If Everything Is ‘Trauma,’ Is Anything?

>> The phrase “semantic creep” has been used to describe how the meaning of words change over time. What we’re seeing today, according to the psychologist Nick Haslam, a professor at the University of Melbourne, could be called “trauma creep” — when the language of the clinical, or at least the clinical-adjacent, is used to refer to an increasingly expansive set of everyday experiences... But as words gain useful new meanings, over time, they can also lose precision.

A similar semantic shift might be seen with the term racist. It's my impression that what used to be a term reserved for blatantly discriminatory and prejudiced behavior has shifted to the point where it might be applied to someone who holds a political or economic view that clashes with the person declaring them racist. It sucks the power out of the word, in a way: when being labeled racist once meant something, now it is thrown around so often that it is just another term of abuse.

Every generation changes the meanings of words and thus degrades it to the eyes of the older ones (ie "literally", etc.). I think with the internet this process accelerated, and now some important words such as "trauma" are used for wildly different experiences, as the article states.

The more interesting point, which is also in the article, is whether we are sort of glorifying emotional responses nowadays. It certainly feels that we are promoting victimhood as a quality, and that the zeitgeist now favors those who scream louder rather than those who internalize their feelings.

archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20220209184644/https://www.nytim...