The singer declared recently that political correctness has ‘run amuck’ - but he probably didn’t mean murderous rage
The singer Nick Cave declared on his blog recently that “political correctness” had become “quite literally, bad religion run amuck”. This is just a fancier way of saying “it’s political correctness quite literally gone mad!” – but what exactly is “amuck”, or as British English usually has it, “amok”?
It derives from the Malay “amoq”, meaning vicious rage, via the Portuguese “amuco”, used by the writer Duarte Barbosa in a 1516 account of his travels in east Africa. According to the 1866 English translation, Barbosa heard of Javanese men who, if they became seriously ill, made a bargain with God, and once well again, would “take a dagger in their hands and go out into the streets and kill as many persons as they meet [...] in such wise that they go like mad dogs, killing until they are killed. These are called amuco.”
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/34lkkEH
