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Comment by anon373839 | Hacker News Reader

> Reading texts? That's borderline abusive.

I’ve noticed a trend of people using increasingly dramatic language. Words like “abuse” and “harm” are being tossed around to describe conduct that really deserves blander words.

I’ve also noticed a kind of social feedback loop happening, where people hear these exaggerations and then come to believe they are victims of “abuse” when, really, someone was just rude.

Anyway, I don’t think reading your kid’s texts qualifies as borderline abuse. I’d reach for a word like “strict” or perhaps “overbearing”.

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This is kind of meta, but you're taking issue with the descriptive term I've used and implicitly dismissing the possibility that we simply disagree on the severity of the transgression.

If I said a 63 degree room was freezing. That would be an exaggeration and misuse of the term and you'd be objectively correct in pointing that out. But in the case of how severe the transgression is - we can only use descriptive terms as it's not quantifiable.

I think it's far worse than rude and is controlling in an abusive manner. Reasonable people can disagree on that and we likely do. But, declaring that on I must be misusing the word seems like a distraction from that.

> implicitly dismissing the possibility that we simply disagree on the severity of the transgression

I do think we disagree, and very fundamentally. I wouldn’t personally characterize this even as a “transgression”, much less abuse. Depending on the kid’s age, I’d even call it responsible parenting!

Nevertheless, I doubt you believe monitoring your children’s texts is truly adjacent to burning them with cigarettes, molesting them, humiliating and calling them names, and so on. This is what “abuse” used to mean.

My pet theory is that this escalation in language has been part of a social feedback loop, where people have become more sensitized and less able to cope with relatively minor nuisances.

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