One of my biggest pet peeves is when people are afraid to use particular words. Just now my use of the term “health nazism” in a BFB post has ruffled some feathers. One person says “A few thoughts here, SJbrodwall. Even though ‘nazism’ has entered the vernacular, it would be nice to avoid such charged language”. The forum moderator (whose job it is to keep the peace, so I don’t blame him too much) follows up with “please, please, please, please do not use the word Nazi or any derivatives. This is a big language, and there are other suitable words that can be used. I really don’t want that word thrown about here by anyone”.

I’m sorry, but… What. The. Fuck!!!!!

Why do words have power? Why? Because people grant them power. Words are nothing outside the minds that use and perceive them.

“Nazism” is a noun. It’s not a slur. It is the name of a political movement. Some shit happened last century, and Nazis did a lot of that shit. It was bad shit, very bad shit, and I don’t condone it. However, using a noun does not fucking condone the actions perpetrated by that noun’s extension! Because some people once did some bad shit, does that mean that I am not allowed to construct an analogy using one of the most historically important events of modern history? Just the invocation of the name of some bad guys is enough to make peoples’ panties get in a knot?

What about rape, then? A helluva lot more people have been raped than were affected by what the nazis did. Am I no longer allowed to use the term rape in anything but its most literal sense for fear of offending people? No rape of the land by the oil industry, no rape of the middle class by the Bush government?

I have to be so fucking careful of every random person’s psyche that I cannot use an apt analogy involving anything negative that might have ever happened to any person, ever? Or wait, I guess the holocaust is sooo fucking special, that it gets privileged status when it comes to taboos. It happened to Westerners, after all, and not brown people. Is that it?

It’s this kind of BS that gives liberals a bad name. This is mindless political correctness, and I’m not having any of it. Not to mention that it’s particularly ironic on a fat acceptance blog called Big Fat Blog. In this movement we have been taught to take back a term that has been used against us–a term that is still used as a slur. We are taught about how the power of language works, and that names cannot hurt us if we don’t let them. I was called fat when I was a kid, and it hurt, even though I was fat–because I was ashamed to be fat. Now I use the word to describe myself, proudly and accurately. Proudly because I have overcome the word’s intended tyrrany, not because I am proud to be something caused by genetics and bad psychotropic drugs. Accurately because fat is a term that describes my appearance. Not “Rubenesque”, not “BBW”, not “curvy”–fat. I have disarmed the word “fat”, and my life is better for it.

The more fear you have of a word, the more power you give it. When you bristle any time the word “nazism” is used in any sense but the most literal, you’re giving that word enormous power. If the language is charged, it’s the sensitive who are charging it. Why would anyone want to be involved in the creation of weapons to be turned on themselves? This is so beyond me.

Sometime I’ll write my thoughts about people who disparage cussing and imply that the cusser suffers from an impoverished vocabulary. But don’t even get me started on “nigger”.