If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?
I would not choose to permanently ban any word from usage for several reasons. First, restricting a person’s basic rights is a slippery slope and an unnecessary one. Once you decide to restrict words, where does it end? Because every person has words they dont like, if we all chose one word, there wouldn’t be any words left. Two, words change and evolve over time so that original meanings and usage get lost over the course of even just one or two generations. A good example of this is the “itis” which came from a comedian in the 90s. Today people who are not black use this term – which I find hilarious – because if they only knew what the “itis” is short for, they probably wouldn’t use it, LOL. Which brings me to my last point: Three, each word has the meaning that you give it and will mean different things to different people. For example ‘hell’ is bad if used in certain sentences and good if used in the Bible. The same goes for ‘bitch’, commonly used as a professional term in dog shows, extremely unprofessional and offensive when used to refer to another human. But ‘bitchin’- that’s a good term meaning fun times, but to ‘bitch’ is to complain about something so if a person is ‘bitchin’ about something, that is not a good thing at all. In other words, Words have the meaning you assign to them.
‘Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so’ . Wm. Shakespeare
The Cultural Connection 