op disabled reblogs so here
It's so hard to come to that conclusion though, like at this point unalive is a part of gen Z culture. It's just using a word, they're not even thinking about talking on TikTok or YouTube anymore, they're just talking. It's a lot like people getting mad over AAVE because it's not grammatically correct and yes it's not, but AAVE is a cultural usage of English, a dialect if you will. They use it because their friends and family use it, everyone talks that way. Nobody thinks about grammar when speaking AAVE. It's actually kind of offensive if you try to correct someone. It's like that with unalive too. It's a clashing of culture, we don't understand it because we see it as it was formed, a response to a shitty half ass language filter, not as it is used, which is just another word for kill, death, or died. I really think this one is just not a big deal enough to fight. I think that teacher in the first part, while I agree with the sentiment and find the story funny, it's also in my opinion not about maturity but just a culture thing.
From working with children, the way kids who use unalive react when they hear someone say kill or suicide, it's not just slang or comparable to minoritised dialects, it's self-censorship, active and deliberate with fear of consequences built into it.
The idea of being punished by an invisible force for saying a bad word is literally something I was terrified of in Catholic school and it’s creepy that corporate sponsors are living in kids’ heads the way God and Satan lived in ours.
kill the cop they have poisoned your heart with and hold the weight of these words in your hands. they are tools meant to be used to better the world, and like most tools they can also be used to make the world a worse place through misuse. that is not an excuse to not use them, that is an indictment of the responsibility that Being Able To Use Words carries.
censorship is vile in all its forms and i will kill it until it dies a painful death.
