The year 2017 is recovering from the political trauma of US President Donald Trump’s election, the economic trauma of Brexit and the social trauma of the Syrian crisis. What most fail to acknowledge is that 2017 is also recovering from the inadequate and inappropriate usage of the English vocabulary.
As far as we have come in terms of technological and educational progress, this is still not reflected in the way that we communicate with each other. Political correctness is yet but a distant dream of free and unrestricted speech. Somehow words like “depression,” “OCD,” “anxiety,” and “insomnia,” and phrases like “don’t run or cry like a girl,” have seeped into our vocabulary and have become normalised with daily usage.
What the majority of the public fails to realise is that depression and anxiety are real mental illnesses and hundreds of millions of people have to deal with them. These words should be eliminated from colloquial usages because it trivialises what people with actual mental disorders go through.
The phrase “don’t run like a girl” or “you throw a ball like a girl” are extremely derogatory to women. These imply that women are the weaker sex and that being a girl means that you are automatically weaker than a boy. By using these phrases, we are instilling in the minds of young children that sexism is okay and that women are less equipped to become leaders than men.
The 21st century prides itself in being a major turning point for the way that women are treated in the society; but the usage of these phrases simply perpetuates sexism. Let 2017 be the time that we change our vocabulary for the better.
- The reader is a student based in Dubai.
