While I am sympathetic to the feelings of the mother who was watching the Super Bowl half-time show with her daughter when they were both mugged by the now-infamous tidal-wave of vulgarity, I cannot agree with her that the episode constituted "cultural terrorism". Nor can I agree with Siberian-Canadians who complain that the policy of educating their children in residential schools constituted a "cultural genocide".
All that claims of "symbolic rape", or ""virtual holocaust" or "cultural Chernobyl" tell us is that no sexual intercourse, mass murder or nuclear meltdown actually took place. Nouns like genocide, holocaust and terrorism are powerful words, absolute in their meaning, and they cannot be usefully augmented by the addition of adjectives. In fact the use of such qualifiers to score rhetorical points diminishes language as a whole, in much the same way as advertisers have debased the meaning of words such as "fabulous", "stupendous" or "incredible".
Failure to heed my warning will inevitably result in a syntactical chainsaw massacre.
Posted by Dexter at February 3, 2004 12:27 PM