The Language Drift
There are certain words that used to mean something very specific. They described real things, with real edges and real consequences. Violence meant force. Harm meant injury. Safety meant protection from real danger.
Lately, those words seem to be drifting.
When Words Start Doing More Than Describing
They’re being applied to more and more situations that don’t involve physical threat, bodily damage, or real risk. Disagreements are framed as violence. Discomfort becomes harm. Feeling unsettled becomes unsafety. Emotional reactions are treated like injuries.
I don’t think this is just sloppy language. I think it’s doing something.
When words stretch, the reality they describe stretches with them.
I did not like the language used in the Supreme Court. Even the justices casually adopted terms like “trans girls,” “trans women,” “sex assigned at birth,” and “cisgender,” as if those concepts are legally neutral rather than ideologically loaded. Language matters in law. It…
— MJ Murphy (@hothingsgirlsay) January 14, 2026
If everything is violence, then nothing is. If every unpleasant experience counts as harm, then harm stops being something we can meaningfully distinguish. When the same word is used for a punch and a poorly phrased opinion, we lose the ability to tell the difference between danger and offense.
That difference used to matter.
When Language Gets Ahead of Thought
Language doesn’t just describe the world. It organizes it. It tells us what kind of thing we’re dealing with before we’ve had time to think it through.
A few decades ago, if someone said they felt unsafe, you assumed there was a physical reason. Now it can mean emotional discomfort, ideological disagreement, or simply being around people who think differently. That shift might sound subtle, but it isn’t. It changes what people expect from institutions, from each other, and from life.
Discomfort used to be a normal part of being human. Now it’s treated like a malfunction.
When Framing Comes Before Facts
I notice this most when I watch how public arguments unfold. The emotional framing often arrives fully formed, before the details do. The vocabulary sets the stakes first, and the facts are expected to follow.
Once something is labeled with catastrophic language, the response becomes moral, not rational. You’re no longer dealing with a disagreement. You’re dealing with a threat. And threats justify reactions that would otherwise seem disproportionate.
That’s why this matters.
Not because words are sacred, but because they are powerful.
When Everything Is a Crisis
When language inflates, so do our reactions.
I don’t think most people are doing this on purpose. It feels more like a cultural drift. We absorb the language around us. We repeat it. And slowly, we start living inside a new emotional grammar that tells us what to fear, what to avoid, and what must not be tolerated.
It doesn’t make us safer. It makes us jumpier.
And jumpy societies don’t think well.
There’s an irony here that I don’t think we talk about enough. The more we use catastrophic language for ordinary life, the harder it becomes to respond when something is actually catastrophic. If everything is an emergency, then nothing feels like one. Urgency becomes background noise. Seriousness loses its weight.
Why Proportion Matters
I don’t think we’ve fully reckoned with what happens when our words lose proportion.
Because proportion is how people stay sane.
It’s how we decide what matters, what can wait, what can be endured, and what truly can’t. When language collapses those distinctions, reality becomes harder to navigate, and everything starts to feel sharper, louder, and more personal.
That might explain why so many people feel exhausted, anxious, and permanently on edge.
Not because danger doesn’t exist, but because our language no longer helps us distinguish between what is truly risky and what is merely uncomfortable. Over time, that confusion becomes its own kind of threat.
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