Our advisor did what his title denotes, and merely advised us to consider the complaint. Of course, this didn't necessarily produce the results the professor wanted.
I defended our usage of the term on the fact that this was how Ware had referred to the place he had been raised.Īfter our brief conversation, the professor decided to take our “problematic” language up with our paper’s advisor, attempting to soften our language on the use of a geographical denotation. “South Central” appeared again in our interview with current AS President-Elect Terrance Ware two issues later, and the professor came in to remind us again. Us that the term we had used to denote a location for a photo credit was “South Central” instead of “South Los Angeles,” the officially recognized term after the LA City Council pronounced it so back in 2003. This is especially true on college campuses, where the perennial debate on language centers around acceptability and trends toward increasingly marshmallow grade softness.Ī professor came into our newsroom one day to remind I’ve seen it over the last several months here at The Corsair and in the general discussion of politics today. It’s these effects that are alive and well eight years after Carlin’s death. It can be a concentrated effort to confuse assertion with aggression or to assist in officially mandated obfuscation - see how the CIA doesn’t “kill,” it merely “neutralizes targets.” The push for softer language isn’t always a slow and natural accumulation of jargon meant to help us cope with reality through euphemism. For example, how “cripples” became “the differently abled,” or how people who were ugly became “those with severe appearance deficits.” He saw that a large portion of this softening came from enforced political correctness, coming primarily out of the American left-wing, especially with euphemisms meant to soften the blow for groups that might take offense to labels. We’ve added more syllables to words that mean the same thing, and especially like to medicalize or make scientific anything that might seem rough or crude. Received for this trauma might have been more effective had the language been kept short, sharp, and to the point - words better reflective of the trauma would lead to more immediate care.Ĭarlin saw this softening as “a function of time,” something Americans did over the years in order to continually linguistically inoculate ourselves so that everything we said was a smidge nicer, but, ultimately, a smidge blander and a smidge vaguer. Carlin pointed out how the condition evolved into “battle fatigue” by World War 2, then “operational exhaustion” in the Korean War, and finally, “post-traumatic stress.” He makes the case that the treatment Vietnam veterans Though he offered plenty of mundane examples such as how “toilet paper” became “bathroom tissue” and “constipation” became “occasional irregularity,” Carlin’s classic case study was the term “shellshock.” Originally a term used in the first World War, it described when a soldier’s nervous system got to the point of snapping due to, well, the shock of combat (which in WW1 involved a lot of shelling).
This is what he called “soft language” - the “language that takes the life out of life.” That's something we need more of these days.Ĭarlin hated euphemisms and language that concealed reality and helped Americans not deal with the world directly. Ns and his hilarious ability to skewer them so deftly and universally allowed us to not only be honest with ourselves, but I think with others as well. Carlin’s frustration at humanity’s pretensi It’s unlikely that anyone of that age knows who Carlin was at all, let alone the content of any of his bits. He was a legendary comedian who died almost eight years ago, so a recent high school grad attending SMC for the first time this academic year would have been in elementary sc I wonder how many students at SMC remember George Carlin.