Fragility's Triumph

When I was a boy (admittedly a long time ago now), if anyone taunted me, I would intone, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Indeed, that is what we all said in such circumstances; how we learned to do so I cannot remember, but I suppose that the saying must have emerged from the general culture around us, since we did not make it up for ourselves. As far as I recall, insult was neither very frequent in, nor totally absent from, our social intercourse.

As manners have coarsened, so—seemingly paradoxically—vulnerability, or the claim to vulnerability, has increased. The least expression which somebody finds disobliging is now treated as if it were a real sock on the jaw. You are bullied if you think you are, you are discriminated against if you think you are, you are insulted if you think you are: no objective correlative is necessary to prove it. We are all eggshells now, and consequently walking on eggshells.

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