Political correctness is no longer the marginal phenomenon it once was — something that could be dismissed with a casual shrug — nor the dry, slightly ironic phrase that the “New Left” originally used as an internal joke about its own dogmatic impulses. Several decades on, it has passed through so many layers of use, reaction, reassessment, and abuse that it now functions as a kind of litmus test. It reveals not only a society’s value system, but also how people understand themselves: as members of groups, as participants in conflicts, as bearers of historical trauma, and as claimants to moral authority.

What began as a loose American joke has gradually turned into something far more consequential: a tool of self-identification and an unexpectedly powerful regulator of social behavior. Paradoxically, in certain moments it occupies a position reminiscent of older ideological systems — those that promised to solve social problems through the correction of language, mentality, and “proper” thinking.

In Bulgaria, developments of this sort usually arrive late and in a strangely refracted form. Ours is a society deeply resistant to external moral prescriptions, and even more reluctant to admit that certain words carry historical weight best left behind. Everyday speech is dense with “our own” meanings, half-ironic self-descriptions, and an inherited suspicion toward any form of moral instruction. This makes it difficult to accept the idea that language can be dangerous not only through explicit insult, but through the quiet, almost invisible reproduction of stigma.

So when news reaches us that children’s books in Germany are being edited to remove words now deemed unacceptable, the instinctive reaction is irritation: What are they doing? They’re tampering with the classics. Given our historical experience — where the politicization of language almost always led to restriction rather than emancipation — this reaction is understandable.

Yet if we put emotion aside, an unavoidable question emerges: can a word be dangerous in itself, regardless of intention? Contemporary social science answers plainly: yes. Words do not merely convey meaning; they carry wounds. They create imagined categories, separate people, and stabilize relations of subordination. This is precisely what Erving Goffman captured in his analysis of stigma: not an insult, but a social mechanism that assigns not only difference, but defectiveness. That is why modern moral standards insist on attentiveness to language, especially when it addresses children, who lack the historical distance required to distinguish context from endorsement.

And yet children’s literature — particularly works such as Pippi Longstocking — exposes a genuine dilemma. Pippi is not a racist, just as Huck Finn is not a racist, nor Jim Button, nor the many free-spirited, generous literary figures that have shaped generations of childhoods. The language they use is the language of their time; the meanings attached to their words belong to an era that did not yet possess today’s sensitivity to historical injury. Altering that language feels like an intrusion into a living text — a risk of losing something of the authors’ immediacy, their moral intent, and the unforced goodness of their characters.

Here we encounter the first major weakness of political correctness once it hardens into ideology: the impulse to regulate not only language, but thought; to replace judgment with prescription; to offer universal solutions through formal correction. This mode of thinking is not foreign to us. It echoes earlier moments in our own political history, when justice was pursued through the correction of form rather than the development of substance. Language is a tool. It becomes dangerous only when it is charged with fear, contempt, or the urge to dominate. It is not a word that makes a person racist, but the posture that accompanies it. When an author like Astrid Lindgren employs historically dated language without contempt or superiority, we are not entitled to collapse her usage into contemporary meanings by default.

There are, of course, opposite cases — for instance Hristo Botev, the nineteenth-century Bulgarian national icon, whose language of hatred is neither incidental nor naïve, but historically grounded and inseparable from his revolutionary mission. Botev does not use language casually. His rhetoric belongs to a political imagination in which liberation is conceivable only through radical antagonism, and national freedom legitimizes total confrontation. This is the logic of his time — a world structured by absolute oppositions, where moral clarity is achieved through exclusion rather than reconciliation. To judge this language by today’s standards without explanation is historically blind; to pass it on to children without context is ethically irresponsible.

The contemporary world, with all its unresolved conflicts, requires not heroic gestures but development — quiet, sustained, patient. It demands cooperation rather than slogans, negotiation rather than symbolic enemies, the ability to live with difference rather than to purify it. In this sense, political correctness does have a legitimate role: as a mechanism of respect toward those historically subjected to violence. But once it becomes mechanical, once it displaces judgment and common sense, it forfeits its moral authority.

This brings us to a deeper dynamic, one that might be called the “struggle for second-to-last place.” The Serbian-American scholar Milica Bakić-Hayden coined the term nested orientalisms to describe how Balkan societies assign backwardness to one another, each attempting to ensure that someone else occupies the bottom rung. The pattern is painfully familiar: every group seeks to prove that another is more stigmatized, more primitive, more defective.

From this perspective, Bulgarian resistance to formal political correctness becomes intelligible. Behind the rejection of stigmatizing language lurks the fear that abandoning it may place us in the very category we use to protect ourselves against. In a world where the West often collapses distinctions between “Bulgarians,” “Roma,” “Albanians,” and “Macedonians,” the anxiety of being lumped together cuts deeper than it first appears.

The circle closes here. Political correctness can function as a moral safeguard, but it provokes resistance when it encounters societies that do not yet feel secure enough to relinquish stigma voluntarily — because stigma still serves as a fragile defense of collective self-esteem.

The necessary conclusion is uncomfortable but clear. Neither extreme is viable. To ignore hatred because it is “traditional” is wrong. But to erase literary layers because they fail to conform to contemporary standards is equally wrong. Historical language must be read with understanding, not with scissors. Contemporary moral language must be built not on decrees, but on the capacity to distinguish intention from insult, fact from prejudice, the author’s time from the reader’s.

Hatred cannot be regulated by circulars or editorial guidelines. It can be limited only by expanding our capacity to understand the world beyond our own fears. Until then, disputes over “correct words” will remain surface symptoms of a deeper human anxiety: the fear of ending up last.