Thursday, June 12, 2003
Late night channel surfing, I encountered CNN and an interesting interview. It seems that the USA has lately been going uber censorship on all classroom texts, including elementary, secondary and post-secondary books.
Common words are being altered in order to be non-offensive. The Government, apparently behind the censorship, is removing supposedly offensive words in order to spare psychological damage to young people, specifically, young females who are apparently more influenced by words like YACHT, POLO (defined as elitist) and BOOKWORM (predjudice).
An Education Specialist, Dianne Rivatch was the target of this interview, mostly because of her book, The Language Police, which goes into much more detail of the (stupid) reasons behind this censorship, and why it should be opposed by the public. She said that its far more damaging to censor these many, many words and cut off the children to the 'real world' which has people who say words such as LANDLORD/LADY (sexist) and BLIND (rude way of saying Visually Impared).
The words range from everyday use by anyone and everyone - MANPOWER (sexist), COWBOY/GIRL (sexist) - to words that are actually more offensive to take out of books such as GOD (too religious) and HELL (also too religious).
Are you offended if I say a word that has a gender diffinitive in it, despite the fact that the word has been used for decades not being specific to that gender? Apparently BROTHERHOOD is both racist and sexist. What about words that have a dictionary definition but also a slang term such as BABE? Censored
What are we supposed to do about languages that depend on gender difinitives, such as Japanese or French? Oops, I forgot that we're talking about the good ol' US-of-Melting-Pot.
So, be aware and concious of your words. Next time you think to be tactful and say that a girl has a BOYISH FIGURE, you might as well just call them a dike and be done with it. Chances are that they read the word FAT in an uncensored magazing somewhere and developed an eatting disorder completely independant of anything you said or did.
(edited for author name)
Common words are being altered in order to be non-offensive. The Government, apparently behind the censorship, is removing supposedly offensive words in order to spare psychological damage to young people, specifically, young females who are apparently more influenced by words like YACHT, POLO (defined as elitist) and BOOKWORM (predjudice).
An Education Specialist, Dianne Rivatch was the target of this interview, mostly because of her book, The Language Police, which goes into much more detail of the (stupid) reasons behind this censorship, and why it should be opposed by the public. She said that its far more damaging to censor these many, many words and cut off the children to the 'real world' which has people who say words such as LANDLORD/LADY (sexist) and BLIND (rude way of saying Visually Impared).
The words range from everyday use by anyone and everyone - MANPOWER (sexist), COWBOY/GIRL (sexist) - to words that are actually more offensive to take out of books such as GOD (too religious) and HELL (also too religious).
Are you offended if I say a word that has a gender diffinitive in it, despite the fact that the word has been used for decades not being specific to that gender? Apparently BROTHERHOOD is both racist and sexist. What about words that have a dictionary definition but also a slang term such as BABE? Censored
What are we supposed to do about languages that depend on gender difinitives, such as Japanese or French? Oops, I forgot that we're talking about the good ol' US-of-Melting-Pot.
So, be aware and concious of your words. Next time you think to be tactful and say that a girl has a BOYISH FIGURE, you might as well just call them a dike and be done with it. Chances are that they read the word FAT in an uncensored magazing somewhere and developed an eatting disorder completely independant of anything you said or did.
(edited for author name)
