In 1983, the big gun muzzles of the United States Navy erupted in bellicose flame for the first time since Vietnam, and sent high-explosive shells crashing into the Druze villages of the Lebanese Shuf Mountains. Since some of the shells weighed as much as a Volkswagen, the "collateral damage" was considerable. In far-off Los Angeles, an editorial discussion took place, only one of many around the United States, about the wisdom of this "peacekeeping" action. In the end, the Los Angeles Times decided to run an op-ed comment which broadly endorsed the Reagan administration's folly. "And the next morning," recalls Tim Rutten, then editor of the "Sunday Opinion" section, "I came to work and found the Times Mirror building surrounded by furious local Druze. Until that instant, I hadn't known that the largest Druze community outside Lebanon was right here."

In one way, this goes to show that you can't be too careful. Especially, perhaps, in Los Angeles—the most multicultural city on earth, and possibly in history. How right it is that any reputable paper should cultivate an awareness of its constituents. How wrong it was of the Druze to have neglected the advertising business. And how hard it might now be for me, if I were a columnist at the L.A. Times, to make a joke about how, say, some of my best friends are Druze. A joke isn't a joke if it has to be explained, let alone justified, and the same goes for many sorts of allusion, nuance, and affect—the invisible bits of writing and conversation which actually make it possible.

In recent months, the L.A. Times has become the object of extensive mirth, inside and outside journalism, by codifying a new set of amendments to the newspaper's stylebook which guide and shape the use of language concerning "ethnic and racial identification," to say nothing of gender and sexual orientation, to say nothing, indeed, of offensiveness, sensitivity, and correctitude in general. The target presented was a fat one, and satirists had an easy time of it. "Dutch treat" was rated a no-no for those who worry about the feelings of the Low Countries. "Deaf and deaf-mute," as well as "deaf-and-dumb," were to be avoided as unkind or pejorative. "French letter"—try not to think about it. You know the sort of thing. A columnist for the Valley edition of the paper, Scott Harris, contacted the Netherlands' consul, who told him that "Dutch treat" was fine and gave no offense to the Dutch. He also contacted the Greater Los Angeles Council on Deafness, which informed him (whether by phone or not I was too dumb to ask) that deaf is "the preferred term." Mr. Harris's column was ... I hardly dare say "killed," but at any event went un-run.

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The list grew longer, as it had to if it was to be "inclusive." Red flags went up over "gyp" (beware Romany touchiness), over "babe" (natch), and over the seldom used but problematic "bi"—"an offensive reference to bisexual people." I realized that this had been coming for a while. David Shaw, the paper's esteemed media critic, once told me that he'd described a political mood as "entering its manic-depressive phase," only to be taken aside by an editor and cautioned because "there are some manic-depressives on the L.A. Times.", I should jolly well hope so: it would hardly be a newspaper if the case were otherwise. But can depression, or more I seriously can oppression, be alleviated by insistent, upbeat cheeriness and euphemism?

There is a thing in philosophical discourse called a "category-mistake." You make a category-mistake, for example, if you look at a thermometer and, seeing the temperature is dangerously high, break the thermometer in an effort to bring the temperature down. Los Angeles is a city of high temperatures. Wasn't its main daily thermometer making a crass error by trying to soften and appease all "categories"? Almost the entire staff of the paper's Washington bureau, as well as many of the staff in Los Angeles, sent in memos which talked darkly of "the journey from shunning offensive words to shying away from painful facts." Words such as "Orwellian" got used a lot.

Arriving in L.A., I went to lunch with Andrea Ford, a criminal-court reporter for the paper, who is a newsroom founder of the "Unity Caucus" and an activist in the National Association of Black Journalists. She is a member of the stylebook committee. She's also brave, tough, funny, smart, and (not that it counts, since this column is being written by a chap) attractive. She'd be a good editor on any paper. She thinks the proposed changes are way overdue. For her, the crux came in the 1992 riots. "A lot of us were used as foot soldiers in dangerous spots, and the coverage was very white. We started to look at the paper itself."

