There is no other way to put it but in these simple words, America is getting soft. We have adjusted our language as to not offend people. We change the words that we use so that things don’t sound as scary or serious as they actually are. We have changed the way we talk and it isn’t sending us in a good direction.

We change our language in the modern word because hurting little jimmy’s feelings a little bit would be an absolute tragedy. We no longer say words that are demeaning to people like “fat” or “stupid”, we change to “overweight” or “learning disorder”. George Carlin’s “Euphemisms” is a wonderful set of examples of how our language has changed for a worse manner. Words may hurt people and maybe we shouldn’t demean younger kids today but that doesn’t mean that we should raise them to be offended by everything out of there norm of wording.

Our language has been adjusted to make easy of some of the more serious situations that we may be faced in life. Doing this could have serious effects on the way that these types of situations are handled in life. Sometimes it is required to scare somebody straight in order for them to get out of the situation that they are in; telling someone they are broke is likely to try to motivate someone to fix themselves more than saying they are “financially unstable”. The largest and most serious example of this happening is through the progression of the effects of war on a soldier. George Carlin explains the progression of this serious illness from “shell shock” to “battle fatigue” to “Operational exhaustion” to “Post-traumatic stress disorder” to “PTSD”, we went from a very ominous and serious sounding illness to a simple jumble of letters that not everyone may understand.

The change in our language is only a small part of the “pacification” of our lives. We no longer have winners and losers in athletics we have winners and “participants”. We do these sorts of things to try and shield today’s children from the ugly truth of life. It isn’t helping either, it is creating a society that is so sheltered that they take offense to another person’s point of view. This is awful and we often are hypocritical with the way we use this new adaptation of language. We beat around the bush with children and use big words so that it sounds less scary and they may not have to fully understand it then but when for example the government uses the same method of explanation then we get upset that they aren’t being straight forward. It is two faced and it is irrational.

Simply put our language and the words we use are making America soft and it is embarrassing. We need to change the words we say so that we don’t hurt anyone’s feelings because that would be the end of the world. We take the seriousness and humanity out of situations and it has dramatic effects on how we handle these critical situations. All of this is sending us down a path where we can’t come back from it, a path of easily offended and entitled kids. This is a mistake that needs to be taken seriously before it’s too late.