In the beginning, we were told, was the word; but I contend that there was never a word that ever existed that was not preceded by the existence of whatever it was the word was trying to express.  Eliminate the word, and what it was expressing will still exist, but we will be unable to know it or express it.

I’m going to assume that everyone reading this knows exactly what the third word in the title is.  If any of you would have been offended or disturbed in some way if I had written the word out without the asterisks, then does the altered version also offend?  If not, why not.  You recognize the word, you find it offensive or disturbing, so why does it not offend you?  And if you are offended, then what difference does it make whether I have used the alteration?

Popular social media has become not just prudish, but actually frightened by the use of certain words. They have created censorship and punishment algorithms that weed out those words in order to eliminate their use online.  As a result, many social media users have begun to do two things: self-censor their language, and seek inventive workarounds to evade the algorithms.

In addition to using asterisks or other symbols to substitute for specific letters, or even whole words, as in the title, users are employing a range of tactics.  They’re rearranging letters, creating nonsense words: fcuk.  They’re putting dots between the letters of the words:  f.u.c.k.  They’re blacking out or otherwise simply removing letters: f__k.  Sometimes, they are simply blacking out or leaving spaces for entire words, leaving imagination and context to, they hope, let the reader know what was intended.

And it isn’t just obscene language that is being elided.  They are altering or censoring any word or idea that they anticipate might cause any offense or disturbance whatsoever and alert the algorithmic overlords.  Words such as die, death, murder, rape, racism, homosexual references, racial or ethnic slurs, even words like hurt, are being routinely disguised.  Badly disguised, but disguised.

The censorship of obscenities has been a part of all kinds of public discourse and entertainment for a long time, but it has not always been the same.  Many of you may remember that, in 1939, the three-hour film, “Gone With the Wind,” was released with a degree of both scandal and titillation.  The film decency board had allowed it to be released despite some disturbing and objectionable content.  I’m not, of course, referring to the fairly graphic scenes of war and violence, including a long gruesome scene of the civil war dead, dying, and butchered soldiers laid out in a railyard.  I’m also not talking about the prominence of respectfully portrayed characters such as prostitutes and their customers, gun-runners, or libertines.  And, of course, the film retains the inherently racist stereotypes and thematic elements associated with the civil war era and the cultural norms of the first half of the twentieth century.

The scandalous content that the censors nonetheless allowed was one word, spoken by the principle male character in his very last line, almost at the very end of the movie, at the end of the three hours, when Rhett Butler says, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  Guess which word.

Now ask yourself, are you offended by that word?  If it is spoken in a major film, or written in a novel, said in a podcast, or public broadcast of some kind, are you shocked, disturbed.  Do you blush or titter?  Do you write an angry letter to someone?  If you knew that word was buried somewhere in the text of a book your high-schooler has been assigned to read, or might just have available in the school library, do you storm into a school board meeting demanding the book’s removal?

We are becoming pre-emptively afraid of our own language.  And we are consequently doing to ourselves what George Orwell predicted would be done to us.  We are reducing the number of words we have available to us to express what we wish to express; and through that self-censorship, limiting our ability to think, to reason, and to try to resolve some very serious social, cultural, and personal issues.

Now, before I continue, I want to acknowledge that there are people who have suffered trauma, or injury, or prejudice of all kinds.  I know that some of those people find certain trigger words or difficult images and representations and depictions to be terribly disturbing.  And even the prohibitions enacted by the censors in 1939 used those things to justify their actions.  Warning labels, ratings symbols, and other public recognition of those words and images have become common.  But alerting those who might be harmed by those things is not the same as trying to hide them away, pretend we don’t see them, or that they don’t actually exist.

Acknowledging another’s pain is not the same as taking responsibility for it or assuming that we must protect them from it.  And the censoring of individual words or ideas does neither of those things, anyway.

Moreover, there is great danger for us as individuals, communities, societies, nations, and the world in the prohibition of words and ideas.  The simple fact is that what we cannot adequately express, we cannot ever resolve.

And substituting other words – or pretending that we aren’t actually using those words – means expressing our ideas and feelings less accurately and less effectively.  The words exist for good reasons.  Even our most disturbing vulgarities exist because they were necessary to express what we really mean.  And when we can no longer use those words, or they have lost their power, we must find new words for them.  If we don’t do that, then our most powerful thoughts and emotions will have no place to be expressed except through the power, often turned into violence, of our actions.

We used to talk about the marketplace of ideas, where everyone would be free to express themselves, so that their ideas could be tested, discussed, challenged, argued.  The end result would be, we were told, a natural evolution of thought, reasoning, knowledge, arts. Even faith, belief, and opinion would have a chance to be expressed and subjected to the forces of the marketplace.  But a healthy market, a vibrant, functioning market, requires more than just a limited number of choices, more than just either/or.

A healthy, vibrant market also requires that everyone have access to the market, and currency to spend.  Language is the currency of ideas.  Words are the tender by which we buy and sell our ideas, our knowledge, our beliefs.  When control of that currency is taken out of the market place, when the powerful have access to all the words they need to get what they want, but the rest of us are told we must be frugal, we must sacrifice, we must learn to live with less, then the market collapses and takes us all down with it.

If we are to save our democracy, if we are to make progress on the issues that challenge us, we need to have the words.  If we cannot talk honestly and truthfully, using the appropriate words, then we cannot solve the problems we face.

Now, we know that there are forces within the culture who want exactly that.  They want to keep us from talking about racism, about abortion, about homosexuality, about science, about the broad spectrum and diversity of faith and belief, about human rights, about the environment, about all those things (and this is nowhere near to a comprehensive list) that must be dealt with if we are to survive as a society as a people, as a world.

We must learn not to be afraid of our words.  The words themselves are not the problem.  The problem lies in what we need the words to express.  Sometimes, the words will seem be hurtful, they will be difficult to hear, we will struggle to understand them, we will be made uncomfortable by them; but it is the ideas, not the words, that are hurtful, difficult, misunderstood, uncomfortable, challenging.

So, let us reclaim the words.  Use them.  All of them.  The beautiful and the ugly ones; for as long as both beauty and ugliness exist in the world, they will need to be expressed.