of space to discrediting those whom he calls “the language mavens” who care a lot about things like split infinitives and the Oxford comma.

Personally, I’ve always felt that “prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar” amounts to a false dichotomy, and what I increasingly believe to be true of language’s underlying properties has prompted me to empathize with those who try to control it in a top-down fashion. In other words, unlike most Chomskyan linguists, who see “language mavens” as a bunch of snobs who are wasting their time, I think that they might be onto something and what they’re doing makes quite a bit of sense, even if it belies their own stated reasoning. So, I figured, I guess it’s time to read this thing — a book I’ve known about for over a decade but never explored.

Now, if I were going to write a book about prescriptivism and all of the reasons that it happens and even perhaps makes sense, here are some questions I’d try to research and answer:

1. What have the earliest historic occurrences been in which an authority figure seeks to control language in a top-down manner, whether in a village, city, or nomadic tribe? Why did it happen?

2. How about the widespread historic phenomenon of diglossia, the two-tiered system in which the language of the clerisy/elites hovers above the language of the laymen? How did the elites’ prescriptivist approach differ from ours today?

3. What might the longstanding existence of taboo words and noa-names tell us about the psychology behind the conscious manipulation of language? Is there some kind of similar residual irrationality that persists in today’s prescriptivism?

4. What effect did the rise of secular nationalism and the enlightenment have on the prescriptive mentality? When spelling and punctuation were becoming standardized, what did its advocates say specifically about this? What kinds of things did Samuel Johnson say about the standard use of English, or Noah Webster for that matter? Did they ever say or write anything that might suggest a coherent theory of how language works?

5. What link is there between how linguists assess language scientifically and their attitude behind prescriptivism? Is Chomskyan generative grammar and the belief in an innate language faculty essential to a dismissive attitude towards prescriptivism? And what if there is no such thing as a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) at all — should that necessarily alter our view on prescriptive grammar?

6. To what extent does prescriptivism rely on the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? And, while we’re bringing those guys up, what exactly did Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf really think? Were they entirely wrong about everything? Are there “weak” versions of their thinking that might be correct?

So in other words, I’d want to take a mix between a historical and philosophical approach to the subject, and I’d try to assess it with the benefit of having done some serious research and thinking. That way, even if I didn’t convince the readers of my own ideas on the subject, then at least they’d learn some interesting things. I was hoping that the author of this book would have approached her topic in a similar manner.

Unfortunately, however, what I found was that Verbal Hygiene, sadly, is one of those books.

II. Those Books

When I went to graduate school, I quickly learned about the existence of those books, since they were pretty much inescapable. I never gave them a proper name, since I didn’t think it was necessary. I just simply learned how to identify them after getting enough experience. I’d have to take three seminars a semester, and while I did my best to study legitimate subjects with serious professors, occasionally I’d wind up in some doofy seminar with a professor who cares a lot about critical theory… and while not everything they recommended was complete trash, inevitably you’d have to read one of those books, and over time you’d learn to spot them instantly. Those books, as I quickly began to recognize them, would typically have a few things in common.

The first would be long, seemingly endless stretches of text featuring extensive use of the first-person “I,” typically as a way of beginning or ending a chapter. There are times, of course, in which this approach is warranted. This here is a blog post in which I’m doing it. But in those books, the author is relatively unfiltered for someone writing what’s meant to be a work of scholarship. There isn’t an immediately identifiable reason for this kind of writing, like sharing a tastefully brief anecdote to illustrate a point, or something like this. Instead, the author gives off the impression that she (note: the author is usually a woman) is reasoning through the subject matter as she is typing. Here’s an example:

Lest the reader believe that I am dismissing the integrity of autogenic queerness as a discipline, I insist here that I do not argue that autogenic queerness is lacking in a proper Butlerian framework. And, not to be overscrupulous, but still less do I argue that autogenic queerness fails to properly acknowledge the debt it owes to Sedgwick. However, I do claim that autogenic queerness must stay mindful of its inchoate status as a queer discipline, and this requires constant engagement with the concerns of its chief critics (particularly those who helped shape the entire notion of autogenicity as an interrogation of The Other), of which I constitute but one. And what are my concerns, then, about autogenic queerness? Well. We can begin, for starters, with my observation that… [etc.]

