What Happened to The Words?

Last night, my oldest daughter was looking for an episode of Black Butler (an anime show). This is how the conversation went:

C: How do you spell terrorist?

Me: What? I’m not telling you how to spell terrorist… Two Rs then one R. (Note: the you-know-what will now monitor my site for the next five years or so).

C: But… I don’t know the rest.

Me, assuming she’s a smart kid, she can get the -ist ending: You can’t spell a word that consists of 6 letters and half of them are R?

C: If you write that word in school, you get ten days detention. I’ve never written it.

Me: Just watch. In ten years, something will happen, and journalists will all be sitting around the room, asking someone to spell terrorist, because they weren’t allowed to learn.

But, seriously? A word is banned from school? From being learned? Do they think if they don’t write it, no one can grow up to become it? Because terrorists don’t think they’re terrorists. (I am so going on a watch list somewhere.) They think they’re good people, righting wrongs, or punishing the evildoers, or some other naive and fanciful and ridiculous thing. But they don’t think they’re the bad people.

It just smacks of 1984 andNewspeak–and I’m not okay with that. We need all the words. We need all of them because people will always do terrible things, and without the words, how do we shine a light on that?

“It just smacks of 1984 and Newspeak–and I’m not okay with that. We need all the words.” ~ Click to Tweet

Photo used with permission from stock.xchng. Photo by: Sebastian Danon.