You know, there is a theory, that kids growing in sterile environments have really shitty imune sistems and prone to all kinds of ilnesses.
I think the same goes for the emotional environment and we are starting to see the results of this, I'd call it "knee-jerk ethics". It works like this: there is a list of words, which are triggers, and the default action: to feel "offended". Whatever that means. Why is it bad? Because it "outsources" ethics, removes emphaty and understanding and messes up semantics. Astonishing number of people are quick to yell "rasist", "sexist" at anything even remotely related to race of sex, no matter the context and the amount of real rasism or sexism (which my be zero).
If anything and everything offends and abuses you, well, go cry in the corner.
Hey now--some words are in the linguistic toolkit precisely because they create offense. I would almost call it "fiat offense"--there's nothing offensive about these words, beyond the fact that we, as a culture, have agreed to react in an offended manner to them.† They can thus be used to "color" your language to make any statement seem offensive and lower-status, when that is your goal.
† The proof of this being that different cultures choose wildly different things to be offended about; nobody in America thinks "bloody" or "tabarnac" are offensive, even though we understand exactly the concepts to which the words refer.
Indeed, in fact in English it is interesting to note that words of Germanic origin are more likely to be viewed as crass than words of French origin. The word infernal in English is almost never considered rude, but the word hell(ish) can be, obviously not as much these days as it used to be. To really see this effect in motion go have a look at what the middle English equivalent of the word vagina is.
