In this current era, where we've all too often moved beyond mere political correctness, and into a genuine and lucrative industry of Perpetual Offense, there always seems to be certain buzzwords and buzz-phrases that come into and/or go out of vogue. A few I can think of are stalwarts, such as proceeding any of those dreaded, multi-syllable 'ist' or 'ism' bullets with 'systemic', 'inborn' or 'inherent'.

All too often, I've seen such buzzwords and phrases used to shut down and indeed nip in the bud any and all honest debate. Likewise, such words have often served to shift the traditional argumentative onus to the other side. Essentially, it is no longer up to the arguer/accuser to prove the wrongness or guilt of the other party. The wrongness and/or guilt is now taken for granted unless and until the accused party can somehow prove their innocence, and often not even then.

I've always been a fairly liberal person from a social perspective, but the last decade or so has served to put those beliefs under increasing strain. The latest buzzword, which I have come to despise is the term: 'microaggression', which is all the rage right now, but which actually traces back as far as 1970, when it was coined by Chester Middlebrook Pierce, who is currently the Emeritus Professor of Education and Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

And just like all buzzwords that have become trendy, they also tend to be joyfully thrown onto the euphemism treadmill (c.f. my previous piece "Age of the Treadmills").

In this particular case, the Euphemism Treadmill has now rolled far enough that the definition of microaggression has greatly expanded from its original meaning of: "specific interactions between those of different races, cultures, or genders (that) can be interpreted as small acts of mostly non-physical aggression," so that it now is often used to refer to anything that makes someone else feel 'uncomfortable', up to and including disagreeing with their opinion.

Indeed, I've seen it taken so far as for some folks to say that disagreeing with their opinion is not only microaggression, but is actually 'showing them hate'.
So I think it goes without saying that this is a deeply didactic and often quite satirical piece that some folks won't get.