Hello dollies 213
Every ethnicity, sexual proclivity, religion, body shape, etc., has a well-funded organization claiming the mantle of leadership on its behalf ready to jump (and fundraise) should someone string together words in an unapproved order.
There’s an effort to alter the First Amendment moving through the Senate right now, but there’s really no need for it. We, as a society, have voluntarily forfeited the reason for it already. The horse is dead; stop kicking it.
So Derek Hunter writes at Townhall.
He deplores the political correctness that is exercising a puritanical tyranny over free speech:
The political correctness movement ruined honest political discourse, funny movies and decent sitcoms, and now it’s sucking the joy out of everyday life …
It may seem like a lifetime ago, but it was only the 1970s when “Blazing Saddles” was made and embraced by a culture simply looking to laugh. It was offensive. It was silly. But most of all it was funny. Same goes for “Airplane!” Richard Pryor and George Carlin were mocking people and cultures, and it was hilarious.
Now we are no longer ready to laugh; we’re ready to be offended. No, we seem to crave being offended.
Not all of us, of course. But it’s amazing how many people like to complain that they are being victimized by something someone says.
A small deputation to this website asked us to find a word to describe people who make a point of taking offense.
A word is needed that will mark them. They constitute a national menace, demanding not just pity for themselves, but blame and severe penalty for their alleged offenders, abject apologies, and even the amendment – as Derek Hunter notes – of the free speech article, the essential First Amendment, of the Constitution.
We accepted the commission. We began to hunt for such a word. Surely, we reasoned, in the enormous vocabulary of the richest language in the world there is a word for them?
But it seems not. Political correctness is too recent a development in Western culture.
So we decided we would coin a word. A word that means: persons who crave an excuse to take offense; persons who are hurt-hungry.
Should we construct it from Greek words, we wondered. No: words in Greek for hurt, pain, offense, and hungriness do not blend and Anglicize smoothly.
Latin then? Yes. In Latin, pain (of body or mind) is dolor. Hungry is esuriens.
So we can construct a good strong word for the pain-hungry: the DOLORESURIENT.
Be not intimidated by it. It can obviously be shortened to a nice common English word to apply to the offense-collectors: DOLLIES.
With the connotations that word has, it could do very well to offend them.