Yes, it has been. I'm trying to sort out why it seems different, or more omnipresent now. The best I can come up with at the moment is that during the period of the American Revolution when people were shouting things like "Death to the Tyrants" they actually meant it - not that it makes it better, but I think (which is speculation, of course, as I wasn't around at that time to know) they weren't using it as rhetoric so much as they actually wanted the English aristocracy to die and would often create effigies demonstrating just how violently. They understood the power of the violent act - it was, in fact, used for precisely that reason and they *meant* it to be that vicious.
Now references to such violent acts are used so much for rhetoric that the true gruesomeness of the actual act is overlooked. I had an acquaintance who frequently used (or uses as I'm sure he still does) the term "rape" as an expletive, often in combination with other descriptors, in situations where he feels, for instance, that he's been charged too much for something. I cringed every time I heard it, and asked him to stop using it, which he objected to as my attempting to censor him. He is, suffice it to say, no longer an acquaintance that is welcome in my home. But I hear it - and read it - more and more frequently from more sources, along with exclamations of how someone who's annoyed someone else should "die". It's that kind of thing - that it seems that we've become so inured to the trauma of violence that we use the language in common parlance as if it were nothing - that is, I think, what upsets me.
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May be triggery; obviously delete if you find it so.
Date: 2009-04-22 08:24 pm (UTC)Now references to such violent acts are used so much for rhetoric that the true gruesomeness of the actual act is overlooked. I had an acquaintance who frequently used (or uses as I'm sure he still does) the term "rape" as an expletive, often in combination with other descriptors, in situations where he feels, for instance, that he's been charged too much for something. I cringed every time I heard it, and asked him to stop using it, which he objected to as my attempting to censor him. He is, suffice it to say, no longer an acquaintance that is welcome in my home. But I hear it - and read it - more and more frequently from more sources, along with exclamations of how someone who's annoyed someone else should "die". It's that kind of thing - that it seems that we've become so inured to the trauma of violence that we use the language in common parlance as if it were nothing - that is, I think, what upsets me.