The politics of correctness….

We are, none of us, perfect. For my own sins I am fully aware that my spelling is atrocious, not helped by my one and a half fingered approach to typing. A drawback you may think for a prolific blogger and writer, and certainly without my trusted proofreaders I would almost certainly be in trouble. I’m not one who is going to pull someone else up on their spelling, grammer or punctuation, put it that way. It is the same the World over, we all have our little foibles, the things that we would love to be better at, perhaps the things that we think we are good at, ut perhaps aren’t so good. This is not generally a problem, but it can become so if we lose the ability to gentle chide each other about our failings, if we become too precious about our petty fiefdoms, our talents and abilities. If I took offence when my colleagues correct my mistakes the use of my blogs would be diminished by the distraction of poor spelling. I could take offence certainly, but the corrections are presented with humour and frankness, occasionally my sanity is called into question as is my intellect, but when taken in the context of office banter, I would be extremely churlish to not take it in the spirit that it is intended.

I think there has been a knee jerk reaction to issues like workplace bullying and overt sexism that has led to an increase in caution regarding office banter, but there is a strong argument that in the modern business setting where pressures are constantly mounting and stress is at record levels that there is a place for robust humour and banter, and a need to “let off steam”. By no means is this a call for a return to the days of the subjugation of women in the workplace, or the extreme bullying that can take place in some situations, but it is my personal opinion that the balance has shifted too far away from the much needed sense of camaraderie forged in the melting pot of people bouncing off and rubbing up against each other, if you will forgive the expressions, and it is high time that this situation was rectified.

We do have a tendency in the UK of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, you can tell it is a tendency as we even have an expression for it. We need to urgently and rationally re-assess how we communicate and interact with each other in all wakls of life and all situations, and focus on finding commonality rather than worrying about the differences….