AS politics are dominating our lives at the moment, it seems an opportune moment to ask why we use the term politically correct for all the synonyms and euphemisms we have to bear in mind today.

It might have had its point in the earliest use I can find - 1793 would you believe - when an American judge thought it more correct, politically, to refer to "the people of the United States" rather than just to "the United States", the US being a political entity.

Today's meaning, whose first use is claimed to have been in 1970, applies to individuals or groups, or their ways, regardless of regimes and parties and strikes me quite often as mealy-mouthed. When it isn't, it seems to be a matter of common courtesy rather than anything else.

The subject came up recently as I sat, waiting for my turn to speak and planning my usual opening of "Good evening, ladies." I've said it countless times and never thought of it as verbal dynamite until the president of the organisation concerned told her members she'd been taken to task for addressing a regional group as "ladies". They were women.

I have to say the speaker bore out what I usually find. Successful females don't worry about whether they are ladies, women or wimmin on their way up. They just get on with it. This was someone who got to the top of her own, male-dominated, tree - honours list and all - and was genuinely puzzled at the reprimand.

How did I address her members when my turn came? Jokingly as "Good evening, women" and they took it in good part but I didn't feel the formality of "Good evening" sat well with "women". Hi? Wotcher? Nah then? Hello, girls? Dunno.

Men never seem to get riled by being addressed collectively as "gentlemen". Just the opposite and, individually, they get pretty hot under their collars at the suggestion that they might not be. I can't imagine saying: "Good evening, men" and "Hi, chaps" isn't on the verge of informal, it skids right across the verge and into the hedgeback of informality.

In this job we are trained to write "woman" not "lady" on the grounds that, if there is a dividing line, we are not the ones to draw it. The lady who opens the bazaar may, in next week's paper, be the woman fined for speeding. Do women open bazaars? Do ladies get fined for breaking the law? You see the problem.

Organisations themselves vary: Townswomen's Guild, Women's Institute, Ladies' Circle, Ladies' Luncheon Club. The same people may well belong to both types and never give the titles a thought in PC terms.

Political correctness is claimed to have seen off the use of offensive nicknames for various racial or religious groups but those terms were never used by the courteous. Those who did use them by and large still do and almost take a pride in doing so.

Where the PC brigade did begin well was in the area of illnesses and disabilities, giving us some much kinder catch-all terms, but then it went too far into the realms of long-winded euphemisms, using "persons" rather than "people", and exposed itself to ridicule, even among those it sought to protect.

All that will lead us, before long, to another area where common sense has been thrown to the winds: health and safety. If you thought the threat of dangerous trousers belonged to The Goon Show or Monty Python, don't be too sure.