A friend once told me a story of his trip to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. It was China's time on the world stage and they were placing their best foot forward. As a tourist, he was shuttled from their swanky hotels to where the games where being held. As the cabs drove them back and forth, you could see tall skyscrapers. In the skyscrapers, windows illuminated residents making the movements of everyday life. But something was off to my friend. He had never seen people that far up with such clarity. Stopped at a red light, he got out of the cab and went up to the towers. As he approached them, the illusion crumbled. The skyscrapers were massive electronic billboards the government had placed. When Tito looked past these billboards, he saw the squalor of real China.
Politically correct words behave in a similar way. Sanitized words, preferably with excessive syllables, hinder the flow of everyday use. In Kenya, I learned from expats that the politically correct term for 'slum' is 'informal communities'. Such a formal description for the makeshift shelters, lack of water and electricity. It is simply an informal community! Slum at least carried the emotional energy of the actual place. Informal community could mean anything, it carries no weight. It is sterilized and inert. In order to understand it, your mind must get out of the cab and walk behind this word and connect to what has been hidden from view. And so we have elegantly cloaked reality behind a clean billboard.