I was thinking about…

The Ridiculous Censorship of Everyday Language

By Andy Lee

Have you noticed how incredibly sensitive and censorious things have become lately? I’m not just talking about videos or live streams dancing around certain words due to “community standards.” No, this new era of fragility has started leaking into written words and phrases too.

Case in point – I recently read an article referring to a woman’s former occupation, but it was spelled out as “p**stitu*e” with the actual letters starred out. Are you kidding me? That’s how delicate some readers’ sensibilities have become that we can’t even print out the entire word “prostitute” anymore without somebody clutching their pearls?

What’s next, completely scrubbing the English language of any terms deemed too crass or controversial? Should we brace for literary classics being re-released with offensive words completely redacted or replaced with strings of asterisks? Or relationship guides dispensing advice by saying things like “make sure to give great **********”?

Because trust me, I went down a pretty bizarre rabbit hole researching this phenomenon recently. Apparently major social platforms are now flagging and blocking surprisingly tame words like “cigarette,” “pissed,” “dummy,” “gay,” “dank,” “bean,” and even the name “Olé” from certain contexts! Then there’s more understandable targets like “gun,” “violent,” “suicide,” “assault” and so on getting preemptively purged.

But once you start digging, that list of prohibited terms surges into truly ludicrous territory. Why on earth would phrases like “Maine coon cat,” “belongs to the streets,” “hot,” “acting like a Karen,” or “bottom” possibly set off alarms demanding communication breakdowns? What about common adjectives like “thick,” “crazy,” “nasty,” “weird,” “dumb,” or “gross?” Have we really become such a hyper-sanitized, fear-based culture that even mildly suggestive language currently gets slapped with ******* band-aids?

Folks, if we’ve reached the point where attempts at casual conversations risk sparking “national conversations” around micro-aggression dogpiles just for saying “weirdo” or “annoying,” then we’re basically a write off as a functional society moving forward. Somewhere along the way, we got so obsessed with pruning every-last hypothetical discomfort trigger that basic expression fell under fire too.

Don’t get me wrong – I appreciate community guidelines around detestable harassment, hate speech and more. But there’s a vast gulf between regulating legitimate toxicity versus severing our remaining communicative suite down to infancy babbles just in case somebody’s feelings theoretically could get improperly ruffled.

We’re talking about full-grown adults willfully distancing themselves from plain English vocabulary under self-inflicted linguistic neutering protocols all in the interest of…what exactly? Preventing potential hypothetical triggered states in others before research confirms whether harm truly manifests?

At a certain point, we all need to concede that existing in society occasionally involves absorbing ambient stimuli we’d personally prefer not experiencing sometimes too. That’s human coexistence’s perpetual push/pull dynamic – establishing mutual respect without sanitizing every possible flavor until we’re all essentially gargling the same flavorless cream of wheat. No thank you!

Words only contain the power we choose imbuing them with. And linguistic spaces afraid of their own communications rip away at society’s fabric more regressively than any bygone spicy subculture’s lingo possibly could. It’s time resurrecting our thick skins and reserving censures for situations legitimately bringing harm rather than irrationally fleeing basic vocabulary over perpetual “what if” angst campaigns.

Otherwise, stripping functional discourse down to nothing but asterisk PDFs feels like a pretty crummy future even for society’s most sensitive components to inherit.

Stay expressive, keep communicating! 💬🔥