We’re allowed to say what we want. The flip side of this most unalienable of rights is that we’re also entitled to get offended by anything we want. And, it just so happens that we exercise this entitlement often. Why? Because “words will never harm me” is the most horrible lie we’re all told as children. Words hurt—sometimes worse than gunshot wounds or the latest Hoya loss. Words jostle our fragile human sensibilities, leaving us with indelible scars from the verbal wars we wage with one another.

Society has long since acknowledged this awful truth. To counter it, without broaching the most holy protections of the first amendment, we as a whole have created a vast network of catch-all’s, circumlocutions, and euphemisms called political correctness, which lets us talk about the tricky things in life without offending those around us. Political correctness doesn’t, at least insofar as I understand it, extend to obscenities, slurs, and the like. There’s no sensitive alternative to, say, the n-word, because the word itself is only used for the express purpose to offend. (Unless, of course, you’re Lil Wayne and you can’t rhyme anything else.) What political correctness is meant to do, rather, is keep us away from the inadvertent offensiveness of some of the more indelicate expressions of the English language.

This endeavor, then, was born of noble intentions. But when taken too far, as it often is on this very campus, political correctness poses a grave intellectual danger. Libertarians and Leftists alike will tell you that political correctness is George Orwell’s newspeak realized—a successor to unadulterated language that limits individual expression for the ostensible reason of curbing discrimination. Frankly, comparing modern political correctness to 1984 is a little extreme, but the fact remains that our collective hypersensitivity to anything and everything that might be construed as offensive creates a culture of apprehension and awkwardness instead of empathy, as was intended.

Indeed, political correctness has morphed into an ungainly, burdensome beast. It’s left us with a knee-jerk assumption of malice or ignorance whenever someone opts for “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays.” This sorry state of affairs is not just unhealthy—it’s also not working.

A few months ago, I found myself in the cramped Voice office in the wee hours of the morning, nearly tearing my hair out as my editors and I sought to affix a headline to a mental health feature. Some of us wanted to explore an “unseen illness” motif, but others among us raised concerns that such a title would be ableist (read: discriminatory to the blind, er, visually impaired). So what did we settle on? “Not Crazy, A Little Unwell” – a Matchbox 20 reference, which, while awesome in it’s own right, represents a significant departure from what we were really trying to say: that the Georgetown community is blind to some of the realities of mental illness.

My experience with political correctness, mild as it may be, is a solitary drop in the bucket. A further instance of this hypersensitivity rearing its swollen head can be seen in a recent exchange between GU Fossil Free and the Black Student Alliance, in which the latter was offended by the former’s “cultural appropriation” of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” refrain.

What we have, then, is a trend, wherein a desire to make everybody happy inhibits expression and expediency. Your professor has to say “African-Americans” instead of “blacks” even though he or she wants to get at the racially-charged heart of identity politics. I’m obligated to write with pangender-inclusive pronouns, or even some Spivak creation like “xe” that’s totally not a real word and makes E. B. White turn over in his grave, when all I want to do is preserve the flow of my little paragraph.

The proponent of political correctness will rightfully respond that I seem to be privileging expression and expedience over an important linguistic endeavor to make the world a more just place. I guess I am. Does that make me an insensitive person? Nope.

Individual expression—sometimes coarse but always uncontained—is foundational to liberty and democracy. Language, in all its myriad forms, has an infinite capacity to offend. “Vertically challenged” will inevitably become the “dwarf” or “midget” of its day—the kind of thing that will make your grandchildren wince just like you do when Grandpa Joe the WWII vet tosses around words like “chink” and “jap.”

The road to complete equality or neutrality of language is paved with good intentions, but it’s destined never to be completed because words are more powerful and more deadly than any stick or stone ever was. We have to shoulder this admittedly scary burden, as it’s the only thing keeping our speech from going the way of unlimited breadsticks at Olive Garden.