If you’re wondering where that came from, the answer is nowhere; I just made it up. I have no idea what “autogenic queerness” is. But it’s a pretty accurate imitation of the writing style.

Those kinds of books, by the way, also regularly feature an off-putting use of first-person simple present tense verbs when the author is stating her intentions. “I begin with…” “I quote from…” “I argue that…” “I conclude by…” A normal person would say, “Let’s begin with…” “Lemme quote from…” “I’m arguing that…” and “In conclusion…” But then again, a normal person would never write such books.

Those books also typically show pedantic attention to detail in the form of “close reading,” sometimes engaging with material only peripherally relevant to the author’s thesis. This has the effect of bloating up the text and giving the book some extra volume. The “texts” (which can include anything, even personal experiences) that the author chooses to analyze are rarely indispensable to the argument, and in fact might even be a poor choice. Since those books often are written to advance vague, unambitious theoretical ideas (even something like “we should be more mindful of X” can be a book’s entire argument), the author has free rein to just pick whatever she feels like closely analyzing. Whatever she happens to have been interested in for the past month is perfectly acceptable. If a fly were to buzz a few times around her head, she might consider incorporating her experiences and personal feelings about that trying encounter into her research.

But above all — and this the most common and salient characteristic — those books are incredibly lazy. Anyone with middling intelligence could write them, they’re loaded with academic clichés, painfully conformist in their attempts to keep up with critical theory trends, they show absolutely no engagement with anything outside of the author’s comfort zone, rarely demonstrate erudition or mastery over the western canon, and they rarely even demonstrate fluency in another language besides English. For the most part, they resemble extended opinion pieces. They do not constitute real scholarship.

For the record, I think everyone should read at least one of those books, at least just to understand how offensively ridiculous the humanities has become. Two of my favorites are Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History by Heather Love (2007) — in which the author blathers her way through 200 hundred pages in order to argue that queers should feel OK about looking back on their history and feeling sad about it — and How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (2012) by Carolyn Dinshaw, which is nothing short of a masterpiece of self-indulgence. You read that one and you get the sense that Dinshaw has worked for years and years at crafting such perfectly billowing, helium-filled prose. For a taste, here’s what’s on the very last page:

That is, I think, my particularly queer response to this queer figure. My reaction is typical because the issue here is desire—both his and mine, to share a love of the medieval with others—and desire, as Heather Love has powerfully demonstrated in her book Feeling Backward, is so thoroughly marked for queers with loss, isolation, and shame. Thomas Colpeper is a failure—in terms of modern productivity or reproductivity, a total loser. “Within straight time the queer can only fail,” observes José Esteban Muñoz. Yes, Colpeper’s failure, the failure of a queer in reproductive time, the failure of an amateur in professionalism’s modernity, is inevitable, but that foregone conclusion is the least interesting thing we can say about it. Colpeper’s queer love, quite inexplicable in everyday modernist frameworks—he loves a hill?—can nonetheless rouse us to look for other ways of world making, for other ways of knowing, doing, being. It can move us to revalue such failures, amateurisms, nonmodern temporalities, and the attachments they foster.

Here she’s talking about a character from the Powell & Pressburger film A Canterbury Tale (1944) who gives us no reason to believe he’s sexually abnormal in any way, yet she still insists on calling him a queer, even relying on Love’s book, which is specifically about sexual deviants. This is the sort of prose you get when the only authority to whom you’re beholden is your academic peer group. You get plenty of genetic drift, and all the other academics (i.e. the ones who are actually trying to produce real scholarship) generally don’t engage much with it, as they find that it’s simply easier to ignore.

Also, did you notice exactly how she cited Feeling Backward? That’s a pretty common form of citation. You don’t actually engage with the text meaningfully; you just give a vague sort of “shout-out” so that the author being cited can have a bloated “citation count” affixed to her work of pseudo-scholarship, giving her the ability to claim that it is influential. These weirdos get together at conferences and agree to cite each other’s books; there’s no actual reason to read anything. The whole practice amounts to a conspiracy of mediocrity.

