General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The latest "banning" (NYC_SKP) is an interesting lesson on REPUTATION. [View all]valerief
(53,235 posts)on a TV show? A sitcom likely. I remember being shocked when Cloris Leachman said, "Go suck an egg," on her MTM spinoff Phyllis. She'd used the word suck and didn't mention a vacuum cleaner.
I can't remember when I first heard the forbidden swear words used regularly on TV--I didn't watch much television in the 80s or 90s--but once I did, I was amused. There was a sea change. Why there was, I don't know, but there was. Those words were no longer "magical." They'd lost their power to insult and had mutated to common slang, used for entertainment. Today, even basic cable goes to minimal effort to bleep out the magic word fuck.
Giving a single word or phrase, especially when used out of context, the power to banish one from a discussion board or social group or job is like believing in ghosts or that Dubya is smart. It's magic thinking, something we're supposed to outgrow at age seven. The fact that conservatives have bastardized the concept of political correctness and embraced magic words doesn't surprise me. While one's history should be considered before banning, so should the context in which the magic word was used. But that's too complex for the black-and-white thinkers. I think we call them authoritarians now.
And before someone points out again that I had used a magic word and was banned from a group (which I probably won't see, because I probably have already put that person on Ignore), please note that I had trashed that group BEFORE I got the ban. I didn't care about the ban. It made me laugh. I trash a lot of the Bernie vs. Hillary threads. They bore me. If I want to watch a horse race, I'll turn on TV "news" shows. In fact, if I'm banned from DU, my life won't change. I can post elsewhere. I'm adaptable and complex. I'm not an authoritarian.