I’m honestly not sure whether that’s a fair reading of Atlas Shrugged.
I recently heard from a woman whose mother died in a fire how infuriating “die in a fire” is. Perhaps it would be kinder to retire it at least until people no longer die in fires.
By that standard, we should purge our speaking of any and all allusions to traumatic death, i.e. the overwhelming majority of death. I would judge this to be an unreasonable standard; trigger warnings are a good thing when possible, but they are not practical for casual, conversational speech.
This particular case may also be a form of unusually high sensitivity, unless the loss was recent (or particularly traumatic for other reasons, e.g. happened during childhood or the woman nearly died in the fire herself). I lost the majority of my family to various forms of cancer, and nearly everyone I know has had at least one such event, but I still remember “I hope the bastard gets bowel cancer” or similar phrases being a fairly common choice for an extremely venomous insult, and it wouldn’t cause so much as a raised eyebrow unless someone’s relative were in the process of dying of cancer, or had very recently done so.
The death was fairly recent, and took a couple of years. I suppose you could call it dying of a fire rather than in one.
I am really not sure where the limits should be on that sort of speech—in a public forum of this size, the odds of accidentally stomping on someone’s toes go up.
Hello, my name is John Galt and if you have ever used the emergency room in a hospital, please go die in a fire.
I’m honestly not sure whether that’s a fair reading of Atlas Shrugged.
I recently heard from a woman whose mother died in a fire how infuriating “die in a fire” is. Perhaps it would be kinder to retire it at least until people no longer die in fires.
By that standard, we should purge our speaking of any and all allusions to traumatic death, i.e. the overwhelming majority of death. I would judge this to be an unreasonable standard; trigger warnings are a good thing when possible, but they are not practical for casual, conversational speech.
This particular case may also be a form of unusually high sensitivity, unless the loss was recent (or particularly traumatic for other reasons, e.g. happened during childhood or the woman nearly died in the fire herself). I lost the majority of my family to various forms of cancer, and nearly everyone I know has had at least one such event, but I still remember “I hope the bastard gets bowel cancer” or similar phrases being a fairly common choice for an extremely venomous insult, and it wouldn’t cause so much as a raised eyebrow unless someone’s relative were in the process of dying of cancer, or had very recently done so.
The death was fairly recent, and took a couple of years. I suppose you could call it dying of a fire rather than in one.
I am really not sure where the limits should be on that sort of speech—in a public forum of this size, the odds of accidentally stomping on someone’s toes go up.