That term, "canceling," has become central to the present-day debate over the consequences of speech and who gets to exact them. It has ascended from minor skirmishes on Twitter to the highest office in the country, and it actually mirrors a cultural conversation that started three decades ago.

"This is a power struggle of different groups or forces in society, I think, at its most basic," says Nicole Holliday, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. "And this is the same case with political correctness that used to get boiled down to, well, 'Do you have a right to be offended if it means I don't have the right to say something?' "

The idea of being "politically correct," having the most morally upstanding opinion on complicated subjects and the least offensive language with which to articulate it, gained popularity in the 1990s before people on the outside weaponized it against the community it came from — just like the idea of "canceling" someone today