Have we gone far enough?

Political correctness is old news, but there's one area of our culture that we haven't purged of latent and tacit racism: completely benign idioms.

Consider:

• If we get our finances in order, we'll finally be out of the Native American and back in the African American.
  
• Well that's really the pot calling the kettle African American, isn't it?
  
• I was always impressed that Ansel Adams could capture so much depth and emotion in his African American & Caucasian photographs.
  
• The President today signed the comprehensive civil rights legislation into law during a ceremony in the Caucasian House Rose Garden.
  
• I'm dreaming of a Caucasian Christmas...
  
• In the Middle Ages, two-thirds of Europe's population was wiped out by the African American plague.
  
• When camping, be sure to pack away all of your garbage so as not to attract the attention of hungry African American bears and grizzlies.
  
• That acne cream really takes care of those unsightly african-americanheads and caucasianheads.
• Joe didn't get into the frat he wanted because one of the members African-Americanballed him.
• After being accused of having communist sympathies, Mort was African-Americanlisted and couldn't get another screenwriting job.
• Surely, one of the most brilliant sales pitches in all of literature was Tom Sawyer's convincing his peers to pay him for the privilege of Caucasianwashing the fence.
• Once they had the incriminating pictures, they were able to african-americanmail him for millions.
  

Did we leave out any good ones?

You keep using those words... I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

Thanks to friend and regular comment contributor Keith for this bit of deft wordplay. Ah, the joy of English, where verbs are homonyms of nouns and adjectives, and helping verbs can be main verbs, and adjectives can concatenate themselves onto nouns as prefices or suffices, and they all have a gay old time.

The mad frog was hopping around the man.
The madman was hopping around the frog.
The man was mad frogging around the hop.
Around the frog, the man was hopping mad.

The moron says what?

Is there a word for the opposite of "schadenfreude," where instead of perverse joy you feel sadness for the misfortune of others? I suppose, perhaps, "compassion," but it would probably sound better in German. In the interest of completeleness, "compassion" in German is, according to the Babelfish online translator, "mitleid." Or, using the same device but constructing the German in a manner parallel to the English translation of "schadenfreude" (harming joy), it would be "schadensorge" (harming sorrow). But that's probably a very foul bastardization of the German.

I feel mitleid and schadensorge when I see sentences such as "The clown stuck his penis in somebody's eye, having decided between the midget and I." or "The clown stuck his penis in whomever was standing closest, and of course it had to be a midget ." In a way, they are the saddest of all grammatical errors, because they are on some level the consequence of the perpetrator trying desperately hard not to make a grammatical error. Since people regularly (and incorrectly) use "me and" or "and me" as part of the subject of a sentence, they are constantly reminded, at least, one can hope, in grammar school, that they should use "and I." Likewise, "whom" (and its -ever derivative) is severely underused. It's rather a mark of sophistication to use it properly.

So when a person uses these underutilized turns of grammatical phrase, but they use them incorrectly in the place where the other, more common expressions would actually be right, it brings a tear to the linguistic humanist's eye. It's like a puppy who's so excited when you come home that he unknowningly and incontinently tinkles on the floor, and you get angry and scold him, but he can't even understand what he did wrong in the first place. And so the cycle repeats, and, embittered by the cruel and unjust world, the puppy turns to drugs and finally a life of crime, until he has to be put down. That poor puppy. And all because you don't understand grammatical cases. You should be ashamed of yourself.