> What the cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker has artfully termed ‘the euphemism treadmill’ is not a tic or a stunt. It is an inevitable and, more to the point, healthy process [...]
> The crucial thing is to be able to step back from our instinctive reactions to the way such words sound to us now [...] and to realize they’re steps on an escalator, moving slowly but inexorably
Is this an ironic attempt to demonstrate notion of the euphemism treadmill, by renaming it to an escalator?
Because escalators and treadmills are kinda the opposite of one another.
With an escalator you do nothing, and get to where you want to be.
With a treadmill, you expend lots of energy and get nowhere - and if you don't expend the energy, you get flung off the back.
It depends on which way you're going on the escalator! Since we started with treadmills, and then switched to escalators, I just assumed the author had in mind a person walking up the down escalator.
This misses the main point of the euphemism treadmill - to teach every new generation how horrible the previous generation is for daring to use words that were standard when they grew up, and surely everything will magically become better once they all die off.
I wonder what the author would think of the fresh cycle of euphemism derived from platform algorithms, like "unalive."
You cant unalive an idea . . .
. . . but you can euphemize it
Many social media websites do not allow discussions about violence, or self-harm. Some have automated bots scanning for words like, "murder", "suicide", "gun", etc. Because it can be very difficult to avoid mentioning those topics in conversations about things like history, social media influencers started using alternate words and phrases, like "unalive" for murder or suicide, and "pew pews" for guns (imitating the sound children tend to make when they're pretending to shoot guns). [0]
I've seen this on YouTube, especially around the Ukrainian conflict. Many creators are saying things like "became KIA" instead of "were killed" or even more euphemistically "loud noises were heard at XYZ location" instead of "XYZ was bombed".
Perhaps related in the sense of being self censorship of restricted topics, although not liguistic, is the recent trend of firearm-related YouTube channels showing disassembly but not assembly. Of course assembly is mostly just disassembly in reverse, but one is permitted by platform terms and the other is not.
Yep, internet censorship drives the creation of a whole lot of modern euphemistic slang like unalive, grape, pdf file... You take them as just being workarounds for having discussions online - but then you start hearing people say them in real life and realize they've actually entered the general lexicon.
And I don't get it. If the intent is "we do not want people to talk about death", then surely the filters / censors would cover all different spellings and euphemisms of it as well?
I'm 99% sure the organizations that do this - tiktok, roblox, etc - are well aware of the users' attempts of euphemizing around the filters, so they are OK with it. That, or it's from higher up but the legal whatsits can't keep up.
It's the advertisers that don't like discussion of death near their adverts. So services can say "we don't monetise content that mentions death" and then their algorithm downranks that content because it's unprofitable
The advertiser's objections must be implemented with actual words since the semantic layer is not yet computable. Maybe an llm could associate "die" to "unalive" and treat them the same way for the purpose of advertiser demonetization; time will tell and as censorship tightens the circumlocutions will broaden.
The irony is that "unalive" has its origins in the currently-trending character Deadpool. There was an episode of the 2012 animated series Ultimate Spider-Man in which Spider-Man teams up with Deadpool to take down a criminal. Deadpool then casually discusses his plans to "unalive" the criminal at which point Spider-Man says "Unalive... you mean kill him?!"
Deadpool's fourth-wall awareness (which manifests in-universe as mental illness) enabled him to know that he was in an animated cartoon series, but he was applying the standards of animated series from the 1980s and early 1990s, in which death was not discussed and the topic was avoided entirely. Sometimes the baddies spoke of "destroying" or "eliminating" their opponents, but never killing them. Ultimate Spider-Man was a more mature series released in a time when we thought we'd moved beyond such standards-and-practices nitpicking in the name of "protecting the children" but... apparently we have not. New media (YouTube) provoked new moral panics and the cycle repeats...
There is a saying "Some people have 10 years of experience. Others have 1 year of experience 10 times." The euphemism treadmill can be a tool to accomplish that.
Ummm... that's PoC to you, and conveniently it now covers all of "the others".
Frankly, I think these are developed by HR so that they can more easily write inoffensive copy without considering their bias or the audience. Most people I've worked with know whether they're black, indigenous, european immigrant, ESL, partially blind, suffering from PTSD, paraplegic, etc. The problem is that those things are just too specific to quickly gloss over in an anonymous uninformative screed. Easier to have a catchall phrase to abstract and dehumanize the issues.
Wait, Indians and Asians are not in BIPOC?! I thought it was a union of the adjectives, not an intersection. Like LGBT you know, you don’t have to be all of them to be LGBT. TIL
Uh oh. I’ve been using it wrong for a while, whoops.
They are considered BIPOC. It stands for Black, Indigenous, or Person Of Color. The term is intended to be inclusive of all groups who are not white while recognizing that, in the states where the term originated, Black and Indigenous communities have suffered uniquely and systemically.
Note: I am not saying that it achieved those goals or that it's a good or bad term, just explaining the intended understanding.
> and conveniently it now covers all of "the others"
Yeah that's because they're different things.
Some things refer to POC, and some to black people, and some to indigenous people etc.
You can still say black, brown, south Asian, what have you. But if you need to refer to all non-white people, you say "people of color". Which makes perfect sense to me.
There's also the rare situation where guarded euphemisms abruptly vanish off the end of the treadmill without a successor taking over.
This lengthy 2018 video on the phenomenon [0] discusses two examples, where:
> When "Illegal Immigration" comes up [...] one of the candidates says he wants to tighter the border because "Mexico is sending us rapists and thieves." I'm sorry, what? What just happened!? [...]
