All the little kids I know call the plastidecor salmon color that I used to call flesh color as a kid. They do not have to self-correct or go through a re-education process. Simply, they have learned it that way, just as most say bazaar to refer to the shops that almost all their grandparents still call the Chinese and they have a hard time assimilating the generic masculine plural. You say to a P4 student: “We will invite all the boys to the birthday party” and he will most likely ask you: “And the girls?!”.
Words mutate, expire and regenerate, how obvious. It is not necessary to sign up for every lexical fashion if one is not familiar with it, but whoever is left alone with the old words will find themselves out of the game, like a child who asks another for a flesh color and finds that he does not understand him. When you come across a new concept, in a conversation or in an article, a natural reaction is curiosity and some embarrassment. What is that and why hadn't I heard it before. Another reaction, less healthy and less productive, is to get angry. I don't know what this is, but it looks wrong to me.
I was not surprised to see the deputies of the PP and Vox overreact to a term, rape culture, that feminism has used (and discussed) since the seventies, but it did seem regrettable to see Meritxell Batet make Irene Montero ugly by using an “inappropriate” expression and even remove it from the session log. And it has been even sadder for me to see columnists and journalists, who are supposed to have a good command of the vocabulary of the areas that stress us, discover a fairly simple concept fifty years late. Nothing would happen if the thing had stayed there. It's never too late. You could google and find out things. For example, that blaming the victim for her clothes or her behavior – as the Xunta campaign that criticized the minister literally did – is part of the culture of rape, that you should not be a rapist or justify rapes nor stop condemning them to participate in the culture of rape. Not knowing how to name the present is unfortunate, but bragging about that lack is even worse.