I should also note, if people couldn’t figure it out by now, that those books get by on their moral pretense. Starting in the 1970s, academic feminism turned into something of a trojan horse that allowed some of the dopiest writing imaginable to infiltrate the humanities, and it has stayed there for decades, splintering off into a spectrum of sub-disciplines while its output has grown more plentiful. Check out Duke University Press for an entire catalog of such nonsense. Those books are upheld primarily by the ideological privilege that their authors both clearly have and yet entirely take for granted.

III. Summary

So anyways, that’s what Verbal Hygiene turned out to be. Just another one of those books, but from a feminist perspective, as opposed to a queer, black, or postcolonial one. Recall the six questions I posed above; the ones I’d ask if I were working on a similar project. The first three aren’t addressed even once. The fourth question is met with five perfunctory references to Samuel Johnson, all of which are dismissive of his ideas and fail to indicate the author has engaged seriously with his work. Regarding question five, we get a single sentence on page six about how a structural linguist and post-Chomskyan mentalist might differ in their understanding of how language works, but we pretty much never hear about those guys again. On question six, we find a single reference to Whorf in this sentence (p. 142, emphases in original):

Most linguists and psychologists today are sceptical about the strong version of the Whorfian claim that language determines perceptions, but on the weaker claim that it can influence perceptions there is conflicting evidence.

You might be thinking, surely, then, she explains the studies, right? Or at least provides a footnote to some scholarship on the subject that does? Nope. That would require effort. She just barges on with the next sentence, which of course begins, “My own view is…” also ending without a footnote.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m really not a huge fan of this book.

So, why did I read this whole thing? The main reason is that I had a suspicion about Cameron’s intentions, and I wanted to see if I was right. This book was written in 1995, around the time when complaints over political correctness had reached a fever pitch within that decade. Just the year before, the college movie PCU (“Politically Correct University,” I guess) came out, and pretty much everyone was sick of authoritarian weirdos trying to control people’s language. Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct also came out in 1994, and it treated the PC brigade as belonging to the same category as all the other language mavens, like those poindexters who harp on endlessly about using who and whom correctly. I’m not sure Cameron actually read his book (she probably started working on hers before his came out), but it doesn’t matter, because he himself was summarizing a growing body of published ideas all relating to the same issue. So at this time, linguists were in a strange position having to explain their disapproval of prescriptivism while also having to appease the angry hordes of annoying student leftists who wanted to coin special names for every “oppressed” identity group under the sun. And surely, some of these linguists were pro-PC despite having no valid reason for being that way (at least, according to the claims of their own discipline). What were they to do?

Since Cameron is a feminist and I realized this before going into the book, I figured that there’s a 50/50 chance that her whole entire goal in writing it will have been to find some disingenuous middle position in which she argues that while it’s perfectly fine to keep bashing all of the conservatives who want to police people’s grammar, we should be fine with political correctness and let the PC people do whatever they want. And, as it just so happens, that’s what the book says. Having read the entire thing, I’m convinced that this was indeed her main purpose in writing it, despite it containing two mostly unrelated chapters.

I’ll go ahead and summarize the whole thing here. The first chapter introduces us to the concept of prescriptivism and it basically defends her decision to call it “verbal hygiene,” the term she prefers. She gives a couple reasons why: the first is that “prescriptivism” has too much negative connotation, and the second is that “verbal hygiene” is meant to be much wider in scope, since it could theoretically include the way schoolchildren mock each other for speaking too properly outside the classroom (a phenomenon she never actually analyzes). I find both reasons unpersuasive, which is why I’m not using her term.

The second chapter is about style guides. In this one, she looks at how the various style guides from different publishers refuse to acknowledge that many of their preferences are arbitrary, instead providing other reasons about ease, clarity, and “common usage,” none of which really stand up to scrutiny. I thought that this was the most successful chapter in the book, and it made several solid points about the nature of copy editing. However, it does not particularly do much to defend the prescriptivism of style guides, neither on their own terms or any terms at all. It largely suggests a critique that a common anti-prescriptive linguist would make, even featuring an extended section on Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (an essay to which she returns over and over throughout the book), which criticizes Orwell for reasons you’d expect from an anti-prescriptivist.

