Geoffrey Hughes's Political correctness offers a history of various terms and concepts gathered under the rubric of political correctness. In Parts 1 and 2, Hughes considers how notions of political correctness may have developed to restrict freedom of speech today. Though not termed “political correctness,” he proposes that such ideologies can be traced to the English Reformation centuries ago. Hughes notes the positive origins of political correctness, where unfamiliar words were introduced as neutral alternatives to a lexicon replete with discriminatory attitudes. He proposes, however, that political correctness is based on “idealistic” assumptions about equality and how society members should treat others. Political correctness relies upon euphemism and orthodoxy in order to change established linguistic and behavioral norms. The term “political correctness” itself can be traced further to the 1930s with Mao Tse-Tung and Chinese Communism. At that time, political correctness literally meant following the party line. In the 1960s, the New Left began to use the term in its rhetoric, and it eventually became an ironic expression of over-adherence to particular ideologies. This debate reached the United Kingdom in the mid-1990s.

Much of the book (Part 3) considers the development of particular controversial terms in Britain, South Africa, and the United States. Hughes considers a plethora of lexical forms linked to social constructs like race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, and religion. He also notes how their semantic and pragmatic meanings have shifted over time and across space. He opts to briefly consider a vast number of terms in lieu of elongated descriptions of fewer lexical items. The fact that meanings of terms change is a theme further examined in Part 4. Hughes notes that the context of lexical usage, including who pronounces the word, is necessary in order to completely understand the term's impact. An individual's background, for example, may affect the uproar that occurs in the aftermath of an utterance. Additionally, people creatively use language in ways that are only discernible through the consideration of co(n)text. Through considering nonliteral performances of utterances, one can see how people trope upon stigmatized words for ends like sarcasm and humor.