Avoid, if you can, giving gratuitous offence (see Euphemisms): you risk losing your readers, or at least their goodwill, and therefore your arguments. But pandering to every plea for politically correct terminology may make your prose unreadable, and therefore also unread.

So strike a balance. If you judge that a group wishes to be known by a particular term, that the term is widely understood and that using any other would seem odd, old-fashioned or offensive, then use it. Context may be important: Coloured is a common term in South Africa for people of mixed race; it is not considered derogatory. Elsewhere it may be. Remember that both times and terms change: expressions that were in common use a few decades ago are now odious. Nothing is to be gained by casually insulting your readers.

On the other hand, do not labour to avoid imaginary insults, especially if the effort does violence to the language. Some people, such as the members of the Task Force on Bias-Free Language of the Association of American University Presses, believe that ghetto-blaster is offensive as a stereotype of African-American culture, that it is invidious to speak of a normal child, that massacre should not be used to refer to a successful American Indian raid or battle victory against white colonisers and invaders, and that the use of the term cretin is distressing. They want, they say, to avoid victimisation and to get the person before the disability. The intent may be admirable, but they are unduly sensitive, often inventing slights where none exists.

An example is given by Denis Dutton in his review of the editors' advice (What Are Editors For?, Philosophy and Literature 20, 1996). Mr Dutton points out that the origins of the word cretin lie in the Latin word for Christian. The term, he says, came into use as a way of acknowledging the essential humanity of a physically deformed or intellectually subnormal person. It is now used for a definable medical condition. The editors' aversion to cretin presumably arises from its slight similarity to cripple, a plain word now almost universally discarded in favour of the euphemistic physically handicapped or disabled.

As Mr Dutton points out, Thomas Bowdler provides a cautionary example. His version of Shakespeare, produced in 1818 using judicious paraphrase and expurgation, was designed to be read by men to their families with no one offended or embarrassed. In doing so, he gave his name to an insidious form of censorship.

Some people believe the possibility of giving offence, causing embarrassment, lowering self-esteem, reinforcing stereotypes, perpetuating prejudice, victimising, marginalising or discriminating to be more important than stating the truth, never mind the chance of doing so with any verve or panache. They are wrong. Do not bowdlerise your own prose. You may be neither Galileo nor Salman Rushdie, but you too may sometimes be right to cause offence. Your first duty is to the truth.

HE, SHE, THEY You also have a duty to grammar. The struggle to be gender-neutral rests on a misconception about Gender, a grammatical convention to make words masculine, feminine or neuter. Since English is unusual in assigning few genders to nouns other than those relating to people (ships and countries are exceptions), feminists have come to argue that language should be gender-neutral.

This would be a forlorn undertaking in most tongues, and even in English it presents difficulties. It may be no tragedy that policemen are now almost always police officers and firemen firefighters, but to call chairmen chairs serves chiefly to remind everyone that the world of committees and those who make it go round are largely devoid of humour. Avoid also chairpersons (chairwoman is permissible), humankind and the person in the streetugly expressions all.

It is no more demeaning to women to use the words actress, ballerina or seamstress than goddess, princess or queen. (Similarly, you should feel as free to separate Siamese twins or welsh on debtsat your own riskas you would to go on a Dutch treat, pass through french windows, or play Russian roulette. Note, though, that you risk being dogged by catty language police.)

If you believe it is exclusionary or insulting to women to use he in a general sense, you can rephrase some sentences in the plural. Thus Instruct the reader without lecturing him may be put as Instruct readers without lecturing them. But some sentences resist this treatment: Find a good teacher and take his advice is not easily rendered gender-neutral. So do not be ashamed of sometimes using man to include women, or making he do for she.

And, so long as you are not insensitive in other ways, few women will be offended if you restrain yourself from putting or she after every he.

He or she which hath no stomach to this fight, Let him or her depart; his or her passport shall be made, And crowns for convoy put into his or her purse: We would not die in that person's company That fears his or her fellowship to die with us.

In some contexts, though, she can be a substitute for he:

That ever was thrall, now is he free; That ever was small, now great is she; Now shall God deem both thee and me Unto His bliss if we do well.

(15th-century carol)

Avoid, above all, the sort of scrambled syntax that people adopt because they cannot bring themselves to use a singular pronoun: We can't afford to squander anyone's talents, whatever colour their skin is. Or When someone takes their own life, they leave their loved ones with an agonising legacy of guilt. Or There's a child somewhere in Birmingham and all across the country and needs somebody to put their arm around them and to say: I love you; you're a part of America. (George Bush)

See also Ethnic groups, Gender, Tribe.

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Political correctness | The Economist