So much of the English language already confused me during my formative years – what with Greek and Latin roots having different meanings, not to mention words that simply had no place except on the S.A.T.’s. Political correctness only made things harder by masking – or at least blurring – the real meaning behind words. To me, "hearing-impaired" meant somebody had trouble hearing. Not so. "Hearing-impaired" was apparently the long way of saying, "deaf" – unable to hear at all. "Partially-hearing-impaired" was the term I was looking for.

The confusion only increased when I got to college. I can remember editing a news package for the school TV station detailing the celebration of Kwaanza. The reporter’s initial instinct was to say, "Over a hundred African-American students came to the assembly." But we realized that with such a diverse international student body, it was highly unlikely that everybody there was actually American. To simply say "African" didn’t seem right either. We spent a good twenty minutes agonizing over this and asking the opinion of everybody who passed through the office. In the end, we decided that "black" was in fact the appropriate word to use – though we couldn’t help feeling a bit uneasy about it all the same.

I think to some degree, PC language has eased up a bit. I can say "blind, deaf, black, white," without getting a sideways look anymore. Most of the terms that survived the 90’s are used more to sound clinical and official in the media, rather than to avoid offending others. "Physically disabled" sounds more scientific than "crippled." "Lower-middle class" sounds more technical than "poor people." For the most part, the descriptive words used on the news are fairly neutral and academic these days. That’s why I can’t help but shake my head, laughing whenever a story comes on about a suicide bomber.

Whoa. Calm down. Let me finish. Obviously, suicide bombing isn’t funny (in the abstract sense), but the way reporters continue to describe what a suicide bomber does is kind of humorous when taken in light of current media terminology. It’s always the same scenario. The suicide bomber straps himself (or herself) with explosives, walks into a busy supermarket and… "blows himself up."

I’m sorry, but it just amuses me that the media has yet to come up with a clinical way of saying "blew himself up." Whenever a "regular" bomb goes off, they always say it "exploded." Of course, they can’t say the suicide bomber "exploded himself." "Induced explosion" maybe? I keep waiting for the term "self-detonated" to start showing up on the airwaves. "A man walked onto a bus strapped with explosives and self-detonated, killing twelve people." Sounds logical doesn’t it?

Yes, but only because I’m a product of the 90’s. Even though I made fun of the whole PC thing right along with everybody else, the fact is that that language eventually permeates you. You begin to think in the words you hear every day. All throughout the last decade, the powers-that-be desperately tried to neuter any term that caused any group to stand out from the rest. Several hundred years of guilty European-conquest forced us to make sure old connotations wouldn’t cause any group to be unfairly judged.

If suicide bombings had been as prevalent during the PC boom (sorry, unintentional pun) as they are today, I’ll bet even this group would have been protected by our language. If every week, a religious zealot had been blowing himself up in a marketplace, killing a couple dozen people in the name of God, I’m sure certain groups would have demanded that we not refer to the situation with such biased language. We’d probably have heard stories about ecclesiastical devotees walking into local merchandising districts and self-detonating, dispatching twenty persons as veneration for their deity.

Would we care so much about the situation in the Middle East if the events were described politically correctly? Would we even understand what was happening over there if the media talked that way? Certain acts should simply never be politically corrected. As far as I’m concerned, people who think it’s a good idea to blow their bodies into millions of bloody, pulpy pieces certainly don’t need protection from us – much less from our language.

As for me, as much as I chuckle at this shift from the typically sterile media language, I’m glad that reporters are still saying that suicide bombers "blew up." For that matter, I’m glad that terms like "suicide bomber" and "terrorists" haven’t been sterilized either – be it to sound professional or non-offensive. If I were to ever actually hear a reporter or anchor using words like "self-detonate", I’m pretty sure I would change the channel and never go back. Hopefully we’ll never allow ourselves to get so desensitized to death that we would choose to protect the murderers over the victims.