You might not walk into Mrs. Boyer’s journalism class and expect to be in a scene out of 1984. Yet, the yellow poster on the right side of the wall, listing the “banned words” of this classroom, brings up memories Big Brother’s Newspeak, the language designed to control thought and expression. Words such as “diddy,””rizz,” and “fiend” are exiled from the class vocabulary, while students whisper-perhaps, using a forbidden phrase-rebellion.
The reasoning? Mrs. Boyer states that words-often slang from TikTok, are overused, inappropriate, and annoying. While her aim may be kind of clear for the sake of being professional in the classroom. Censorship does feel right to some and especially me. It’s like we’re being policed,” one anonymous student said, looking over at the word wall. “First it’s slang, next it’ll be adjectives.” It calls to mind the 1984 doctrine of dictating speech to dictate thought. If you eliminate the word for something, can it be at all?
Mrs. Boyer isn’t destroying history, but she’s definitely destroying culture-or at least the culture of Gen Z. Students secretly compete to say banned words without Mrs. Boyer realizing, the whispers of some kind of resistance, it’s like rebellion, is hard to suppress. The thing is the wall of banned words is more than a classroom gimmick; it is a reminder that the language is always in a fluid motion and may be attempted to control. After all, as Orwell warned, the harder you try to eliminate something, the louder that something becomes.
