Politics & Power Quote by Charles Osgood

Politically correctness gets framed here as a kind of emotional labor tax: a life spent pre-apologizing, self-editing, and scanning the room for invisible tripwires. Osgood borrows the skeleton of the old melodramatic line "Love means never having to say you're sorry" and flips it into a jab at modern manners. That echo does a lot of work. It turns what might be a dry complaint about language norms into a punchline with cultural memory baked in: romance idealized as effortless acceptance, now replaced by a public sphere imagined as permanently aggrieved.

The specific intent is to puncture the moral prestige of "politically correct" speech by recoding it as performance rather than principle. "Always" is the tell: not occasionally, not when you mess up, but constantly. The subtext is resentment at shifting rules of respectability, the sense that the vocabulary of inclusion has become a moving target controlled by social gatekeepers. It's also a subtle defense of the speaker's comfort: if the problem is endless apology, then the real injury isn't harm done to others; it's the inconvenience of having to watch your mouth.

Context matters because Osgood sits in the late-20th-century media ecosystem that helped popularize "PC" as a catch-all insult. In that framing, courtesy becomes coercion, and accountability becomes censorship. The line works because it's catchy, yes, but also because it captures a real anxiety: public language now carries consequences. The joke turns that anxiety into a grievance - and invites the audience to laugh their way out of responsibility.