Sorry. That was intemperate.
I've been cross all day. I've been thinking about the children I encounter in classes in schools. In an average classroom, I will encounter children who have fled war zones, whose parents are experiencing/have experienced modern day slavery, who have a cultural history of slavery.
Yes, i moderate my language to take account of those experiences. Any normal person, with half an ounce of humanity and a little knowledge would do so.
To encounter generalisations, that interpret a basic act of moderation as an infringement on some idealised, never-realised in actuality, notion of 'freedom of expression', is really annoying and quite troubling.
We all moderate what we say and do , all the time, depending on our audience, our intentions, and what we know.
We live in a society where such moderation is, actually a legal requirement, there is no such thing as 'free speech': it's an ideal, against which we debate what can and should determine our moderations. Sometimes, those moderations pass into law, sometimes they are a convention, many times they are an improvised moderation, contingent on particularities.
We - most of us - are fairly sensitive of others, and do not deliberately aim to cause offence or hurt. Often, we want to improve, enhance and make progress by way of our speech acts.
We - most of us - are very capable of realising that not all speech acts need the regulation of the law, and that there are speech acts which, while not illegal, would be massively inappropriate/insensitive/hurtful in specific contexts.
We - most of us - manage to make judgment, all the time, regulating our speech acts so as not to cause hurt, offence, whatever.
We - most of us - know that a particular speech act, in a particular situation, or the moderation of speech acts in particular locations, at particular times, do not, necessarily, need to be translated to a universal act or moderation, to be applied uniformly, across all civic spaces (don't need to be converted into law).
We - most of us - are very aware that asking for sensitivity for certain things, for certain audiences, is not, necessarily, the same as asking for a blanket ban on nursery rhymes. As functioning adults, we know we can make choices.
I'm really, really fed up with this whole "I can't say anything these days. It triggers the snowflakes" thing.
You would never dream of sitting down and making hilarious jokes about slavery with your Afro-Caribbean boss, would you? Or with a child, who you know has a mother who was forced to work for food, in slave conditions, because she came to the UK without a proper visa and found herself paying off a huge debt to the people who arranged it.
It's not a big deal. You employ your intelligence to speak sensitively. It's not the end of Western civilisation.