Language policing
The cascading effects of clipping words out of the dictionary
When I used to keep a diary as a teenager, there were some entries I felt incapable of writing. I had some thought, or some half-formed emotional impulse, but I literally could not shape words around it. Nothing I wrote conveyed the idea properly. Sometimes I'd result to single words repeated in a loop, or even scribbles, to get my point across in lieu of finer-textured words. Writing, on net, helps you make your thinking clearer, but the words have to be there in your mind first. They have to come to you before you can use them.
The more words you have, then, the better. Not just in a damn dictionary. I will never understand the people who don't bother to learn vocabulary because they can just look it up. Yes, you can go look for new words anytime—how will you know when to? How do you know what to search? The absence of a word you don't already know doesn't stick out to you like a gap in the tooth; it just feels like you're groping around for a way to say something that isn't there in your mind. It feels like stumbling around in fog, writing words and erasing them because nothing is coming out the way you want it to. And words build upon each other associatively. If you're writing and you don't have certain vocabulary words, it's not as if you'll just write around the blank spaces in your mind where the words would be. Your whole sentence will be generated differently. Missing one word leads to a kind of knock-on effect where you don't just erase that word but whole avenues of free-association after it.
When I tried to write those non-starter diary entries, I was a decent writer but there were still whole swaths of descriptive information that were completely underdeveloped in my mind. I lacked the words to describe what I saw and felt, except when I saw others describe the same thing. Their descriptions, their ways of phrasing it, settled into my brain and became part of my lexicon. The way you put something into a description will have slight differences from the way somebody else does, and when you focus closely on those differences, the information you find can expand your mental world. Reading about something from many different angles will give you new ways of looking at it, obviously, but not just that: you'll carry those perspectives with you later on, and be able to use them as lenses to see the world differently.
Whatever I come up with, my interpretation and my view and my descriptions, can be made so much richer by hearing another person's interpretations. You can see things you never even thought about before, just by listening. And by reading when people write out their thoughts. I love to read other people's writing; I think it says a lot about them.
Language is learned over years and vocabulary builds up like sediment. The way somebody speaks and writes, then, is informed by decades of interacting with the countless sources of language they've encountered in their life. As much as you reveal from what you’re trying to say explicitly, there's even more information in what you focus on and what you shy away from; the tone and cadence of your sentence, hurried or calm; and the things you ask of your audience, the things you expect them to believe.
And if you write more, you'll surprise yourself with the things that you can draw out of your mind. They'll come to the surface unheeded; unbidden. Wanting to be told.
Our thoughts are shaped by language, and taking away parts of the language can remove whole trains of thought, which are fragile and easy to derail. I've said before that if an idea is good enough, if it grips you hard enough, you'll keep circling back around to it, sometimes so much that it becomes a kind of motif in your life. But it's hard to explore an idea if, even though it occurs to you multiple times, you run into that roadblock of "No, I shouldn't think or talk about this," or that roadblock of "I shouldn't say these words," even if the “saying” in question is done fully internally, in your own mind. All thought stops after that line. There's a reason thought-stopping cliches have arisen in the sorts of communities in which exploring certain ideas would damage their cohesion.
If someone shouts you down for using a word, in an internet comment or in a hushed side conversation where the tone is "hey, you've done something very bad," it sticks with you long after they've finished saying their piece. You start turning over in your mind what their motive could be, and whether your speech was really so harmful, and you begin to consider toning down your language or removing similar words that might offend someone as well. This can get into your head even if you yourself aren't the one offending people, too. Watching someone's ideas be censored can lead to you censoring yourself. You become your own censor, far before your words reach any kind of audience that might be tempted to clip and prune them.
And when you self-censor, you begin to self-censor even when no one WILL read your words, like in a private journal. You flinch away from the words you might have otherwise used, and it's at the speed of the mind: you don't get the chance to ask yourself about it, to consider the decision, to say "Hey, no one's watching me, so why don’t I use those words that might otherwise get me in trouble?" The decision is made in a split second: the word is bad, so the word gets cut. A flinch happens, and it cuts off a thought, like pruning a branch that might otherwise have blossomed.
Our minds are affected by the words we read and the words we see censored. The words we read become the words we write. So what happens to the words that we see censored, scrubbed out on purpose by other writers? Well, they become the things we feel like we shouldn't say.
I guess if anything at all helps, it's getting comfortable with saying things that feel transgressive, even if they aren't. If you're embarrassed about something innocuous (e.g. your height or a skin condition) and you purposely force yourself to think and write about it, or if you believe you'll be punished for something otherwise minor (e.g. a person raised in a relatively repressed household beginning to write about sexual topics) and you choose to write about it anyway, you start to practice resisting self-censorship. If you're used to ripping off the band-aid and writing about things in a very direct way, or if your writing is always a little edgier or a little more controversial than you're fully comfortable with, then it just might prepare you to expose yourself to things you'd flinch away from.
For what it's worth,1 it's still a good idea to stick to the rules of basic politeness in a conversation. If someone doesn't want me saying "god damn" around them or calling things "retarded," sure, I'll respect that. But if I start restricting myself from calling things god-damn retarded in my own mind, I'm nursing a bad habit. That's when it's time to ask what other thoughts I might be shutting down.
And I feel like I have to put this as boilerplate when the subject of language policing comes up, on the off chance someone in the comments feels like stirring the shit with a well-placed "so you're saying we should go around calling people slurs in the name of resisting censorship?"