I nominate "ass rot".

It's pretty silly how they love to rename stuff. Often for PC reasons, otherwise because they think it doesn't quite fit or has gotten a bad "reputation" as a word.

When I was at uni 10 years ago, our teacher economics dropped the word "businessmen" only for one of the few girls in class (computer science degree) to go "Excuse me, don't you mean businesswomen?". If you're one of three girls in a large class of over 100 men, the last thing you want to do, is poke your PC ass up in the air and make a big deal out of a word. The teacher basically ground her to a pulp after that - he was a very laid back guy but had some very strong feelings about PC, bias, etc. and proceeded to give a speech about how the content and meaning of words is more important than what it actually says in letters. How many words we use today, have different meanings from what they originally meant anyway and how we could throw away most of our dictionaries if we wanted the words to be more correct and accurate.

And he was perfectly right - many many words we use today, had completely different meanings 100-200 year ago. Society chooses the meaning of a word and if "businessmen" is considered to encompass women too just like mankind encompasses women, then why make a big deal out of it? Personally, I think replacing "man" with "person" to be daft. "Businessperson" sounds so lame not to mention layperson (yes they actually changed layman into layperson). "Say it in layperson's terms" say what?

Heck, Wikipedia is fighting a PC battle where a lot of common terms have been mutilated to become more PC. In the end, all you're doing is wrecking history and old words. Instead of words having a different meaning over time, they're just scrapped and erased and replaced with monstrous PC terms which I absolutely refuse to use.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfHCxIiZ_4M
Everybody sing along!
"Inflammation of the foreskin reminds me of your smile...

Indeed, I refuse to admit that he's in another band.
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. Mankind is derived from a completely different set of German words than businessman is. It's a common mistake that English speakers make in assuming that mankind is derived from the German word der Mann, when it's actually derived from the German word man, which is effectively the German equivalent of "one." As in one shouldn't do that.

Also, I've been in classes dominated by women and quite frankly, this is completely inappropriate behavior on the part of the professor. I remember sitting through an incredibly tense discussion on gender free language as the only man in class. The last thing that a prof should do when a class is that lopsided is chew somebody out for sticking up for themselves against perceived bias.

Is there reason for it to sound "less scary" in the first place? There are things people -should- be afraid of - atleast enough to find more info about them.

"Its just ______" -> one of the most dangerous things that can be said :D

Which is extremely stupid and annoying. They get that reputation because of what the word means or represents. Changing the word will just "damage" the new one the exact same way.

They used to call them STDs in the UK, but the acronym is/was also used for telecoms - s(ubscriber) t(runk) d(ialling) code which determines which part of the uk your phone sits in, so it was helpful when they changed it to STI

this.

Also, what different reptuation can a word connected to itching private parts (to say the least) can have? They will always have the bad reputation.

It's better to keep one name / term, because everyone knows what they mean. I never heard a word STI , and if somebody used that towards me, I wouldn't even know what's wrong with me.

Inaccurate, probably.

I don't understand why Weiland seems to have this habit of being kicked out of bands. He got kicked out of STP, then they took him back, then he got kicked out...then he got into Velvet Revolver, and had *that* band breakup...then he got *back* into STP and according to Wikipedia, got kicked out *again* after 2010. Good grief.

This is long, a tad interesting, but completely off topic. The change was for accuracy reasons, not "PC" reasons.

The problem is that the abuse of "PC-ness" actually ruins legitimate discussions about gender inclusivity and gender equity. I had a similar situation break out in one of my classes where several people (all male) – through no fault of their own – simply didn't fully understand the true importance of understanding gender in the classroom, and as a result felt attacked by others in the class.

I think such discussions are valuable, and there are some cases where being PC is actually very important...but people need to be reasonable about when and where to emphasize the importance of language. Kind of like our discussions about gamer "entitlement".

No, people shouldn't be scared of STIs, they should be well educated about them. People frequently don't go see the doctor when they're "scared" of something. If you see something that might be a symptom of an STI the proper and responsible thing is to go get checked before you sleep with anyone else (or accidentally spread it in other ways).

Most STIs can be cured, still, many others can have the symptoms completely, or nearly completely treated. Hell, HIV even develops into AIDS so infrequently if people have access to medication that record numbers of people are essentially living out their natural lives despite the infection.

So, again, no, people should not be scared of STIs, they should be educated about them, what activities expose them to risk of each type, what treatments exist, etc.
Exactly, disease is inaccurate, so the science types changed it. Oh those finicky science types, always wanting to be so accurate!:)