maybe i'm just a little cranky right now, but it seems like there can't actually be such a thing as the protection of free expression in america anymore because too many americans simply aren't familiar enough with the english language to comprehend what's being expressed.
for example, the US Army was just recently forced to delete a tweet that people had called "racist". the tweet contained the phrase "a chink in the armor" (they were talking about issues with their new fancy-shmancy tech-mech wifi-warrior suit) and everyone randomly decided that they were talking about asians. that expression is hundreds of years old... and you mean to tell me that the only americans who understand it are the ones doing p.r. for the army?
can people who don't understand the language be reasonably considered to have "freedom of speech"? further, do the rest of us have a duty to protect the rights of those who have rendered themselves incapable of exercising them? i don't mean not protecting illiterate people from exploitation. of course we should do that. i mean; do we have to afford the same amount of weight and respect to the speech of a person who doesn't know what they're talking about, and are we bound to allow that to interfere with reality? does the fact that nobody understands that "a chink in one's armor" isn't a racist sentiment necessarily mean that we have to drop the idiom from our language entirely, even though they're the ones who are wrong about what it means?
and what happens when the ubiquitous "they" decide to start labeling other random words "palabra non grata"? do we just let them do it? does their "freedom of speech" extend to the right to outright destroy the language? giving people who aren't using the language correctly ultimate control over how the language is to be used by everyone doesn't seem very "freedom"-perpetuating to me. in fact, manipulating a society by manipulating how they speak is part of every dystopia ever conceived, real or fictional.
