Graham Crawford's Column

Graham is a translator living in Poland for almost 20 years. In between travelling the length and breadth of the country, he has worked for Collins and Longman publishers and on the Kosciuszko Polish-English dictionaries, among others. His current and recent projects include a translation of the 20th century poet, Konstanty Galczynski, and a book on the songs of Edward Stachura.

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Previous Columns

Caught in the ACTA
2012-01-27

Gee, how stupid!
2012-01-20

WOSPish comments
2012-01-13

Noisy teenagers
2012-01-06

Winds of.... oh bugger!
2011-12-16

All you need is love
2011-12-09

Give 'em both barrels!
2011-12-02

A capital place
2011-11-25

It's not my fault, either
2011-11-18

Stairway to Hell
2011-11-11

Driving me mad
2011-11-04

A fair cop?
2011-10-28

Triffic traffic
2011-10-21

Shades from Hades
2011-10-14

Democracy sucks
2011-10-08

Read the small print
2011-09-30

Fan-tastically stupid
2011-09-23

If thine eye offend thee...
2011-09-16

World of Rubbish
2011-09-09

Untermensch return
2011-09-02

Money for nothin'
2011-08-27

SWAT's the problem?
2011-08-19

Bouncebackability
2011-08-12

Speed demons
2011-08-05

Revenge - best served cold
2011-07-29

Bicycle madness
2011-07-22

Virtually insulting
2011-07-15

Ask the experts
2011-07-08

First come, justice served
2011-07-01

Unparliamentary language

Friday 3rd February, 2012

After a few days’ quiet, the case of Law and Justice MP Marek Suski, who made a blatantly racist comment during a parliamentary meeting, has finally been taken up, with the MP to be called before the Sejm’s ethics committee. He rightly stands accused of using racially inflammatory language, which can carry a sentence of three years in prison. Let’s hope he’s packed off there soon.

Not long ago, when Civic Platform MP Kazimierz Wegrzyn made a risque joke about not wanting to watch gays, but being happy to observe lesbians he was hounded out of the party. His comment, however, was an off the cuff comment in a parliamentary corridor.

Mr Suski has made two outrageous remarks in the main hall of parliament during a sitting, and in a parliamentary committee - in both cases when he was in the workplace. First he made a comment about zoophilia in response to gay MP Robert Biedron, then the, “Little darkie” comment. What a nasty man Mr Suski is.

That said, I’m quite glad the concept of political correctness is so poorly developed here. The whole PC thing is based on one of the dumbest academic concepts ever created - the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistic determinism.
The idea is that if there isn’t a word for something it doesn’t exist (so how the hell did we think of vacuum cleaners and space shuttles?). By extension, if you get rid of all the bad words for racism and sexism, the theory goes, then they’ll disappear, too.

Me, I like people to speak their minds, and when I come across people as blatantly racist and homophobic as Mr Suski, I know to avoid them, or punch them.

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