Chapter Three is about the British Tory party’s obsession with maintaining standard syntax along with their pedagogical crusade during the 1980s to make English teachers continue to use grammar drills. Here, Cameron presents her own objections to them on no uncertain terms, ultimately offering them no sympathy and refusing to “steel-man” their thought process. Chapter Four is about political correctness, which Cameron, on the other hand, treats with great sympathy. One academic review of the book by Diana Wegner (in Technostyle, Summer 2000) insists that Cameron “hovers at the edges of the debates.” This is nonsense. She directly places herself into them. I’ll discuss those two chapters in a minute.

Chapter Five is about self-help books, particularly those directed at women to help them be better in relationships, or in the board room, or whatever. This could have perhaps amounted to a decent discussion, but Cameron doesn’t really identify the generic dissimilarity between these materials she’s analyzing and all others. All of the other things are about the standardization of language and attempts to forge a “proper” way of communicating, while all of this material she analyzes falls under the category of rhetoric to assist with achieving particular goals. She never really offers a discussion on how “verbal hygiene” might differ from the other kinds when it’s executed in such an ad hoc way.

Self-help books are not particularly new, and they aren’t always female-oriented; a huge amount of them are directed at men or gender-neutral. It could be somewhat interesting to analyze how such books differ in the way they address each sex, but Cameron doesn’t even do that, since she never analyzes one directed at men. I mean, look. If your book is supposed to be about linguistic prescriptivism, or “verbal hygiene” — about as broad a subject as it can get — I fail to see how dedicating an entire chapter to self-help books directed specifically towards women as opposed to self-help books in general could be the best use of your efforts. Anyhow, the book ends with Chapter Six, and that’s a pretty basic albeit long conclusion.

Note that when I said that those books are all really lazy, the criticism certainly applies here. All of the texts the author scrutinizes are things in her immediate vicinity. In the chapter on political correctness, she analyzes the anti-sexist speech codes in her own (now former) employer, the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. When she analyzes style guides, she’s clearly looking at publishers that she and her friends are interested in working with, or perhaps already have. When she analyzes the British grammar crusade during the Thatcher regime, she’s describing things that she, a British woman, lived through and read about in the papers. She does not show the slightest bit of curiosity about anything more than a stone’s throw away from where she is or has been. History seems to have begun for her right when she was born. She even seems bizarrely proud of this at times. For instance, in the concluding chapter, she makes a brief aside about the pseudo-scientific practice of Neurolinguistic Programming, saying (emphasis mine).

I know there are many verbal hygiene practices whose premise is that by using language in particular ways one can actually reprogramme one’s mind, or even one’s brain. (For example, so far as one can judge without actually paying to be initiated into its mysteries, this is the idea behind Neurolinguistic Programming.)

Yes, my god, whatever you do, don’t actually pay to do something that would constitute real research! You might even come away with an interesting story to share! Jesus — what kind of Women’s and Gender Studies specialist would you even be?

IV. Grammar & Syntax

Let’s now go into Cameron’s reasons for hating conservative prescriptivism and approving of left-wing prescriptivism. We’ll observe how she argumentatively wriggles her way around in an attempt to avoid looking like a blatant hypocrite. After all, that’s really what this book is about.

To be clear, it isn’t especially hard for Cameron to attack conservative arguments. Ideologically, she benefits from the fact that the conservatives have no real institutional power within academia and thus form a decentralized discourse with very little message discipline. As a result, conservative commentators writing for various publications, funded by various think tanks, and representing different (sometimes incompatible) perspectives altogether form a somewhat amorphous blob of opinions. Cameron, being a leftist, has apparently neither the time nor patience to engage in the work of taxonomy, so she can freely pick apart weak arguments, observe incongruities between them, and conclude that “the conservatives” constitute a unified bunch of doofuses, and that’s more or less what she does.

