#BanBossy

I'm going to start out by saying I almost never watch the news, and I'm awful at keeping up with current events unless they pop up on my newsfeed or bloggers are talking about it. So today when I'm actually in the loop, I actually have a lot to say. 

Anyway, today I heard about the campaign to ban the word bossy from young girls vocabularies. Personally, I was always painfully shy so I have never in my life been called bossy. Even though I have no personal experience with this, I never thought of this as a problem. Sure, I definitely thought of some of my friends growing up as bossy. I mean what else do you call the girl who dictates every movie you watch and the games you play at a sleepover? But what about the girl who's filled with thoughts and ideas that she can't help but express? Is she bossy too or just confident? 

This campaign is centered on the idea, that the word bossy is a barrier to women taking leadership roles in the workplace. While I do think that if a girl is called bossy over and over from a young age she'll be less likely to think of herself as a good leader, than someone whose confidence and brilliant ideas have been encouraged, this campaign may be taking the issue a step too far. 

Banning a word from girls vocabularies in school may be a little bit too much. While the word bossy can be falsely used, it's also an accurate description for some people. It would be a shame to encourage this time of tyrant behavior in girls who are simply abusing their power. Some kids are gifted with extroversion should they be allowed to walk all over the introverts? Just because a handful of children are wrongly called bossy are we going to allow the rest of the oppressive children  believe they are doing something right? 

Can we really try to shelter children from the reality of human nature? Even if all of the school age children are freed from bullying and name-calling, they will still have to come face to face with these dilemmas as adults. After all, we never really do leave middle school. 

While this campaign has good intentions, I think it may be entirely too unrealistic for this society. 

Also, we can't simply ban a word just because it have negative connotations. How many thousands of words in the english language are negative? Are we going to try to ban them all?  

Check out this article from Time on other attempts at word banishment. 

What are your thoughts? Share them in the comments below!