Nowadays, the problem of political correctness is very relevant for different cultures (1). It touches upon not only usual citizens but celebrities and politicians from all over the world (2). However, not all the cultures in this regard are in step with one another. The study analyzed the politically correct lexicon of English and Russian cultures which are used in various fields (religion, ethnicity, people physiology etc.), but in this article we would like to pay attention to the comparative analysis of the politically correct synonyms in the field of medicine.
Comparative analysis of these two cultures allows to track which of them is increasingly resorted to the use of politically correct vocabulary, and where the phenomenon is more common. Thus, there were found the following expressions:
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English culture |
Russian culture |
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insane asylum - mental home, mental hospital, mental health clinic; patient’s death - terminal episode, therapeutic misadventure, negative patient care outcome; cancerous growth - formation, neoplasm, new growth; deaf - a person with hearing impairment, visually oriented person; pass over to the other side – die. |
психиатрическая больница - пристанище для душевнобольных; смерть пациента - летальный исход больного; опухоль - новообразование, объемное образование; глухой – слабослышащий.
умереть - перейти в мир иной. |
We can see that politically correct English expressions are aimed to minimize a traumatic effect of each medical term for a patient more. It might be explained by the fact that the English belong to the individualistic culture but the Russians to the collectivistic one so the perception of the individual and collective values are different. Nevertheless, the analyzed phenomenon plays one of the major roles in effective and productive intercultural communication and contributes to the dialogue of cultures.