Blogging: True News Delivery

Somewhere between websites and weblogs we lost our political correctness. If you have ever listened to George Carlin, you know he has made fun of how we take words that are accurate and water them down over time until they are almost meaningless. This is the rise of political correctness.

Here is the George Carlin skit as a reference:

I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protest themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I’ll give you an example of that. There’s a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It’s when a fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to it’s absolute peak and maximum. Can’t take any more input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap. In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy years ago.

Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock! Battle fatigue.

Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, were up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.

Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ll bet you if we’d of still been calling it shell shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I’ll betcha. I’ll betcha.

But. But, it didn’t happen, and one of the reasons. One of the reasons is because we were using that soft language. That language that takes the life out of life. And it is a function of time. It does keep getting worse. I’ll give you another example. Sometime during my life. Sometime during my life, toilet paper became bathroom tissue. I wasn’t notified of this. No one asked me if I agreed with it. It just happened.

Toilet paper became bathroom tissue. Sneakers became running shoes. False teeth became dental appliances. Medicine became medication. Information became directory assistance. The dump became the landfill. Car crashes became automobile accidents. Partly cloudy bacame partly sunny. Motels became motor lodges. House trailers became mobile homes. Used cars became previously owned transportation. Room service became guest-room dining. And constipation became occasional irregularity.

When I was a little kid, if I got sick they wanted me to go to the hospital and see a doctor. Now they want me to go to a health maintenance organization…or a wellness center to consult a healthcare delivery professional. Poor people used to live in slums. Now the economically disadvantaged occupy substandard housing in the inner cities.

Weblogs aren't PC and therein lies the beauty of them. I find myself writing things I wouldn't write in any other medium and might not even say except to my closest friends. Somewhere the along the journey of daily writing, the blogger befriends the computer which in turn generates pure unadulterated journalism. Some of my editors tell me they wish they could access my blog so they could change the grammar or spelling but that would ruin the beauty of the blog. It is the personality that shines through without intervention from editors whose mission in life is to create uniformity and etymological order out of chaos.

So blogging is the future for all of us because to be quite honest, news in any other medium is just plain sterile when you compare it to a blog. Sure sometimes you can get the same news from a blog and a magazine but on a  blog you can see blogging wars or better yet, ideas and concepts editors might normally strip out of a written piece.

As long as human beings desire to read what is going on in the inner most recesses of the human mind, blogs will be around to help deliver news with colorful if not always tasteful commentary.