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I grow weary of the violent terminology our kids bring home from school.

In our day, up north, if someone had a problem with you, they’d just say, “Shurrup or I’ll bray yer.”

But rarely did we take those threats seriously. That’s not to say we didn’t occasionally find ourselves pinned to the wall by our neck.

It’s just that words were relatively benign in those days. Or so it seemed to me, until one friend insisted that a singular threat was absolutely serious.

Today, though, the threats conjure up graphic violence, usually invoking a stabbing or slashing.

“If you do / don’t do such and such I will literally stab you. If you do / don’t stop, I will push a knife through your ear.”

Throwaway remarks we might say, if only teenagers and young adults weren’t casually stabbing each other with zombie blades, leaving a young man dead nearly weekly.

This is not exactly the environment in which we hoped to raise our children. We hoped for kinder expression of feelings, but it seems that world is long gone.

Prayers are all that’s left, hoping desperately that these threats remain words alone, spoken in frustration, never meant. What a time to live in.