In the syntax chapter, her main claim is that the conservatives during the 1980s stoked the flames of a moral panic about Great Britain getting rid of its grammar-based approach to English education, which involved a lot of rote memorization and drilling. The pedagogists’ reason for doing so (and this is, I believe, indisputable) was that grammar-based education does not actually do a better job of teaching reading comprehension or writing. But the conservatives, Cameron argues, responded by conflating good grammar with moral purity and discipline. While Cameron does a good enough job at showing that there is no ontological link between mastery over standard English syntax and moral uprightness, she never really addresses the deeper concern they have over pedagogy becoming too lax in general. For instance, here’s her quoting what Prince Charles said in 1989:

We must educate for character. That’s the trouble with schools. They don’t educate for character. This matters a great deal. The whole way schools are operating is not right. I do not believe English is being taught properly. You cannot educate people properly unless you do it on a basic framework and drilling system.

So, we’ve established that what Charles advocates doesn’t actually help with English fluency, but he’s also making a separate claim that drilling helps with moral character. If Cameron wanted to show that his concerns are all complete nonsense, she would present some psychological evidence that drilling practice does not, in fact, make people more disciplined or obedient in general. But she doesn’t do that, and she probably can’t. There’s an obvious point the conservatives are making about a certain pedagogical approach and its effect on behavior as opposed to learning, to which she can only offer no response except to accuse them all of treating grammar as a “symbol.” But some of them seem to have no illusions about grammar’s value merely as a vehicle for teaching discipline.

Beyond pedagogy, there are concerns about allowing students to use nonstandard English and failing to teach them the prescribed standard version. To her credit, Cameron actually does acknowledge one of the better arguments in favor of making sure students know the rules of standard English right down to the syntax:

John Honey’s early salvo The Language Trap (1983) had argued that in adopting the new orthodoxy, schools were hurting the very pupils they most earnestly desired to help, namely, working-class children speaking non-standard vernaculars. It was all very well proposing the linguist’s axiom that ‘all varieties are equal’, but since no one else in society believed this, to act on it was to perpetuate social disadvantage. Standard English remained the mark of intelligent, educated speakers, and working-class children would suffer unless they were taught it and made to use it in school.

A fair description. Her problem with it, though, is that she feels linguistic prejudice should be challenged rather than approached via realism. Honey’s refusal to challenge the system is unacceptable, because even if a few students are done a disservice here and there, the important thing is actively resisting the language-prejudiced establishment. As she puts it, “There is, after all, a lot of colour prejudice in Britain, but that fact is never invoked to suggest that black children in Brixton schools should be taught the proper use of skin lightening cosmetics.” Ha, ha, ha. But in the same way that she sees “improper syntax” as a mere symbol for the conservatives’ true concerns over chaos and disorder, we can just as easily infer that for Deborah Cameron, “linguistic prejudice” is merely symbolic for prejudice towards minorities. Once we understand her own predilection for symbolic thinking, only then we can parse her reasoning a bit better in the next chapter, where she defends the advocates of a different form of linguistic prejudice done on behalf of minorities and other supposedly oppressed people.

John Honey is thus uncontested when he says that no one actually believes that all language varieties are equal… but he was indeed out of touch. He apparently underestimated the political left’s ability to seize the major vectors of the establishment and force their own language of power into play, replacing the old one that had been used since the enlightenment. Has this done anything to benefit working class children who speak non-standard vernaculars? Not one single bit — if anything, it has made things worse for them, because the new system is highly unstable and fluctuates rapidly, which Cameron even acknowledges. But it has done plenty to keep leftists ensconced atop the establishment, warding off conservatives completely by forcing them either to adhere to a highly ideologized and constantly-shifting new speech code designed by and for their political adversaries, or to simply fuck off. If we examine what political correctness actually is from a realist perspective, there’s no denying that it has been remarkably successful, and it has rendered Honey’s original criticisms from 1983 now dated and irrelevant almost forty years later.

