"robber" is one of over 1000 words and phrases in english that the pakistani telecommunications regulators deems undesirable and that will be blocked in text msgs.*
makes sense to me. i think it is worthy of not only emulation but expansion because it's good to be more careful with words. people use colors in vague ways, for example so i vote that we decree all use of color-related words as undesirable, even undemocratic. people say baby blue when really they mean sky blue and then there are the complete misfits who do not know the difference. this is confusing to everyone so let's just eliminate all color words and let everyone just form their own mental picture of what something looks like without the intrusion of someone interpreting a color. messy or neat are other highly subjective words that lead to ill will and therefore should be banned. in fact, adjectives in general lead to gross misunderstandings and should be abolished. your big is my average size, your obese is my fat, and so on and so forth. nouns too specific and have become pretentious as well as misleading. somebody refers to their briefcase vs their bag vs their purse and you wonder how many words they are going to put in your face that day. it's all very passive aggressive. let's just all agree that these objects are all bags and let the other words go as they are just cluttering our daily lives and disturbing the zen-like state of simplicity in which we normally live. so only top of the noun charts survive, all these other words are unnecessary and do nothing to improve the quality of life. perhaps a committee of highly paid federal employees should be commissioned to study the whole word thing with the goal of reducing the dictionary to just 1000 or so essential words. i like that. think of the implications -- schools wouldn't have to go on and on and on for years teaching vocabulary, you could knock those lessons out quickly if the dictionary weren't so huge. i mean big. and really the committee can decide whether we stick with big or large; hard or difficult...but really we can just choose one and everyone agree to use it. the possibilities, as our wordy friend voltaire might say, are endless.
*http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2011/11/censorship-pakistan
