The Language War (Paperback, Revised)

This text gets to the heart of a pressing issue in American society: who holds power and how they use it, keep it, or lose it. In a discussion of the news events that have occupied an enormous amount of media space in the late-20th century - political correctness, the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, Hillary Rodham Clinton as First Lady, O.J. Simpson's murder trial, the Ebonics controversy, and the Clinton sex scandal - author Robin Lakoff shows that the struggle for power and status at the end of the century is being played out as a war over language. Controlling language is a basis for all power, she says, and therefore it is worth fighting for. As a result, newly emergent groups, especially blacks and women, are contending with middle- to upper-class white men for a share in "language rights".