“you don’t like the proliferation of terms like Unalive outside of TikTok because you realize that you’re aging out of youth culture and it makes you uncomfortable!”
no I don’t like it because there’s something INCREDIBLY dystopian about being forced to soften terms for basic parts of the human experience like death and sex (and even more so terms for oppressed minorities- call me a “le-dollar sign-bian” and I will bite you) purely because advertisers and corporations demand it
The idea that young people are getting used to not being able to speak in public about sex, queerness etc without talking around censors, and see this as normal and not a problem, scares me tbh.
The fact that people are so comfortable with being censored that they Voluntarily censor themselves on words and topics that aren’t even being limited is a terrifying sign
I hate to be like the “THIS IS JUST LIKE 1984” guy but. there was literally a thing in that book where you had to say “double plus ungood” instead of “bad” because you weren’t supposed to talk about bad things. if you told me ten years ago that “unalive” was a word that George Orwell had coined for Newspeak I would have believed you.
Deep breath everyone. People are code switching. So that they can talk about sex and death. This is not cowing to censorship, it is language flowing around it. ‘oh we can’t say ‘sex’? Fine I’m just gonna say ‘She Bojangles on my Hardee til I Jimmy John’ which is in fact much more explicit than ‘we had sex’.
You understand that when someone says ‘self delete’ or ‘auto terminate’ that they’re discussing suicide. You understand that ‘unalive(v)’ means 'kill’ and that 'unalive(adj)’ means 'deceased’ without having that explicitly explained. Because it’s a valid construction in the English Language.
If you comprehend the meaning of the words, language is working. It’s doing its job of taking ideas and concepts from the head of one human and conveying them to another. Linguistic relativity does not in fact prevent the transmission of ideas and concepts.
Put down your copy of 1984, take a breath, and pick up a copy of A Clockwork Orange.
the issue here isn’t whether terms like “unalive” are comprehensible or not though. it’s pretty obvious what they mean, and I don’t see anyone disputing that.
what’s unsettling is that people are voluntarily mincing words that are so integral to the human experience. death is natural. sex is natural. why are we so uncomfortable talking about them that we need make up new, softer words?
censorship is, unfortunately, an undeniable fact of modern media and being online. we are adapting to it, yes. we’re still communicating the ideas that corporations are trying to censor. and yeah, some of us are effectively code switching in order to bypass the censors. but I can tell you from personal experience that there are definitely people who just talk like that now. like all the time. they’ll say “unalive” to my face, in person, completely seriously. that is what’s worrisome to me. it doesn’t seem like “rebellious youth culture” to me. it seems like the opposite of that. it seems like corporate interests seeping into our genuine, private, offline interactions where they shouldn’t have any control.
Last time I checked, this kind of thing has not and never has been solely the wheelhouse of private companies.
Censorship is generally done by governments. The euphemism treadmill is often operated by sincere and well-meaning activists.
If people are using this kind of language offline, they have responsibility for their own actions. Not some vague collective Other boogeyman.
And frankly, this isn’t even remotely the first time e-euphemisms have escaped containment. It’s just the first time y'all noticed.