Soothsaying British writer George Orwell once said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

He also wrote “it’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words”, in his famous work Nineteen Eighty-Four.

He was being facetious.

Apparently all of this is lost on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), specifically one of its professors — Warren Scherer — because they’re now saying that saying the term “politically correct”, isn’t … politically correct.

We’re not even kidding here.

They use the coined phrase “microaggression” which, not only sounds like a silly tongue-in-cheek term straight from one of Orwell’s dystopian masterworks, but it probably deserves a hyphen.

It can be found in the university’s “Just Words” campaign, which they say is meant to “raise awareness” of such tiny, literary offensives, which according to them, have an impact.

They say using “politically correct” or “PC” (which can also be interpreted as “personal computer”) has “become a way to deflect [and say] that people are being too sensitive and police language”.

Which is so circular and obtuse you almost believe they’re screwing with people.

But wait — there’s more. From Campus Reform:

The university also claims the word “lame” is a microaggression that somehow both “ridicules and ignores the lives of amputees” and therefore shouldn’t be used.

UWM also claims that using the phrase “third world” to describe third world countries is a microaggression because it “reinforces heirarchical [sic] attitudes towards nations around the world, [and] establishes Westernized (industrialized) countries and cultures as the ‘standard’ upon which to measure national well-being or economic status.”

It’s also worth nothing that Scherer — the ringleader of this circus — has frequently taken to Twitter and dropped f-bombs, ethnic slurs, etc.

So it’s really no surprise that when Campus Reform attempted to get a comment from the university, they didn’t respond.