The Los Angeles Times occupies an exceptional place in both local and national journalism. It is the second-largest metropolitan daily in the nation. Its dispatches, from its many overseas bureaus and from its immense Washington office, are often reprinted in rival papers. It has won a host of prizes and awards. From a sleepy, Waspy, family-firm newspaper with a dislike for unions and immigrants, it has made the transition to a big-city, mainstream-liberal, investigative and reportorial colossus. Times Mirror Square straddles downtown L.A., occupying the entire block between First and Second and Broadway and Spring, rivaling the mass of city hall and the L.A.P.D. headquarters. A network of "zoned" editions, extending across the city and deep into Orange County and the San Fernando Valley, have their own separate offices, and from the Olympic printing plant and other presses flow more than a million copies a day (1.5 million on Sundays). Though it has suffered some recent reverses—the San Diego edition was a failure and was recently shut down, and the paper is in a tough circulation battle with The Orange County Register, its chief competitor since the demise of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner—the paper is profitable, and its owner, Times Mirror, still posts $3.7 billion in revenues. Times Mirror owns Newsday and the Baltimore Sun, among other newspapers, Field & Stream and Golf Magazine, among other magazines, and is the l0th-largest cable operator in the country.

It came as a rude shock to the management that when a "buyout" was offered the more talented names accepted.

In the life of the city, the Times acts, or should act, as a kind of daily seismograph. Its editorial and opinion sections—livelier by far than those of The Washington Post and The New York Times—register the tremors in black-Korean relations; the tension between Beverly Hills and the proposed mass-transit system; the rapid growth of the Catholic immigrant vote. Under the editorship of Shelby Coffey III, a man justly renowned for the acuity of his antennae, the paper has striven to be as protean and adaptable as the city itself, in the face of riots, fires, quakes, recessions, and inter-communal jealousies.

Close readers and many past and present staffers, however, complain of palpable tension between the Times's cultural role and its institutional one. The obligation to cover everything and to give everybody the semblance of a hearing can too easily become a matter of marketing, and of being all things to all men (or all people).

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There have been signs in the recent past of unmistakable bottom-linery. In 1989, Coffey inaugurated the new "faster format" edition, advertised as a more nugget-like read. Stories shrank and pictures grew, and there was more color photography and more show biz. In 1992 the management offered a "buyout" to all staff members, the aim of which was to tempt the—ahem—less gifted and more elderly team members to take a bundle and depart. It came as a rude shock when, instead, some of the more talented and recognizable bylines decided to accept the offer that had not been meant for them. Though Coffey made efforts to keep people, he nonetheless found himself losing the primary allegiance of writers such as Robert Scheer, Charles Powers, and Bella Stumbo—stars, respectively, in the firmaments of politics, foreign reportage, and feature writing—and of the world-class cartoonist Paul Conrad.

This corporate background is necessary to understanding the latest war over "P.C.," or, if you prefer, over the house style. Might one guess at a connection between a paper more concerned with evolving a "something for everyone" prose and a paper that sought above all to be inoffensive? From this perspective, the proclaimed formal liberal aim of the editorial side makes a surprisingly good "fit" with the bland but definite imperatives of the corporate management, which is composed of men such as the ex-Nixon hand Lawrence Higby. "Giving in to the various caucuses," said one staffer gloomily, "is just another way of buying labor peace." "The paper these days is right down the middle," said cartoonist Paul Conrad, who has ruffled some "sensitivities" in his day. Thus, political correctness becomes a matter of deliberate bean counting, the race and gender calculus as a management tool.

The first tool used in the stylebook tussle, according to Andrea Ford, was the Lexis/Nexis computer search. An intensive scan disclosed that the word "nigger" appeared in the Los Angeles Times, on average, every other day. " 'Bitch' was No. 2 and then there was a long drop down to 'wetback,'" Andrea Ford told me. "Words like 'honky' and 'cracker' didn't feature in the same gratuitous way, but there were a few 'kikes.'" I listened enthralled to this enumeration. "The key thing was that when we asked the managing editor to guess how often the paper said 'nigger,' he thought it was about four or five times a year." But it's not the words that matter so much, I gathered in the course of lunch. It's the spaces around and between them. "Take 'inner-city.' We call Watts 'inner-city' though it's barely inside the city limits of L.A. And take Baldwin Hills. It's one of the richest neighborhoods in the city, where the black achievers live, and we've called it 'South-Central,' which is even geographically inaccurate."

I gave the standard thrusts, but didn't get the standard parries. Isn't this Balkanizing the newsroom? "We're already Balkanized. We just don't acknowledge it. Count the number of blacks on the foreign staff. There are no blacks on the foreign staff. Or on the downtown city desk." O.K., but do you get over that by banning words? "There are no banned words. The guidelines never use the word 'ban.' Where does it say ban? You want to say 'nigger,' you can say it. But you need to clear it with one editor." Identity politics are a drag, aren't they, forcing people to think with their genitalia or their epidermis? "I'll drop the ID anytime just as soon as I don't need it anymore. Don't make me circle my wagons and I won't be so identity-conscious."