> Now they're talking about "The War on Terror" [... ] but then that same candidate pipes up that, if elected, for the sake of security, he wants to create a "Muslim registry" and--what the hell is going on? [...]
> The guy seemingly tanking his candidacy by appealing to extremists is the one who finally secures the nomination. You realize with some shock that in each of these cases you are witnessing the death of a euphemism. The death of a euphemism is a rare celestial event. Politicians only let a euphemism die when they don't need it anymore. This does not imply good things for Mexicans or Muslims.
Isn't that just normal not-using-the-euphemism for exactly the reason somebody wouldn't - to not try to hide the offensive idea behind it? Same way if you wanted to insult a handicap, you could call them a cripple.
The point is that that is only possible in an environment where such hate has become possible where it previously wasn't. Regardless of your opinion on euphemisms, that is not a good thing.
It's not a good thing to not want rapists, thieves and terrorists entering your country? Pretty much every country has immigration restrictions that aim to stop those kinds of people and catch a lot of innocents with their broad classifications. The US has a visa-waiver program to enable easy access to people from western or developed countries. No doubt it's because those people are lower risk. It's not hate to trust Singaporeans more than Russians.
That's a neat video but I think that usage of euphemism is a little different, based on how they used it in the video. I'd call that more of a "dog-whistle" - you use a term like "war on terror" because your base understands that you means you hate muslims and would like to stick them all in a death camp, while the establishment can still go on CNN and not have to answer questions about "muslim registries". But yeah its kind of hard to relate to previous eras of politics when shit like this mattered to most people.
George Carlin has a great bit on euphemism where he makes the case that euphemisms are used to soften the meaning of things that are painful to the point of being meaningless, e.g. shellshock -> ptsd
Initialisms in common speech are the linguistic equivalent of a code smell; people are right to react negatively towards them (and the appropriate degree of negative reaction increases with the length of the initialism in question).
I was talking about spoken language, not the existence of initialisms per se. Though I'd wager they are a lot more prevalent in written American English than in most other languages as well. Nobody else would think of inventing an initialism-euphemism for body odour (which I guess already is a euphemism for "smell" for example. Or "significant other".
By the way, QED is just a calque from Greek. (Like most things Roman...)
Funny, when I was born and grew up outside the US it was very common there too. Perhaps you'd like to scope your claim down to a specific group of people who find it annoying?
Again, that might work fine for veterans, but not for victims of peacetime rape and horrific accidents who have similar symptoms. The syndrome needs a common name, like: he has “the horrors”.
That is exactly the definition of a euphemism. It’s a synonym that is less harsh or blunt.
I doesn’t have to be a negative thing either. PTSD is more inclusive, since it doesn’t imply that you’ve literally had bombs dropped on you relentlessly, like shellshock does.
Is this a bit? Who says this? Its hard for me to believe that you genuinely hear a statement that means, for example, that being ADHD doesn't make you bad it just makes you different but interpret it to mean that you have to ignore that you find them intolerably messy and also marry them for some reason.
You're still allowed to form opinions about people and your mutual suitability based on their traits! Obviously! This isn't difficult.
You're doing it again. The point of contention is that it doesn't mean a person is bad. Its like you're 13 in a red state and just read Harrison Bergeron for the first time.
Some traits are mostly-negative traits. That's just the nature of life. I'm fat/obese/overweight/slow/thick/plus-sized/curvy. It's a negative trait I have. Someone referring to me in that way can be fine, or it can be stigmatizing. The word used doesn't really affect whether it's stigmatizing. If it's being used to insult/put me down, it's stigmatizing. If it's used descriptively it's not.
If I say to someone to "make way for the blind person walking there" I'm not attacking them, but trying to help them navigate a crowded area safely. That's true regardless of whether I referred to them as blind, unsighted, vision-impaired, differently-abled, or anything else. Similarly, If I were mocking them I'd be stigmatizing them regardless of the word I used for it.
No, its not. I have lived through this most recent shift and I can tell you going from ignoring mental health in the hopes that it will 'make you be normal' to talking about how we experience the world and offering each other reasonable accommodations has been pretty nice.
I thought there was recent evidence that shellshock actually was pretty distinct from modern ptsd, where ptsd is psychological and shell shock was just nearby artillery mechanically disconnecting your brain cells
FWIW, I dated a psychologist for a while, and we talked about this specific monologue.
She primarily worked with sexual abuse victims, but spent a lot of time veterans as well. Her focus was PTSD, and talk therapy is really effective for PTSD.
Her opinion was, in world war 1, They didn't really have the psychologic or physical frameworks to really distinguish. Certainly, some people had mechanical damage, like football players. Certainly, some people really had a hard time experiencing the horrors of war. They just didn't really know.
Calling it shell shock, that helped some of the veterans. Helped them sorta get that they're not alone. People have dealt with this for a long time.
Rape victims, shell shock isn't a great name. For a lot of reasons.
It's kinda about recognizing that this trauma is a real thing, there's nothing wrong with you. This is a normal reaction, everyone goes through it. Some people need a little help finding their way back to normal.
In retrospect it’s likely that a lot of the people diagnosed with “shell shock” would today have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury rather than (or possibly in addition to) PTSD.
It's important to note that WW1 was very different from preceding wars; people spent weeks, months in the trenches, always on edge for incoming artillery or chemical attacks. The only thing that comes close is sieges from back when, which were its own kind of shit.
