One of the comments left on the previous post inspired me to write a kind of follow up post on words, but this time to discuss their power. Coincidentally, I had just started to ponder on this when I heard on the news about an appalling event that has had everyone talking for the last couple of days, and that relates to this topic. What happened is, somewhere in upstate New York, a bunch of middle school kids ganged up on a 68 year old woman who worked as a bus monitor, and while riding the school bus, verbally (and may I add quite brutally!) attacked her. Or to use the term du jour for this, they mercilessly bullied her, bringing her to tears. You can watch the video of such regrettable situation here:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l93wAqnPQwk&w=360&h=280&rel=0]
Bullying has become a major topic over the last few years, gaining national attention and media exposure since reaching the unfortunate height of causing children and teen suicides. Bullying refers to unwanted aggressive behavior than can be either physical or verbal, or often both, and usually refers to interactions between school aged kids. The term bullying is not commonly apply to interactions between adults, or even young adults, because at this point aggressive behavior, specially physical or repeatedly verbal abuse, can be considered a crime, either assault or harassment. Nevertheless, such bully behavior can and often happens also between adults. In this case, the issue that concerns me here is the verbal abuse side of it, no matter how old the involved parties are, and the power that words can have to be able to reach the status of abuse.
