Losing the language wars: Woke malapropisms

The can of worms around free speech and bullying or threatening speech was created when the powers that be created an awkward, politically correct and woke speech category called "hate speech" which, depending on your political leanings, can either be an expression of free speech or an expression of violence -- violence in the old-fashioned way, ie, not "silence is violence," but rather oral and written threats of violence.

It would actually clear up the issues if we just stopped trying to label actions against only certain people as "hate crimes" and stop labeling expressions of doubt about "gender transition" as "hate speech." The irony is that if you listen long enough, it appears that the problem in this last case is the continuing self-hatred among those who doubt their sexual identity.

Which leads to another word that has been twisted, "gender". It's not a social construct; it's a synonym for "sex" that we first started using when people felt that the word "sex," with the connotation that sex was an act and not a biological category, left "sex" out of those forms you had to fill in just about everywhere starting with the sex identified at birth. Which leads to another tweist. Today we have to say "sex ASSIGNED at birth," and then allow children to demand taxpayer-funded, secret from their parents, "gender reassignment," where the term "gender-affirming care" has to be one of the most horrific distortions of medical and scientific reality imaginable. Seriously, isn't it really what we used to say to describe Renee Richards, a "sex change"? Better yet, why not call it what it really is, an extreme form of child abuse.

Better yet, let's go back to to using "phobic" to connote fear, not what we today call "hate". I mean, wouldn't today's jargon require us to change "anti-semitism" to "jew-phobic," just as we are required to say "Islamophobic." Or when the dude at Boston University coined the term "anti-racist," shouldn't he have just called it "race-phobic."

Thanks to people like the Harvard president and that woke, elite ilk, words are more like the way they were described in Alice in Wonderland than in Webster's.

Just as we have drifted away from any meaningful understanding of "love," we have been driven to the hard left with the casual use and misunderstanding of "hate."