It can be useful to cycle through words for concepts that are stigmatized, if only so you can use the new shibboleth that means "I have no ill will or prejudice against the concept", but it's still annoying to see no progress be made on destigmatizing the underlying concepts. That's where my ire lies. Not with the new euphemism per se but the admission of defeat.
Well, what the new shibboleth actually means is “I have expended more effort keeping up with the current vocabulary than other people. And those people are bad for not having spent that effort.” The intent is not destigmatisation but counter-stigmatisation.
If you frame changing vocabulary as a shibboleth that point of view is inevitable, but that doesn’t make it accurate. This is a view of other people on the same spectrum as accusing them of “virtue signaling”, and is equally worth ignoring.
Not only are accusations of "virtue signaling" generally a sign of a conversation not being worth my time, I'll even go a step further; I think there's a genuinely useful phenomenon where some takes are so common from people I consider to be trying to discuss in bad faith that someone not even being willing to pretend not to have them is a legitimately useful way for me to filter out conversations that wouldn't end up having any value for either side, and this honestly does seem to fit the meaning of "virtue signalling". If I'm tacitly asking for "virtue-signalling" by not being willing to discuss politics with, say, relatives who have binged too much Fox News over the past decade, then so be it.
I know its a bit of a tangent, but its wryly humorous to me that someone referring to something else as "virtue signalling" is, in itself, a way of signalling some specific "virtue" (an incredibly negative and gross one) wrt. the way they think about the world.
Its quite useful, means I can safely ignore any opinion they have on the topic at hand.
Oddly, despite probably disagreeing with you on many things, I think you might be right here. Interacting with people with very different world views does tend to make maintaining a simple black-and-white world view a lot harder and bits of grey will start to contaminate it.
The phrase itself discredits the very idea of someone acting virtuously by implying any such thing is simply done to fulfill an ulterior motived. It is used with great frequency because it is a simple and easy way to discredit someone who says something you dislike.
The absurd part is you are acting like everyone who uses that phrase has casual access to the interior life of absolute strangers: if it isnt a myth and the only reason someone wouldn't point it out is politeness the it follows that you know their motivations.
Virtue signaling isn't the same thing as being virtuous.
For example, many thinks that saying "I have many black friends!" is just virtue signaling by someone not very virtuous, and that is often called out. The virtue there is to have those friends, ie not being racist about who you choose to be friends with, the signaling is that you say you have black friends.
See the difference? And I bet you think that someone saying "I have many black friends" is more about signaling than being a virtuous act in itself. Many people signal that way, words are cheap actions are not.
What I don't get is why nobody says "stop virtue signaling" to those people, because that is what they are doing. Virtue signaling is absolutely a real thing and people do it everywhere, regardless of political alignment etc.
The phrase doesn't discredit the idea of virtue. Virtue signalling captures a thing that has low cost (like saying one word instead of another) and limited actual virtue.
Of course, people can try to smear genuine virtue by calling it mere virtue signalling. Philanthropy might be called mere virtue signalling by some, even though it does materially benefit people. But I think most cases are more clear-cut.
> Its quite useful, means I can safely ignore any opinion they have on the topic at hand.
Speaking of an incredibly negative and gross "virtue"—this growing trend of people actively seeking to identify members of an out group who they can safely ignore is disturbing.
Once upon a time we actually tried to understand even our opponents, if only so we could beat them in the debates. Now we're so confident that we're right, they're wrong, and right makes might that we don't feel the need to attempt to understand them even to debate them—we just throw meaningless insults at each other and win elections based on who can drum up the most fear of the "incredibly negative and gross" other.
The solution of course is to come up with a new word for "virtue signaling" that doesn't give people that repulsion reaction.
I have to say though, when I see people using popular buzzwords, it shows me they're not really thinking and are just LLM-like regurgitating what they've been exposed to.
> this growing trend of people actively seeking to identify members of an out group who they can safely ignore is disturbing
It depends, some people are radicals. For example, if you think climate change isn't real that's not even an opinion. That's just... not true.
Someone who's perception of reality and reality itself are so misaligned can't be understood. Because their position doesn't come from understanding, it comes from emotions. Typically fear of the unknown, hatred, or maybe they're just dumb (dumb is the least likely).
After a certain point, it crosses to the delusional. After a certain point, they're just crazy.
I don't listen to the man on the corner yelling about the bugs under my skin that signal to aliens. Because that's crazy.
Nor do I listen to "5G microchip in the vaccine!! Plandemic!!" type people. Because they're just crazy people.
The problem is, and I don't know exactly why, but that category of person is expanding. Rapidly. My own family has fallen victim to it. And now I can't ever reason with them because their minds are so forgone they're living in an alternate reality.
How do you handle being corrected? It's ok to not keep up, if someone is like, "heads up, that term is more considered offensive. You might not have known, but here's the updated one"
If you are like, "oh, shoot, didn't know, I'll try to remember that" then most folks are pretty chill.
It's only when someone is like, "it's too fucking hard to remember the current term every decade I just want to use the term that offends people because I refuse to update a pointer in my memory!" That people generally get edgier over.
I mean, ageism is absolutely real. As is cognitive decline (which is a legitimate disability). But also, there's a difference between "I'm trying and failing" and "I'm not trying". I give the former camp way way more leeway.
How about "it's truly unfair of you to expect me to try to keep up with the latest language changes into my 70s, and you're at least as capable of learning to understand generational language gaps as I am of keeping up with the latest shibboleths?"
I think you'll find I'm consistently willing to be forgiving of people across my comments here.
The only moderately strong objection I'm posing is to the characterization of language evolving as a shibboleth.
