Esther's 2018-2019 Playlist

Honesty has become a fun game that people like to play. There is somehow a great joy in attaching people to a lie detector and asking questions to see whether or not they tell the truth. We sometimes talk in a sarcastic voice to see if other people will pick up on the fact that we are only kidding. We pull pranks on people where we say that we no longer want to be friends or text song lyrics in order to elicit a response from the opposite side. Then we simply tell them that it was just a prank or that it isn’t the truth. For a society who highly values the truth, this is quite ironic. The events listed are examples where people are deliberately dishonest and find it amusing to do so, and this is actually accepted as a form of entertainment in our society. Like Steven Pinker says, “hypocrisy is a human universal”. While it is implemented in our culture to be truthful people, we wittily follow this virtue. According to our thinking, we are still honest people if we perform dishonest act...

When I look at the fact that some people think that changing “women” to “womyn” or “waiter” to “waitron” will help prevent inequality, it baffles me. Don’t get me wrong— I do believe that we all should work together as a society to end these issues but placing limits on our language is definitely not an effective solution. Some words are inherently racist, I understand, but I feel like the root of inequality in terms of language is because we decide to abuse it, not because it is wrong in its nature. Our language was first created to communicate with others and to express ourselves. It’s a platform that we use to relay our ideas and to connect. We’re able to control it freely to our liking and this freedom wasn’t a given; it was fought for. I think when people claim that certain words shouldn’t be used because they could possibly offend someone, it’s being taken to the extreme. There will inevitably be people who will use language to hurt and offend others but as a result of this, ...