By now most of us have heard about last week’s most famous prom dress. Kezia Daum, a Utah teen, wore to her dance a red and gold Chinese qipao-style dress she picked up at a vintage shop in Salt Lake City. Kezia probably didn’t expect her tweeted pics from the fun night to become an international incident. But they did, all thanks to the world’s army of social justice keyboard warriors constantly surveilling their social media for violators.

Some guy on Twitter, Jeremy Lam, is of Asian descent and was triggered when he saw Kezia’s dress, promptly telling her that “My culture is not your G-D prom dress.” His profile picture shows him wearing a T-shirt and an Adidas baseball cap. So let me restate it this way. An Asian man, with the Hebrew-originated name Jeremy, wearing an American baseball cap manufactured by a German sportswear company, bullies a teenage girl for crossing a cultural boundary.

He didn’t walk into that one. He ran into it with the force of a thousand stallions — probably Arabian stallions — but with the self-awareness of an amoeba.

Lam’s feigned indignation was absurd, but he wasn’t alone. Well over 100,000 Twitter users joined the mob and expressed their support for his crusade against teenage girls wearing prom dresses from a different continent.

Hordes of American liberals were offended on behalf of all the Chinese people who weren’t. In fact, exactly nobody from the China was upset over this. While I didn’t previously know that some dude in the United States with a Twitter account was the guardian of Asian culture, it was rather unfortunate that in earlier tweets he dropped the N-word in a “thug life” kinda way. That seemed to diminish his status as the cultural appropriation appropriator.

In many cases, “cultural appropriation” is a made-up socio-crime fitting under the same umbrella of ill-defined rules and vague expectations as microaggressions, cry closets, safe spaces, and trigger warnings.

It’s defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “the act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture.” Let’s see.. taking or using things? What does that even mean? What implications does this definition have for a melting pot society? Can I still eat tacos? (I’m Swedish.)

Sometimes there are clear cases, like when a U.S. senator in Massachusetts claims Native American heritage for professional and political gain, but refuses to prove her lineage or submit to a DNA test.

Then there’s an NAACP leader in Idaho’s panhandle who for years made every effort to look black, but under her makeup was whiter than rice in a sugar bowl during a blizzard. Those — and clear ridicule of cultures, like wearing blackface — may not even fit under the concept of cultural appropriation; those things are just racist.

Earlier this year, super talented singer Bruno Mars was accused by YouTube activist Seren Sensei of appropriating black culture in his music — which combines funk, soul, R&B, reggae and hip-hop.

Mars’ mother is Filipina and his dad is a mix of Puerto Rican and Jewish. I’m not sure what kind of music you are expected to not sing when you’re Filipino-Latino-Jewish. And isn’t just about every music genre an amalgam and a borrowing from other genres?

Is music creation and performance requisite on the performer’s DNA? What’s the difference between being influenced by a music genre on one hand — and cultural appropriation on the other? Thankfully, numerous black performers swiftly came to Mars’ defense and praised both his talent and creative style. Sanity sometimes wins out in these things.

This is how I see it in the end, because I’m not going to stop eating tacos. We’re all on this big planet together. And there are a lot of us. And we come from different backgrounds many generations and centuries deep. And that gives all of us a lot of options! If you think it’s beautiful, wear it. If you like how it sounds, sing it. If we like how it tastes, then let’s cook it and eat it.

And for heaven’s sake, let’s just stop prosecuting people who praise a culture by partaking in it.

Associated Press award-winning columnist Neal Larson of Idaho Falls writes at www.neallarson.com. He is also the author of “Living in Spin.” He is a conservative talk show host on KID Newsradio 106.3 and 92.1, and also at www.kidnewsradio.com. “The Neal Larson Show” can be heard weekday mornings from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. His email address is neal@590kid.com.