My grandad used to use a bunch of WW1 era slurs. Constantly. They were just language to him. I never got angry, I just let him know that if he used those slurs, people would have a perception that he was unwilling to believe in equality. He didn't realize and he tried, not because I said he was bad, but because he wanted to.
If you want to not keep up, that's fine! But language always changes. Whether it's yeet, sus, aura, brat, or disabled, the use of words is going to change.
So, if you choose not to change with it, you will eventually, accidentally, make someone who is keeping up feel hurt. That's not evil or bad. But at that moment, how you respond is something you can control -- talk to the person, share with them how it was unintentional, listen about how they felt. Explain to them how you feel about trying to keep up. Learn from one another.
Getting angry because inter generational language gaps exist is like getting angry because someone bumped you accidentally. Accidents are gonna happen, it's how we get together and give each other grace and listen that matters. Don't assume every bump of a passing stranger is an assault.
I think you might be reading my posts believing that I'm disagreeing with you, or that I'm insisting the new language is the only acceptable language. I'm really not.
> the characterization of language evolving as a shibboleth.
When I showed up at my most recent job I used "you guys" once and immediately regretted it. Things got awkward for a second and then someone in the group constructed a sentence that allowed them to use "folks" and place the emphasis.
I adapted, but if that's not a shibboleth I don't know what is.
What was the negative consequence you experienced from that interaction (genuine)? Did you follow up afterwards to understand why someone chose both the language they did?
You gotta be pretty sensitive to consider momentary awkwardness a consequence when someone blamelessly and passively corrects you.
How do you reckon that they were judged here at all? This is a level of transgression roughly equivalent to mispronouncing someones name for the first time, I can't imagine anyone else even remembering this incident aside from OP and even they may only remember because the human brain reserves 10% of its space for reliving minor faux pas.
That isn't a shibboleth because it doesn't mark you as a member of their group. It sounds like a simple preference against gendered language (or maybe the default masculine, idk).
Using the word 'head' to refer to the bathroom would be a shibboleth.
Side note: I find that preference odd because I come from a context where 'you guys' is neutral, but ultimately view it as a deficiency in the english language.
What about "this is not worth trying"? One thing people in bubbles like this forget is that for them, learning is easy and effortless, but there's a giant cognitive underclass (often aged) who have limited mental resources that they are much better off dedicating to real problems like dealing with that mold problem they've allowed to fester in their bedroom. Imposing a new norm on your engineering team is a very different thing to imposing a new norm on say, all of McDonalds or an entire society.
It can be pretty hard for non-native speakers to keep straight even the outdated term that they studied in their textbooks. Let's not make things harder for the people who are already struggling with language, just for the sake of showing off that we are all up to date on the same memos.
If someone is using a term maliciously to express real prejudice, I'll call them out on it. If they are just communicating using the terms they know for the same concept that a newer term now exists for, that doesn't strike me as a reason to dock any points.
I've never once met a group. I've only met people who are members of groups, and they are rarely unanimous about the words that should be used to refer to members of the groups to which they claim membership.
If I can manage not to forget your username, hungie, then I will try to remember not to call you "differently abled". But please be patient and forgiving of my confusion if, between now and our next conversation, I encounter a third individual who insists that I never refer to them as "disabled" and instead call them "differently abled", and my memory for which of you preferred which term fails me. Forgive me doubly if you're both in the audience at the same time when I'm giving a presentation about installing a wheelchair ramp, and struggling to come up with a mutually-satisfactory term. I already struggle enough with names alone, such that I often decline to use them out of anxiety of making a mistake!
You've got my forgiveness in that situation! That would be a tough one!
I don't think most groups are unanimous in self describing, but I do think there are general trends. We know, generally, that certain words aren't ok! Plenty of slurs we avoid, even ones used by in groups in a reclaimed way.
I don't think most reasonable people expect perfection. I spend a lot of time in disabled and queer (and disabled queer) circles, and I've primarily observed people expressing preferences, not anger.
This is true, but don't forget that (especially for socially-anxious individuals), anger does not have to be expressed to be perceived! And that when the burden of expressing oneself becomes too high, people may prefer not to express themselves at all. Everyone has their own internal threshold for this, some are set surprisingly low, and often the people who decide to stay quiet have the views we most need to hear.
Some people will cheerfully adapt their language and continue without missing a beat; others will feel deeply ashamed and embarrassed, and simply shut down out of the fear of making a mistake again. There are all sorts of people, and the burden of language weighs differently on each.
Yep. Like I said, I hang out in a lot of disabled spaces. Many of those disabilities are invisible (social anxiety is super common).
There's not a great one size fits all solution, so I push for grace and I push for understanding. Two people might have mutually impossible to reconcile experiences with language. I believe if we assume good intent from others and attempt good intent towards others, we'll clear many, many situations with a minimum of harm to all.
Me too. This is why, as I said earlier, I don't correct people when they use outdated euphemisms, unless it's clear that they're deliberately using them as put-downs. (And in that case it's more the attitude rather than the language that is the problem).
(Anyway, cheers! You seem like the kind of person I'd enjoy hanging out with in person, even if we disagree on things. Sorry if I seem like I'm just posting rebuttals; text is a hard medium).
I agree completely. It is a real shame that nowadays so many people do not assume good intent, or if they do, they value the intention much then the Deliverance. There are definitely a small number of people that intentionally use terms that others may find distasteful or offensive, but the vast majority of people are not trying to do that. They are just using the words and vocabulary with which they are familiar.
