When we were kids, one of the basic rules that governed our young lives, teaching us how to interact with the people around us was "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all". If you haven't experienced the cruel honesty of a child, let me be the first to tell you that children are ruthless. They say the first thing that comes to their mind without much regard for how it will make the other person feel.
That's why if you get around more than one child at a time, chances are eventually one will walk away crying that the other hurt their feelings while the perpetrator will not really see anything wrong with what he/she said and will probably have to be forced to apologize.
Or when you get around kids who are getting old enough to learn to express their opinions, you'll often hear a parent telling them that they shouldn't say certain things out loud because it "just isn't nice".
As we grew older, we learned that this unbridled honesty is not very conducive to a friendly atmosphere. We began to learn that even if something was true, maybe we shouldn't comment on it. Maybe we shouldn't always speak our opinions because maybe what we thought about something didn't really matter to anyone else - especially if it was going to hurt their feelings.
If we went to a friend's birthday party and didn't really enjoy ourselves, we would just say we had a good time because that's our friend and that was their party. You probably wouldn't tell your friend that she shouldn't have dyed her hair blonde after she already did it because you knew she'd be devastated that you didn't really like her new 'do. To be concise, we valued relationships and connections more than we valued brutal honesty.
Somehow, we've unlearned this basic skill and it's not too hard to figure out how. With social media giving us the ability to comment on literally anything we want we've started thinking that 'hey it's my account, I can say what I want'. "It's my opinion" has become the mantra of the flippant. And you can't tell these people they're wrong because "it's just the internet" and God forbid anyone is affected by disrespect on the internet.
It's word vomit. If you look up the definition to word vomit on urban dictionary it accurately describes exactly what many suffer from.
"The uncontrollable act of stating valid facts at an often inopportune time in conversation"
Word vomit is the perfect diagnosis for the simple reason that it acknowledges that though they may be valid facts if said at an inappropriate time or setting, it's still an inappropriate comment. The fact that Facebook asks "What's on your mind?" and other social sites give us the option to "comment" shouldn't make us lose our basic respect for people and situations by taking care about what we comment on and what we say when we do comment. This, of course, applies to in-person interaction as well (because hopefully, you do more of that than online interaction).
You don't have to develop a complex that makes you believe that just because you care about what you say, that you're censoring yourself. You can have all the opinions that you want-- you can even speak on them. But there is an appropriate time and place for everything. And just so we are clear, adding an "I think" to the beginning of your sentence or an "in my opinion" to the end, doesn't justify an out of line comment.