V. Political Correctness

Honey’s naïveté isn’t unique to him, and it is in fact why Deborah Cameron actually scores quite a few points when she attacks the conservatives’ treatment of political correctness. To be sure, she has some stupid responses, which have themselves become leftist clichés. At one point, she says something to the effect of, “Ugh, really? Are we still talking about the Thought Police? That argument is so last-decade.” But the reason she scores points is that the conservatives did an abysmally bad job at resisting PC. They simply didn’t know whether to laugh at it or take it seriously. Many chose the former, and those who chose the latter never really found the proper means with which to express themselves — hence their tedious reliance on George Orwell to connect all of the dots for them, which Cameron rightly criticizes.

But since she published her book, many conservatives decided to ignore the problem altogether, taking their cues from liberal linguists like Steven Pinker, whose message boils down to, “Yeah, this is all just silly stuff… it’s a euphemism treadmill… one word might be swapped with another, but it’s no big deal. You can have a big ol’ laugh about it!” Those conservatives actually should have read Verbal Hygiene instead, because had they done so, they would have seen for themselves just how little this reasoning actually discouraged the political correctness advocates, including those who identified as professional linguists. Perhaps entirely by instinct, these leftists understood that the ability to impose language standards upon others is a useful way to both seize and consolidate power, and they were thus delighted to find that a bunch of pathetic rubes were actually letting it happen!

Summing up the conservative response to political correctness well, Cameron says,

The most common linguistic charges against the so-called ‘PC movement’ are on one hand that its brand of verbal hygiene abuses language and destroys freedom by perverting the meanings of words, and on the other that it trivializes politics by focusing on language and not reality. One thing that must strike anyone considering these accusations is how contradictory they are. How can intervening in language be both a trivial diversion from politics and a threat to our most fundamental liberties? How can it be at the same time such useless, superficial tinkering that the only possible response is to laugh at it, and on the other, an attack on language and communication so serious it has ‘got to be challenged’?

It’s very hard to argue with any of this, and in fact, the same criticism has been leveled against the conservatives from the standpoint of the far right. In his speech on Marxism and the Frankfurt School, the late Jonathan Bowden said the following at the 13th New Right meeting in London (2008):

Because conservatism is an anti-intellectual attitude anyway — often philistine, often atheoretical — when a Marxist version of Center-Leftism comes along, they increasingly laughed at it… scorned it… accepted it a bit… accepted it a bit… moved [it] to the side… said they were against it… pushed away an egregious bit… accepted a bit… then another generation would accept a bit more… then another generation would accept a bit more…

Of course, we’re dealing with a somewhat different phenomenon, but the behavior pattern is identical.

So, then, what are Cameron’s arguments as to why political correctness is fine and unfairly smeared? Well, let’s get into it. Early in the chapter, she says the following:

One way to read the emergence of so-called ‘politically correct’ language is as a challenge to the whole idea of a universal and neutral language. It pushes to the limit established beliefs about what a language is, or ideally should be, and therefore it causes considerable anxiety.

In response, I’d say this is half right. There’s nothing about PC that inherently challenges the idea of a universal language, but it does have no pretense of neutrality, and this is something Cameron admires about it. Cameron seems to subscribe to the postmodern political sensibility, which goes something like, “If a thing can’t be 100% pure, then there’s no problem with just smearing a bunch of shit all over it, since it’s all the same anyway.” Language can never be purely apolitical, so if anything, the PC people are better than the liberals, since they have no illusions about their political aspirations while the liberals, on the other hand, are totally self-deluded.

For this reason, Cameron actually has no qualms with criticizing liberal attempts to defend political correctness. To her, the liberals miss the point entirely when they talk about “civility” or “accuracy” in expression. She has no problems drawing attention to the fact that, for instance, the feminist attempt to remove the suffix -ess to mark the feminine leads to less accuracy, since it precludes more descriptive terms like “waitress” and “hostess.”

So, why else is political correctness fine? The reason for PC language reforms that Cameron seems to like the most is actually symbolic. In one place, she says,

Even if we assume that language has no significant effect on perception, that does not license us to dismiss it as a wholly trivial concern; for speech and writing are not just about representing private mental states; they are also forms of public action, symbolic affirmations of an individual’s or a society’s values.

And later,

Despite the rhetoric of guideline writers, more than mere civility is at stake here. At stake is a power structure in which certain people, often without even being conscious of it, just assume the right to tell other people who they are.

