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CSU-Northridge Students Compile List of Offensive Words Like ‘Crazy’ and ‘Stupid’

CSU-Northridge Students Compile List of Offensive Words Like ‘Crazy’ and ‘Stupid’

They know what’s best for everyone.

Students at California State University Northridge have taken it upon themselves to decide which words are simply to hurtful for the rest of us to use. Wasn’t that nice of them?

Heat Street reports:

California University Students Call Words ‘Crazy’ and ‘Stupid’ Hate Speech, Play in Big Ball Pit

During its “inclusive language” campaign, California State University-Northridge students lounged in a bouncy-ball pit and held forth about words that hurt their feelings in a so-called “vent tent,” Heat Street has learned after exclusively reviewing documents and video footage.

CSU-Northridge’s event stretched on for an entire week, teaching students about “potentially hurtful phrases” and cautioning that “using non-inclusive language can have a negative affect on others.”

The University Student Union, a student-led nonprofit campus organization, spent more than $1,000 in student fees on the event, according to invoices. Urging students to avoid hurtful language, USU came up with a list of offensive words — and then printed them in huge, all-caps text, hanging the poster on campus regardless of their supposedly triggering potential.

Some of these phrases were obviously rude; in fact, it’s pretty inconceivable that a university would feel the need to teach college students that it’s not nice to say, for instance, “you stupid whore,” “this bitch,” or “fag.” Then again, these are the same young adults who find their college’s rental of a play-place ball pit fun and quirky instead of infantilizing and slightly insulting.

Other words and phrases deemed offensive by USU are much more common, and garner far less public consensus as uncouth. For instance, students were cautioned about the harmful potential of “man up,” or about using the adjective “crazy” or describing the weather as “bipolar.”

Another flagged phrase had a decidedly political bent: Students were cautioned about saying “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien.”

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Comments

Who gets to censor the censors?

I [deliberately non-inclusive] don’t give a flying fig [perhaps uncouth] about what these pussies [insulting and therefore hate speech?] think of my speech. Are they proposing that my speech rights be limited, prohibiting me from using the words they deem offensive under threat of punishment? Or are they just going to tell me that I am offensive to them?