Newspeak for a future taken to extremes

This article at CNN predicts a pretty gloomy future!

She says a lot of people are having fun finding new titles for Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" which presents problems with every word except "and" and "the." [Dianne] Ravitch said old is ageist, man is sexist and sea can't be used in case a student lives inland and doesn't grasp the concept of a large body of water.

Granted - some words are explicitly offensive and have no place. But this is ridiculous. It seems to me that the cure for this has more to do with educating rather than erasing every words that is, could possibly be, or might remotely be offensive.

The New York Times recently reported that National Institute of Health researchers on AIDS are not only avoiding using words like gay and homosexuals in e-mails so as not to offend conservatives in the Bush administration, they are also inventing code words. Times journalist Erica Goode reported that one researcher was told to "cleanse" the abstract of his grant proposal of words like gay, homosexual and transgender even though his research was on HIV in gay men.

Hmm. How is education helped by a standard taken to extremes? And just who is responsible for drawing the line?

"Everyone gets their pet causes incorporated in textbooks. The history texts are reluctant to criticize any dictator unless they are long dead. And even then, there are exceptions like Mao is praised in one text for modernizing China but his totalitarian rule is not mentioned," [Ravitch] said.