I’m a huge defender of free speech but there is one word that I think is used way too much today that minimizes the horror associated with it.  The casual use of word “Nazi” has become too far imbedded in our daily lexicon.  Everything from the “Soup Nazi” in the famous Seinfeld episode to people tossing the word around when describing a trait about someone they don’t like, it makes me uncomfortable when I hear it.

Some examples are if maybe a teacher is a strict disciplinarian, a student might say “Man, she is one frickin’ tough Nazi.”  Or if someone complains of police abuse, they might throw out a line like “It was like I was in Nazi Germany, man.  Those frickin’ fascists make me sick with their Gestapo tactics.”  Maybe someone, after being chided for grammar, will blurt out “What are you, the Spelling Nazi?”

I won’t chide anyone for using it in a sentence but I’d prefer if people didn’t.  This is coming from someone who is guilty of using rather crude language.  It just makes me cringe that we’ve glossed over what the Nazi party represented, part of which resulted in the genocide of over 6 million people.  If I’m watching the History Channel, I expect to see references to the Nazi regime.  But if I’m watching some mindless show on a cable channel, the last thing I want to hear is some ill-informed idiot making a stupid comparison where the sentence ends in “…like a Nazi”.  Hey Clueless, try to expand your vocabulary and stop referencing a trivial entertainment-related anecdote with one of the worst regimes this world has seen.