By day, I am a student, an employee, a friend, a teenager. By night, I am a warrior, fighting the downfall of the English language. I refuse to stand by while “OMG” and “LOL” are being added to the 2011 Oxford dictionary; before we know it, English will be as dead as Latin. The only remedy to this problem is to take a vow of abstinence from acronyms, text in complete sentences, and use punctuation marks – the kind not required to create smiley faces. As prevalent as text talk has become, the most common sound heard within American society today isn’t a word at all – it’s a bleep. We all know the words underneath the monotone sound or the random characters meant to mask an expletive, so who are we trying to protect? We try so hard to keep our conversations politically correct: heaven forbid little Johnny says the **** word, or the British secret service’s randomly generated code name for Obama happens to be the American equivalent to “Smart Alec”. Isn’t it possible that we’re bleeping out the very words that can cause pivotal change within our society? Can’t expletives, labels, and stereotypes be positive things?
Modern day censorship not only fails to protect small children, but destroys global societies one country at a time. Pakistan? Osama Bin Laden’s pornography stash just proves that censoring women and idealizing them as chaste creatures only promotes male lust and aggression. Bin Laden claimed to fight in the name of Islam, yet Islam is fundamentally opposed to his principles (both violent and pornographic). China? “Google-ing” the word “freedom” will yield approximately zero results. The government’s attempt to curb any anti-establishment sentiments consists of screening phone calls, emails, and online searches while cloaking these intrusions as Google technical difficulties. Denmark? The Danish Bible Society translated the bible to “modern Danish” for young children to be able to understand it. “Blissful” becomes “happy”, “blessed” becomes “lucky”, yet the Danish youth seem to have no problem conquering 700 page Harry Potter books. How can we continue to believe that censorship has benefits?
Although censorship may seem necessary in front of your boss or at the local daycare, we’re actually failing to see the benefits of the lack of censorship. Negative labels, such as a diagnosis, can help you attain the help you need, stereotyping has been scientifically proven to increase the human ability to multitask, and swearing increases pain tolerance (who knew?). Self-proclaimed “Tiger Mom”, Amy Chua, has no problem telling her kids that they’re “garbage” or that they’re “lazy.” Now her oldest daughter is deciding between attending Yale and Harvard while her youngest was chosen to play with the Norwalk Symphony Orchestra. So why can’t we all achieve the same level of success? Because we’re too damn polite. No one wants to hear the truth anymore, which is why obesity is an epidemic, students are receiving W’s (warnings) instead of F’s, and we’re so intrigued by the fantasy world of Harry Potter books (the Danish aren’t the only ones). Political correctness and self-censorship have turned the game of life into a game of bumper bowling – we’re handing out A’s for effort because we’re too afraid to hand out criticism, which only earns us an F for fruition in the end.
As I continue arguing against acronyms, I realize that the real problem isn’t the abbreviation of words, it’s society’s eradication of them. Even profanity has its individualistic meanings that can’t be categorized as a single “bleep”. According to Tim O’Brien, we “[use] a hard vocabulary”, what happens when we don’t have enough words to comprise a vocabulary?I need help writing a conclusion?
Sorry but it takes too much time
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