The more time goes on and the more experience I get the more cemented this becomes. The best example is the expression you guys. Nowadays that expression is fully gender-neutral and is routinely used to refer to a group of mixed gender individuals. Some people can feel excluded by the term, and for that reason I do often try to substitute a different term for it, but many of the women I work with use the same expression of you guys even when referring to a group of entirely women. I strongly wish that most people would hear that and not think of a gendered reference. I think that would radically improve communication.
If there is doubt about what the person meant, sometimes a clarifying question can be extremely useful. For people that are trying to use offensive or exclusive terms, it is good to push them on that a bit and ask for clarification and such. But I don't think I've met anyone who was using the term that way in many, many years.
Yeah, "you guys" is a fascinating case. I happen to be non-binary and autistic, so it's one that causes me a minor mental stutter to hear.
I absolutely never assume ill intent. But it does cause a cd-skip mentality for me, so I usually privately tell people. "Hey, heads up, you guys causes me an unfortunately unavoidable mental hiccup. It's not major, and I recognize it's common language. If it's low cost to you to use an alternative, awesome, but I don't want to cause an even bigger hiccup for you."
My goal is always to share the impact, and to be open to solutions that might include "nothing changes". I assume people would want to know they are unintentionally having that impact and also that I'm not going to roast them for using a very very common expression.
I get a big mental hiccup when trying to reference a group and am fearful to use the wrong terminology in case it causes offence / hurt / outrage.
I never mean malice, and it’s especially bad when a term changes and isn’t even fully agreed on by the group it refers to.
Like a Pavlovian dog, this kick of anxiety actually feels like it estranges me from groups rather than brings me closer (my intention) because of the fear I have of making a miss-step.
> I've only met people who are members of groups, and they are rarely unanimous about the words that should be used to refer to members of the groups to which they claim membership.
The problem of "determine what group X wants" gets even worse when we go online and the people whose words we read are now not randomly sampled from the group, instead being the tony minority who care enough to campaign about it online (or those who arent even group members but campaign for them).
I know what 'nerf' and 'grammable' mean because they're obvious, but I won't ever think of using them. The rest I honestly have no idea about. I really don't care about fashionable language.
Your disinterest is ostentatious to the point of itself being a fashion statement.
Also, 'nerf' and 'grammable' are obvious? I know what nerf means but neither are in any way obvious. I think you've got some unexamined ideas about language that have more to do with the words you learned as you were coming up than any principled or aesthetic reason.
> Your disinterest is ostentatious to the point of itself being a fashion statement.
Which part of what I said was unwarranted?
> Also, 'nerf' and 'grammable' are obvious?
If you know the brands, the verbs/adjectives can stick easily.
> I think you've got some unexamined ideas about language that have more to do with the words you learned as you were coming up than any principled or aesthetic reason.
I think you have problems understanding why people say what they do.
Your problem is you are seeing this behavior as inherently about point scoring. Stop it. And please don't make this about ESL struggles, it's disingenuous to make this about that.
If you see someone performatively policing language feel free to call them out on it. Unless I missed something though I don't think anyone is asking you to pull a shift as a language cop, or otherwise 'dock points'.
> And please don't make this about ESL struggles, it's disingenuous to make this about that.
Can you explain why this struck you as disingenuous? ESL struggles are a daily concern for me and the people I know.
As for being a language cop, I have no interest in doing so; I'm more concerned about the people who find themselves on the receiving side of feeling policed. When I say "that doesn't strike me as a reason to dock any points" I'm talking about my ideal that everyone will behave in a non-language-policing way. In order to avoid sounding lecturing or critical, I often refer to myself when expressing how I hope other people will behave too. ("When crossing the street, you should look both ways" --> "When crossing the street, I should look both ways"). It seems you interpreted it rather differently than I meant, which just goes to show again how clear communication is already hard for all of us.
>> Can you explain why this struck you as disingenuous
Certainly! In essence because shifting euphemisms are a drop in the bucket of learning a language, the challenge is already present because words are always shifting in meaning (do you remember when 'figuratively' and 'literally' swapped?) and in my experience people give a lot of grace to non-native speakers. This made it feel like concern trolling to me.
As for your other point I believe I understood you, but in the absence of a specific example of language policing to analyze I think I should let it drop.
I object to the word cishet that you used early, strongly. From my point of view it seems one particular crew is declaring that there need to be all these new words, and I don't agree that these are the people who get to decide that. Consider me a Blood, and I'm not accepting words created by the .... wait, respecting your wishes, I mean, consider me a Crip, and I'm not accepting words created by the Bloods. Come talkin that trash, we'll pull your card, knowin' nothin' in life, but to be legit, don't quote me, boy, 'cause I ain't said shit. Thanks, Eazy-E, couldn't have said it better myself
Sure. What word do you prefer to mean "heterosexual, non transgender person". The word cishet is just a combination of some (Latin? Greek?) prefixes, but if you'd prefer a different descriptor I'm happy to make the effort on your behalf.
For others, who may not be aware, cishet is a portmanteau of cisgender heterosexual. Cis being the opposite of trans, Latin prefixes for "the side of" and "the opposite side of". Transgender is therefore just "the opposite gender" and cisgender is "the same gender". (These prefixes are commonly used across science.)
Most folks are aware of homosexual (same sex attracted) and heterosexual (opposite sex attracted), which are the Greek prefixes for same and opposite.
Maybe you are one of today's lucky 10,000 who didn't know where that term originated! (https://xkcd.com/1053)
Sure, I haven't heard that before but I could see it. I wouldn't be surprised if others made that connection too. Would hetero cisgender person be better for you?
