There is a difference between tortuous (full of bends and twists) and torturous (painful, pertaining to torture). Tell it to Derrick Jackson, a columnist for the Boston Globe.
In a piece about the recent gender flap set off by Harvard president Lawrence Summers, Jackson quotes Martin Luther King Jr.: "It is a tortuous logic that views the tragic results of segregation and discrimination as an argument for the continuation of it." Jackson then makes a very interesting jump: He runs with that word 'tortuous' and somehow concludes that Summers' un-PC views "torture women."
It could be a linguistic lapse on the part of Jackson and his editors, or maybe it's just a hopelessly weak pun. If it's neither, then Jackson is indeed saying that hurtful words equal body blows and worse. This is the path of reasoning once favored by radical feminists, extra-thin-skinned minorities, and other victimhood junkies: that if people use language you don't agree with, their speech constitutes violence. I didn't think anybody argued that way anymore, but — dreaded words — perhaps I was wrong.
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