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Ms. Ford gave me some examples of where she personally thought the guidelines were "silly." "Dutch treat" was one. The appellation of "bi" as offensive to bisexuals was another. "Deaf-mute" seemed to her to be an all-right usage. And the paper's laborious and embarrassed advice on when, or whether, to say "ghetto" struck her as "stupid." She asked me to note that the proposed manual doesn't even have an entry for the word "nigger," which it doesn't. (Though it does frown on the use of the word "Jew" as a verb. Who needs to be told that?)

"In other words," she wound up, "I think this is good for journalism reasons, not 'diversity' reasons. We should force ourselves to be precise and not to make lazy assumptions when we use words." I got the same line from Shelby Coffey and from those close to him. It's a matter of clarity and care, they said. We have a responsibility to be exact.

I must say that Andrea Ford nearly convinced me. But then, with the help of a disinterested friend, I managed to tap into the computer "basket" in which the L.A. Times has stored all the submissions from its various caucuses and minorities. The experience of reading this stuff at a sitting can be compared to that of standing in a wind tunnel of self-pity, bureaucratese, and mediocrity. (The entry password for hackers, by the by, is "Sensitive.")

Language is used as a chopping block to split the difference between the moistly compassionate and the hotly resentful.

The Native American stuff, with which I started, was amazing. "Be aware that since Native Americans are of different nations, all tribes may not share a common viewpoint." Too pompous and boring to be worth saying, you might think, except that in other contexts the word "tribe" is a stylebook no-no. The photographing or tape recording of tribe members, anyway, should be done only with the consent of "appropriate event officers," since Indians "may have strongly negative feelings about being photographed." (I thought that was a stereotype.) In any case, so do mobsters and the House of Windsor—not that it's the job of a newspaper to consider their "feelings." Terms such as "bow and arrow," "warpath," "low man on the totem pole," and even "costume" were disapproved.

Household and everyday family usage fell under a host of proposed constraints. Since "there is no such thing as a mother who doesn't work," there are no unemployed mothers—a "fact" more likely to gratify the Bureau of Labor Statistics than the single mother who can't find a job. The prefix "step-" and the expression "common-law marriage" are proposed for the chop. "Divorcee and spinster have acquired pejorative meanings and should not be used."

"Poet" should be used for poetess and "aviator" for aviatrix, but there is "an exception for actress." Why?

Worst of all was the general tone of leaden, lugubrious sanctimony. "We generally endorse the terminology outlined in Shelby's June, 1991, memo, with proposed amendments and modifications contained in the Style and Usage Appendix 4 of the final Diversity Subcommittee Report on News Coverage."

For all the talk about clearing up ambiguities, and for all of Andrea Ford's good points about the hidden assumptions of such terms as "inner-city," the style manual in its current form is an hommage to political correctness. See the category-mistake at work in the entry "handicap," which defines it as an aspect not of person but of society: "A handicap is an environmental barrier preventing or making it difficult for full participation. For example, a person in a wheelchair is handicapped by stairs." Sweet. Stupid, though. And the inclusion of "WASP" and "welshing" is so obviously a spurious attempt at evenhandedness and damage control that it makes one weep and giggle by turns. Nobody without clout in the office is catered to. There is no entry at all for "Druze."

So I went back to Tim Rutten, who is still sorry for offending the Druze and most of all sorry for offending them by accident. "It's a problem of means and ends," he told me. "The paper should be much better in its coverage of minorities and immigrants. But this—this is the voice of the commissar. It's indifferent to the necessity of nuance. It means there's no foundation for coalition or solidarity, except on the basis of individuals of ethnic identification. It's just like the fragmentation of the city itself."

The Los Angeles Times is one of the great newspapers, and has been a home to many brave writers, reporters, and cartoonists. It stands athwart one of the great "faults" in society's crust—the fault of tectonic racial tension—just as the city itself stands between the mountains and the sea in point of space, and between the next earthquake and the next millennium in point of time. What such a paper needs, every day, is the pen of a Mencken or a Lincoln Steffens. What it has settled for is a grand consultative committee, made up of the well-meaning and the ill-tempered, using the language as a chopping block to split the difference between the moistly compassionate and the hotly resentful.