> What word do you prefer to mean "heterosexual, non transgender person". The word cishet is just a combination of some (Latin? Greek?) prefixes, but if you'd prefer a different descriptor I'm happy to make the effort on your behalf.
I'm half convinced the parent isn't serious, but since you asked: I prefer to not be labeled at all. If you have to pick one, I'd prefer something closer to "neurotypical"—a word that effectively communicates that my sexual identity is defined by existing comfortably within the herd of the 90%+, not something that I've actively shaped or given much thought to.
Aside from the fact that the pronunciation is... hard... "cishet" doesn't fit me because it labels aspects of myself that I never stopped to notice until well into adulthood and seems to give them greater importance than I actually assign to them. It feels a bit like putting a name tag on my left elbow introducing it as "Bob".
So a sort of null -- gender or sexuality aren't things you consider much, so you haven't really assigned any labels to yourself. I think that makes sense.
I've seen people use "gender or sexual minority" to describe lgbtq+ folks, so maybe you feel better described by "gender or sexual majority"? (Which I think is a judgement free expression of percentage?)
I am not the parent comment, but I would also refuse to give you a label. The very request is disagreeable, not whichever label it is that you use.
In all ways I am how I was born, and I have no desire to have that impact who or what I associate with or how I associate with it. I have to deal with these things when it is obvious to peoples eyes how or what I might be, I have no desire to add to it with intangibles. This feeling should hopefully be familiar to you: It should be the feeling you have when you are in the minority in any way considered important by those around you or those you care about, but especially so when it is not relevant to most of anything.
My relationship with non-gender-related aspects of myself follows this same pattern: Autistic or not, ADHD or not, I have no desire to be categorised as neurodivergent, neurotypical, neurospicy, or any such term. These are epithets all and the use of them when discussing specific others, even when benevolent, is almost always in a way that serves to other. And they are terms that will almost inevitably be used as deliberate insults.
Downthread, you mention that you call yourself queer but you would reject that label when applied to you by others. I cannot help but think that your feeling there is similar to a number of other people's feelings about the parts of their identity that they do not wish to label; I do not wish to label myself, so please do not label me.
There are others who may wish to identify with a group or a label because it is a part of their identity, and because that label comforts them or softens the edges of how society may treat them or whatever it might be. For most of those who are objecting to the cishet label, I suspect you may find that it has almost always only been used in their presence to discount them or their opinions. This is not the fault of the label, but its intent, for many. There is no trick of semantics that you can pull to strip the label's fundamental semiotic purpose, which will inevitably be used for scorn, as always.
What you are asking, in this case, is to put people on the treadmill.
>I've seen people use "gender or sexual minority" to describe lgbtq+ folks, so maybe you feel better described by "gender or sexual majority"? (Which I think is a judgement free expression of percentage?)
I can't (and wouldn't attempt to) speak for anyone else, but the label I use is Nobody9999 (okay, I use my actual name, which isn't any of your business -- consider that, as it's important here).
I don't broadcast my gender, sexual identity or personal sexual proclivities unless it's relevant in some way. This conversation, for instance -- my gender identity (whether it matches the hardware I have or not), what sorts of people/animals/objects/concepts hold my sexual interest, and/or what sorts of things I like to do with those, are completely irrelevant to you in this context.
And they're not relevant because my use of language doesn't depend on what sort of anatomy/identity I may have, nor does it depend on who or what I want to exchange bodily fluids with (assuming that's something I find sexually satisfying -- and I'm not saying that at all, just using it as an example) and in what way I wish to do so.
If we meet down the pub/on a dating site/at the laundromat/museum/washboard concert/etc. and I chat you up or vice versa, perhaps those things might become relevant.
But until that time, it's none of your damn business and I find your focus offensive. Please don't.
It was raised because I was describing myself as queer, and how that word is an example of the evolution of language. However, it's not a word typically considered appropriate for use by non queer people.
People objected to the word I used for non queer people, so I asked for alternatives that people would prefer.
So it is directly related to the topic and the linked article, but only from the standpoint of in vs out group.
It's not that I care what you (or anyone else) calls themselves. Whatever you (or anyone else, for that matter) choose is just fine with me (not that I have any say in the matter, just clarifying my point of view).
As I said, I don't speak for anyone else, so others ("people," as you put it) may well have objected.
I object not to the terms themselves, nor to others who choose to use those terms for themselves. Rather, I object to those terms being applied to me, and even more, that it be demanded that I use those terms to describe myself in this context.
You specifically asked (as I quoted, so it would clear, but I guess not) "maybe you feel better described by "gender or sexual majority"?"
And I explained that such labels/terms aren't relevant in this context, and that I find your focus on those labels/terms in this context to be irrelevant and your continued demands for folks to participate in your verbal strip tease (i.e., acquiescing to being outed -- which is what you were doing), when someone's gender identity and/or sexuality is irrelevant to the discussion.
IMHO, it was an offensive and obnoxious thing for you to do.
If you're still not clear, I'd be happy to explain (again) why invading the privacy of others (in a public forum, no less!) is objectionable.
It's not that I care what you (or anyone else) calls themselves. Whatever you
(or anyone else, for that matter) choose is just fine with me (not that I
have any say in the matter, just clarifying my point of view).
As I said, I don't speak for anyone else, so others ("people," as you put it)
may well have objected.
I object not to the terms themselves, nor to others who choose to use those
terms for themselves. Rather, I object to those terms being applied to me,
and even more, that it be demanded that I use those terms to describe myself
in this context.
