The deliberate avoidance of language use and behaviour which may be perceived to be either derogatory or excluding of a political minority. Institutions and organizations that adopt political correctness as part of their communications policy thus expressly forbid the use of racist, sexist, and otherwise prejudicial language and require that politically neutral terms be used at all times. So, instead of âchairmanâ, âchairpersonâ is used because it does not imply that the role is in any way gendered; similarly âindigenousâ has been substituted for ânativeâ and/or âIndianâ because it implies prior sovereignty of possession of the land. Right-wing commentators like to complain about and lampoon political correctness as a kind of needless or useless language tyranny, but the fact is the way language is used does matter to people so its use needs to be subject to oversight. The difficulty comes when trying to legislate against specific words such as âniggerâ which can either be an insult or an expression of solidarity depending on the context. Butler, Judith offers an important consideration of this in her discussion of âhate speechâ in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997).