Sticks, stones and words.

I remember a lot of people when I was in HS starting to turn the "sticks and stones" thing on its head, claiming that bones may heal but emotional scars last forever... so it turned into "actual violence is meh, words are the real threat".

It's the kind of thing that sort of sounds right -- cause sure, sometimes words hurt -- but there's no way to make that argument really make sense, because there's a direct 1:1 connection between physically assaulting someone and the pain/damage they will experience as a result while there is no such direct connection with words. The words that hurt you are not going to be the same words that hurt me and vice versa. Some people are fragile and get hurt by everything, while others are barely affected by anything. The exact same words might hurt when said by a friend won't mean anything at all when said by someone you don't know.

It's also possible and relatively easy to train your mind to become less fragile by just exposing yourself to more ideas, more conversations, pushing yourself to really grapple with your own ego & personality, and then focusing on humility and gratitude, you can make yourself largely impervious to being seriously "hurt" by words -- whereas a broken bone is... well... a broken bone.

I'm not sure who really kicked off that meme, but it was all wrapped up in the anti-bullying crusade that started around the same time, and now we have taken all of that so far younger people can't really handle any kind of criticism at all and we've allowed people who really should feel a sense of shame to have none at all.