I finally read my old high school's 2022 banned words list and half of it is just normal words
My little brother is a junior at the same high school I went to in Ohio and he showed me the updated restricted language list they handed out this fall. It has 34 words on it and I am not joking when I say a bunch of them are just regular words nobody would blink at. Words like 'obviously' got banned because a teacher said it makes other students feel dumb, which okay I kind of get that one. But then they also banned 'whatever' and 'lazy' and even 'illegal' which makes no sense in a history class. I asked him how teachers even enforce it and he said kids get written up for saying 'whatever' in the hallway, which happened to 7 students just in September. The whole thing feels less about respect and more about making the rules easy to hand out as punishment. Does anyone else have a school that banned words you would use in a normal sentence, and did pushing back on it actually do anything?
I gotta say I kinda see where the school is coming from on this one, even if the list sounds nuts at first. Words like 'whatever' and 'lazy' do get used to shut people down or put them in a box, and that stuff adds up over a school year. The 'illegal' one is weird for history class though, I'll give you that. Where I disagree is the idea that this is mostly about making punishment easy, because I think a lot of these rules come from teachers who are just tired of the small digs that never get caught. The real problem isnt the list itself, its that they wrote it lazy and then enforce it on autopilot.