LETTER FROM AMERICA: New York is not a town one associates with mollycoddling. Brash, blunt, outspoken, the Big Apple is a place you want your wits about you and an ability to take the rough with the smooth. This is a town in a run-you-down hurry.
They breed 'em tough, and "sensitive" is not a word that springs to mind as a description of the average New Yorker.
How particularly strange then, Jeanne Heifetz's tale of political correctness gone mad in the state's school system.
At first the Brooklyn mother thought the omissions were simply typos. She had noticed in her daughter's English exam paper a couple of errors in a comprehension test extract from a writer she knew well.
Puzzled, she began to look more carefully at 10 years of past papers and discovered a pattern that struck her as bizarre.
In the vast majority of quoted extracts, from writers that included Edward Albee, Elie Weisel, Judy Blume, Anton Chekhov, Annie Dillard, Jack London and William Maxwell, and even in a speech by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, there were subtle but significant changes to the original.
These were no typographical errors, however. She discovered that the board setting the Regents English exam, used to graduate students from the state schools, was systematically sanitising references to race, politics, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity, alcohol, even the mildest profanity . . . just about anything that might possibly offend someone for some reason.
Thus, in a text by the quintessentially Jewish Isaac Bashevis Singer all mention of Judaism was eliminated - a reference to "Most Jewish women" became "Most women".
In an excerpt from Barrio Boy by Ernesto Galarza, a "gringo lady" became an "American lady", a "skinny" boy became "thin", a "fat" one, "heavy." In an extract from a memoir by Frank Conroy, Stop-Time, the changes include replacing "hell" with "heck" in one sentence and excising references to sex, religion, nudity and potential violence.
In Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, racial references were removed from a description of her childhood trips to a library in the black part of town where she is almost the only white visitor, even though the point of the passage was to emphasise race and her insights into blacks.
And so, too, a paragraph in John Holt's Learning All the Time was truncated to eliminate some of the reasons Suzuki violin instruction differs in Japan and the US, apparently not to offend anyone who might find the particulars somehow insulting. Students were nonetheless then asked to answer questions about those differences.
In a speech by Kofi Annan, in addition to deletions about unpaid US contributions to the United Nations, any mention of wine and drinking was removed. Instead of praising "fine California wine and seafood", he ended up lauding "fine California seafood".
The Education Department's assistant commissioner for curriculum, instruction and assessment, Roseanne DeFabio, defends the excisions which she says are in compliance with the state's "sensitivity guidelines so no student will be "uncomfortable in a testing situation".
She says the guidelines seek to avoid using anything offensive about a student's "race, religion or neighbourhood, or anything that would interfere with the student's ability to fairly demonstrate the skills that the test is measuring". Give me a break.
Or, as the New York Post put it: "Imagine that. In the age of Eminem and Ozzy Osbourne - shockable teenagers."
Not surprisingly, Ms Heifetz's revelations have caused an outcry among civil liberties and arts organisations and most of the quoted authors whom she has managed to contact.
Cathy Popkin, professor in the humanities department at Columbia, wrote to the board imploring them to put an end to a "scandalous practice".
"It is dishonest. It is dangerous. It is an embarrassment. It is the practice of fools." And the New York Civil Liberties Union executive director, Donna Lieberman, denounced it as "fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment." It's probably also an illegal breach of copyright law.
Of course it's a piece of silliness of which the exam board should be ashamed. But the attitude underpinning it is not at all atypical of this society.
The cult of victimhood is pervasive and drags in its trail an ultra-sensitivity on the part of many to perceived slights that in a lot of workplaces has everyone treading on eggshells.
And it's not just that people are easily offended, but a good argument - the stuff of intellectual life - is equated to rudeness, and even the pointing out of difference must be couched in euphemism to soften that difference.
At Harvard this week a student speaker at the graduation ceremony was forced to abandon the title of his paper "My American Jihad" after protests in the student newspaper.
That, despite the fact he was trying to reclaim the word from terrorists to speak about the compatibility of Islam with American democratic ideas.
Brave new world.