Troll, I like your image with the hammer and the nail. There hasn't really ever been a PC movement. Negative connotations of the phrase, politically correct, started with the sneering implication that people were ONLY doing something (recycling, composting, attempting to be sensitive to what other people felt when called particular things) because they wanted to be 'cool' and 'with it'. The ridicule came from both those who were genuinely interested in effecting change and also their opponents who used it to undermine eforts at both useful and unuseful change. If in the year 2000 you use the term 'mankind' you are referring only to male members of the human race. One of the nice things about language is that it can evolve and become more specific when necessary. The ambiguity of having the same term used both to exclude and include has resolved to where we can now all speak of men, women and humans.