This one has nothing to do with my journey as a writer, it’s just a pet-peeve. I can’t stand the current trend on the internet of censoring words about death. Look, I get it, you wanted to do something about cyber-bullying, and you weren’t smart enough to actually target the root causes in a realistic way. Just because you can’t do a thing, doesn’t mean you should create another problem all in the name of “well, we had to do SOMETHING.”
No. You didn’t have to do ‘something.’ There’s no good solution, so you just deal with it. You couldn’t be happy with that end result though, nooooo. You had to take some action, so you made it against the internet law to say some of the mean words that bullies say.
“We blocked cyber-bullies from saying ‘kill yourself’ and ‘die’, our job here is done.” No. All you did is introduce something utterly moronic into our language: ‘unalive.’ People can still communicate hateful, cruel statements, they just have to contribute to the further bastardization of the language to do it. The word itself doesn’t matter, only the meaning behind it. In your utterly childish attempt to solve a problem, you introduced the stupidest possible solution that embarrasses us as a culture and creates socio-cultural problems all its on own. And all without remotely addressing the original problem, by the way. Sure, you’ve forced cyber-bullies to be more creative; but they excel at that. Meanwhile, you also force news personnel on the internet to describe victims of natural disasters as ‘unalive.’ How utterly embarrassing. I heard another online reporter describe a victim of sexual assault as a ‘grape victim.’ How does that benefit anyone? Remove the weird censorship, stop patting yourself on the back for pretending to address cyber-bullying and go back to the drawing board.