I'm not interested in what terms you'd use to describe yourself. I'm interested in what term you would use to describe the group of people who are not transgender and not homosexual.
Your own identity is not necessary not germane to this. I had used the term cishet, without any judgement intended, and some objected to that.
A Venn diagram exists, people told me not to label one section cishet, and I'm asking "if not that, what label should I use instead?"
The problem is that the question itself implies belief of a system that many people do not buy into.
It's like saying, what type of Christian are you: practising or non-practising? A question that disregards the fact that many people don't consider that religion to be an accurate model of the world in the first place.
The correct analogy would be, "I'm a practicing Christian, but you don't call yourself that. What would you call the group that doesn't call themselves practicing Christians?"
I'm not asking "are you a twink or a bear" I'm asking if you belong to a group that doesn't identify as homosexual. If you think homosexuality is evil, you probably can still acknowledge that some people do identify themselves as homosexual.
Your point only exists for an extremely narrow group of people who deny that people identify as trans or homosexual. And for those folks, I'd probably have a separate conversation about, "you might consider it amoral, but you know there are people who call themselves gay, right?"
I think that the conflict here is that you are asking which term nobody9999 prefers to be used to describe a group of people similar to them on a certain set of axes, whereas it seems that nobody9999 would prefer that there not be such a word because they'd prefer not to be grouped on that set of axes at all.
On a personal level, this reminds me of my own struggle to identify with the term "agender". At best, it's not incorrect. But it describes an aspect of myself that feels irrelevant to whatever context it's brought up in, almost to the point of being a category error. I am currently wearing a black shirt. Does this make me a black-shirt-wearer? Well, yes, but this tells you nothing about who I am. Better to describe me on a relevant axis: I am an engineer. I try very hard to be kind to everybody no matter what I think of them. I am an optimist. I enjoy sour beers. All of these are more relevant than asking what gender I identify with, because the fact of the matter is, I don't.
Extrapolate that to the disagreement between you and nobody9999 if you find it useful; I may have misunderstood the debate or nobody9999's point entirely and make no claim to represent their views.
I'm trying not to assume nobody is in or out of the group. But I think it's fair to say that the group exists and to ask if the term for that set isn't cishet, what other description would they use to describe that set.
I'm not interested in asking nobody9999 to share any details about their own identity, just asking them how they'd label that section of the Venn diagram.
Neurotypical refers to brain stuffs though, it's mainly used by the people within the neurodiversity communities (think autism, adhd, etc) to identify those outside of it; I don't think it communicates gender or sexual identity at all. But likewise, cishet is mainly used by the LGBTQ+ community to identify those outside of it.
Either label is probably wrong, of course. That said, I understand why labels / identifiers are used and needed. One thing to point out though, rejecting labels like cishet can easily be construed as "I'm normal, no need to label me", which in turn means you see other gender- and sexual identities as abnormal, which is the core of the problem.
(I'm making loaded and generalised statements, nothing personal to the commenter I'm replying to)
The main issue isn't the label, but that people perceive a label as a slur or an "othering", which is hurtful.
Nothing! Straight is also ok. But it's orthogonal to cis-trans. Like, you can be a straight trans person or a gay trans person. Or a cis straight person, or a cis gay person.
Isn't a new word. It's just the sort of most prolific, "default" position of human so we don't really use it because it isn't relevant.
Heterosexual is a word, cisgender is a word, and both are 100% accurate descriptions of MOST people. Since MOST people are both of those things, we have cishet.
"Why does this exist?" you may ask.
Because sometimes we need to refer to the minority - as in, people who ARE NOT both cisgender and heterosexual. Or sometimes we need to refer to people who don't face societal challenges around their gender/sexuality - those people are cishet.
I think the fact you think gays don't have the authority to "create" words is weird. Um, why not? Why don't you want to use them? Will something... bad happen to you or is it more so an out of spite thing?
Also neither cisgender or heterosexual were created by the gays. Both created by cishet people. People just put them together, boom, cishet, easy. Not a new thing or cause for concern IMO.
Since you used the rather telling term ‘corrected’:
You have several comma splices, just as many missing commas, some dubious capitalisation and a missing full stop or two. I personally find sloppy punctuation offensive but I don’t usually point it out. How do /you/ handle being corrected? These rules change a lot less often than once a decade.
Now, you may not like prescriptivist grammar, but if you don’t, I’d like to see how you justify one form of prescriptivism and not another.
And if you don’t like how I picked on your choice of a single word in your post: That is the behaviour you’re defending.
I type on my phone, apologies. I try to take corrections with grace. If you've got suggestions that would clarify or corrections to my language that would remove understandings, please share them.
I'm not bothered by your post! Genuinely. I find it takes all types, and if there's a way I can improve to be better understood, that's a language win for me. I level up when corrected.
I get the point you're trying to make, but I'm fairly sure you don't normally get this offended at punctuation, you're playing it up to prove a point. Quoth the Wiki:
>When one becomes frustrated with the way a policy or guideline is being applied, it may be tempting to try to discredit the rule or interpretation thereof by, in one's view, applying it consistently. Sometimes, this is done simply to prove a point in a local dispute. In other cases, one might try to enforce a rule in a generally unpopular way, with the aim of getting it changed.
You're trying to apply prescriptivism consistently to the point of absurdity. In turn this causes you to reply to people who hold genuine views with a bad faith exaggerated offense at punctuation, just so you can illustrate your point, and that turns a genuine discussion into a something much less interesting.