So, just to be clear: when the conservatives argue for standard traditional grammar-based pedagogy and they’re primarily concerned with its symbolism (marking order, purity, or whatever), they’re a bunch of morons. But when Cameron and her friends argue for PC language reforms because they symbolize being against racism, or whatever, then that’s great! After all, at least they admit it, unlike those laughably stupid conservatives.

Now, one might ask her, “OK, but from a consequentialist perspective, what’s the point?” Here’s her response:

As Trevor Pateman (1980) has observed, even the most cynical compliance with non-sexist norms sets a public example others may take to heart. Changing what counts as acceptable public behaviour is one of the ways you go about changing prevailing attitudes—ask anyone who still smokes cigarettes.

So basically, even if the words themselves don’t affect perception, the mere display of obedience might. You got it? You take a sexist who wants to partake in the power structure, you bring him to heel, and you make an example of him. Of course, he’s free to think whatever he wants, as any good Hobbesian sovereign knows, but if he wants to participate in this Leviathan, he must submit. When others watch as he gets on his knees and obeys the dictates of the new power structure, they will see plainly who is in charge, and they will follow suit in their obedience.

At the risk of over-stressing this point, Cameron has no illusions whatsoever that power is what’s ultimately at stake here. She might be supremely lazy as a researcher and blissfully unaware of so, so many things, but she definitely understands power. One must give her that. She even defends linguistic double-standards from minority groups (e.g. black people saying “nigger” but getting mad when whites do the same) in exclusively power-based terms:

Liberals complain that this is unfair—straight white men are damned whatever they say or do, whereas women, blacks and homosexuals can get away with anything. But in a sense, this is exactly the point: to turn the tables in the argument about ‘who’s to be master’, and thus draw attention to the liberals’ unexamined (and from the radical perspective untenable) assumptions about language itself.

And elsewhere:

The kind of verbal hygiene I have been calling ‘radical’ is dedicated to disrupting the complacency with which dominant groups regard their own ways of using language as the only legitimate or intelligible ways of using it. The strategies it employs to that end are various, inventive and mostly confrontational. Some strategies rest implicitly on a turning of the tables: ‘we are going to use language as if we, not you, were the centre of the universe: if you don’t like it, think how we feel after centuries of having it done to us.’

It’s all power struggle. One might point out that she’s describing a theory in the third person and doesn’t necessarily agree, but if you mark just how critical she is of almost everything she discusses, and then compare that with her refusal to criticize these ideas, it’s pretty clear where her sympathies lie. She ends the whole chapter with this:

The verbal hygiene movement for so-called ‘politically correct’ language has the merit of bringing contests that are often submerged to the surface of public discourse. It is no more of a threat to freedom of expression than any other set of linguistic norms (and abandoning all such norms is not an option); nor does it threaten our ability to communicate (even if the tone of the communication may be less civil than ideally we would like). It threatens only our freedom to imagine that our linguistic choices are inconsequential, or to suppose that any one group of people, in the guise of defending ‘the language’, has an inalienable right to prescribe them.

Of course, knowing what we know now, everything after the first sentence in the last quotation is complete bullshit. I suspect that she knew this, too, and decided to benefit from the fact that PC advocates had not yet fully achieved their goals. The whole point of political correctness was to make a new set of preferred terms into the standard ones — to make style guides adopt them, university speech codes adopt them, companies enforce them (under threat of firing recalcitrant employees), and, later on, social media companies ban those who refuse to respect them. We are far, far away from Mrs. Wormwood in 6th grade English class rapping a student on the knuckles for splitting an infinitive, because in our current reality, The New Mrs. Wormwood never goes away and has permeated just about every sphere of communication. And do not kid yourself for even one moment: that is what these people fought for.

Since it was first published in 1995, Verbal Hygiene has been reprinted in 2012 under the Routledge Linguistics Classics line, and Deborah Cameron holds the Rupert Murdoch Professorship in Language and Communication at Worcester College, Oxford University. Here’s a video of her from 2017 talking about how women at Oxford are still oppressed because they have to endure the banal sexism of seeing statues of men on campus.