You Can’t Say That

Gen Y shutting down free speech.

Gen Y shutting down free speech.

Free speech and the right of Americans to speak their piece is arguably one of our nation’s most vaunted freedoms. Short of yelling “fire” in a crowded movie theater and a few other caveats, whether you agreed with another’s protected speech, the right to say it was sacrosanct for more than 200 years.

Leave it to millennials to fuck that up! According to Pew Research, our milliennial snowflakes are much more likely than older Americans to say government should be able to prevent people from saying “mean and hurtful” things about minority groups.

Millennials want to eliminate bad words.

Millennials want to eliminate bad words.

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Destroying Words

There was once a book, one that I learned about in school. Granted, when I first went to school back in the 1960s, the world was a different place. While it was beginning to shift and change, language was still fairly static. That’s no longer the case.

George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, or 1984 in 1949, which compared to when I began school could be considered the Dark Ages. The name he was given at birth (in 1903) was Eric Blair. I bet you didn’t know that.

Big Brother is watching!

Big Brother is watching!

I used to have a blog called Words Matter. I named it that because when I was learning words and how to write them, they really did matter.

Orwell’s book had a profound effect on me when I first read it during my high school years, during the first term of a president named Reagan.  I’ve subsequently read 1984 at least 15 times since then. Continue reading