Naughty, naughty words.

The silliest words are completely taboo now. Including taboo, because it might offend some Tongan people out there. 

Censorship has been in the news again, although the proponents aren't calling it that. Roald Dahl's books are getting the workover to remove offensive words like "fat" and "ugly" that might offend people who are... well, fat and/or ugly, I guess. I never liked Dahl's children's books -- he was not a lover of humanity, and his writing for adults has a high enough body count to back me up on that. But you don't even have to read those stories. Spoiler alert: In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory we have children being blown up and squashed, permanently discolored, thrown in the garbage, shrunk and stretched out, and all kinds of things I found traumatizing when we covered the book in second grade. That stuff's fine, but we can't use words like "fat"? 

If they think that taking insulting words out of the discourse will make children be nicer to one another, they have never met any children.

Even dumber of course (ooooh, dumb is a taboo word too!) is that Fleming's James Bond books are getting the treatment. For the love of all that is good, if you're an adult and you can't handle a seventy-year-old spy novel, you ought to go back to singing "Baby Shark" and let the adults talk. 

The American Library Association is useless, as always. They love to prance around with their so-called Banned Books Week in the fall. Altered Books Week is never going to happen, though. They're all for it. You might hope that the dead authors' estates would fight against this nonsense, but they couldn't care less, as long as the money keeps rolling in. 

Lately I find more of the companies I work for employ sensitivity readers, people whose entire job is to go off like a smoke detector if a bad word comes up. Not bad as in obscene, blasphemous, or grotesque, but bad as in possibly offensive to one of the many grievance farmers out there working the fields. Words like dumb (insults the deaf), insane (insults the crazy), handicapped (insults the handicapped), fat (covered above), hooker (insults sex workers), mumbo-jumbo (I think this is cultural appropriation), addict (insults bums), grandfather (as verb, from its relation to Jim Crow laws), master bedroom (because only plantations had master bedrooms?), and anything that might suggest masculinity, like fireman or congressman. Also any possible use of black in a negative sense (as in a black mood), or any use of white in a positive one (which will be a bummer to the saints in Revelation 7, who "came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb"). And you'd better not have a character wear moccasins. Although they have been a style in the shoe industry for more than a hundred years, now they're culturally insensitive.

Sensitivity readers have to keep coming up with new words to ban, if they're to justify their phony-baloney jobs.

We need more insensitivity readers. Speech is supposed to be free in this country, and we need to toughen the hell up. I was rereading a 98-year-old book by an Englishman and was surprised to find an incidental use of the old N-word. I'm an adult; I can that the author was using the term in a reflection of the attitudes of colonialists, whom he firmly opposed. But I dare not tell you what book or author it was, lest the Kancel Kops come for him next.   

One word that the sensitivity Nazis ignore, of course, is Jesus in a perjorative sense. It's peachy with them that some readers will be offended over that. It's ducky. No problemo. I've heard it said that Christians are the only religious people who consistently use the name of their Lord in vain, and that's probably true. But not all of us. However, that's not something a sensitivity reader worries about. 

After all, it's not like saying a simple scientific sentence like "Flowers contain male sex organs called stamens and female sex organs called pistils." That could get you fired. Who are you to assume that flower's gender?