Bit niche, I admit. But here’s why:
Life is risky in lots of ways. Basically everything from getting in the car to go to work to playing sport to eating processed food - all carry risk. We generally manage this, and there are communally agreed thresholds in many cases (sometimes mandated by law - eg seatbelts in cars - sometimes not - eg dietary choices). It’s a sort of continuum, if you will, from ‘absolutely fucking reckless’ at one end, through to ‘wrapped entirely in cotton wool’ at the other.
When a choice or an activity strays too close to the ‘fucking reckless’ end of the spectrum, it seems reasonable to me to call it ‘risky’ or ‘perilous’ or ‘very dangerous’; these are all words/phrases that carry meaning of their own and denote different degrees of danger.
But to label a behaviour ‘unsafe’, to me, denotes a fictional situation in which everything one side of an arbitrary line is ‘safe safe safe safe…’ and then it suddenly and arbitrarily tips over into ‘unsafe’ in some sort of banal binary way. My problem with this is that it smacks of a sort of smug, unimaginative box-ticking mentality with no understanding of the nuances or variables of life. If you operate on this sort of model, it leads to a very black-and-white sort of thinking and eventually an abdication of real risk assessment.
I have similar feelings about the word ‘unwell’ instead of ‘ill’ but I’m not sure if that’s reasonable and I haven’t really formulated an argument on that one.
Anyone see where I’m coming from with the ‘unsafe’ thing?