At first, that new term is not just the "updated term" that everyone knows is now considered less offensive.
At first it's partly activist, and when you adopt it it means that many people won't understand you, think you're criticizing their use of the previous term, or think you're probably activist on other topics too, when you think you're using a normal, neutral expression.
So most people are sceptical and wait with adopting new terms until they're widespread.
> heads up, that term is more considered offensive
The passive voice thing always gets me here. It omits who is doing the considering. It's not like some word suddenly is offensive. A small group of people decides the word is offensive and then they either succeed or not at dragging everyone else along with them.
"Is considered offensive" lends it a gravity that it doesn't deserve if you translate it: "some people whose opinions you may or may not value consider xyz offensive".
That's a good call out. I do try this in practice, e.g., "some members of the Inuit community are pushing back against the term Eskimo, because it's an exonym"
Excuse me but I don't feel I can be a courageous and outspoken ally while remaining silent on this issue, so this is just a polite lesson since you appear to have some internalized ignorance. Using the term "shoot" as an exclamation is very insensitive and triggering particularly to people of color and refugees. I'm almost certain this was not intentional on your part, so in future be better, like me.
The morally virtuous new term that the experts have decided is the correct replacement is "golly gee willikers". Please use it.
I'm sorry someone hurt you. And I'm sorry you think I am the same as whoever they are. I think your anger is aimed at the wrong person, but I hope you are able to introspect and examine these feelings and find peace in the future.
I assure you I'm not making a fuss. I'm genuinely sorry that you've encountered people who were so strong in their insistence that they left you responding so emotionally to someone on an internet forum.
True. My actions here are extending empathy towards you, and to consistently express that the empathy is genuine.
Responding as strongly and as angrily as you have suggests that someone in your past was needlessly rude or over correcting, and it's made you put up some walls.
"Moron", "idiot" and "imbecile" are all terms which at one time had specific medical definitions concerning intelligence -- and none of them are nowadays considered remotely as offensive as the word "retard".
Why?
(That you don't see any of them in official publications doesn't count for much in my opinion. Official publications try to avoid all negative emotive language.)
Moron, Idiot, and Imbecile were coined as precise medical terms by Dr Henry H Goddard in the 1900-10s. Retard(ed) was devised as a euphemism to replace them in the 1960s.
Once an unfashionable euphemism falls out of use, people gradually cease to recognise the offensive meaning which made it unfashionable.
I don't speak English everyday. When I'm speaking with someone, I usually don't care what their disability is, or their sexual preference, or their mental illness. I don't have the ability to learn all the new euphemisms every time somebody decides to move the social cheese.
If someone gets offended because I was looking for the cheese where it's traditionally been, then they can enjoy the offence that they imagined. Even if I went to the effort of consulting a dictionary before every communication it could not be updated quickly enough.
Might be kind of hard to "destigmatize" the underlying concept behind the various ways of saying someone isn't very smart.
The general tendency of most people to favor the in-group probably also provides enough of an underlying reality to make it hard to "destigmatize" the various ways of calling someone part of the out-group.
Not if only they do it, no, but concerted and widespread effort has destigmatized things. For example, how much did TV shows and films depicting interracial relationships (I'm thinking e.g. Star Trek) do to normalize interracial relationships? Gender, sexual identity, racial issues, etc are all actively considered and discussed nowadays in most layers of society; if it was still stigmatized, there wouldn't be a discussion about it.
This seems to miss one of the key roles euphemism plays (and why it courts controversy) it is interventionist and draws attention to a pattern of thought in order to get you to think differently about it. Part of the role a phrase like “differently abled” plays is to estrange your base assumptions about disability and to signal the existence of and your membership in a group of people concerned to change the conditions around disability (note that this is not the same as signaling “virtue” although it may do that as well—what I’m talking about is the construction and renewal of group identity around a social project).
Accordingly, you need new words whenever the old ones become standard, since at that point they no longer serve the estranging/interventionist role.
What you describe is pretty much straight virtue-signaling. And as a disabled person, I can tell you, I need nothing of it.
Especially this "your membership in a group of people concerned to change" part, which is virtue-signalling at its best.
I have NEVER met someone using alternative language like "differently abled" who actually did something substiantial for the community or for a particular person. Almost all cases have a touch of patronisation.
I need nothing of it. If you cant call me disabled, you are part of the problem, not the solution.
Suffering... I could tell you something about suffering, but I leave it at that.
Lets suffice that I find it pretty funny that you, a non-disabled person, tries to tell me that the way I prefer being called is "old-fashioned" and "bigoted", therefore invalidating my own preference.
I let this stand as it is. Readers can decide who is bigoted here.
Besides, its nothing new that non-disabled people tell the disabled how things are supposed to work. Thats called patronisation. And you are a great example of people I really dont want to be around.
I didn't know that that was the definition of "polyamorous"? To me this was always a meaningless word, a label for a labels sake, but I didn't realise that it was also a euphemism.
I remember a few years ago someone posted a link here to a guy that had built a clever off-road wheelchair so that people with disabilities could enjoy hiking, and some people got upset with him because he used the wrong euphemisms.
Its a curious form of signalling that appears common amongst the American users of this site;
I recall one such poster getting upset over the word 'Chinaman'. Something this Englishman, sharing an office with two Irishman, a Frenchman and a Dane, found rather bizarre, particularly as the chap complaining was not Chinese themselves!
Such virtue signalling is at its worst when used to pile-on a speaker or post for uttering some perceived slight, or daring to suggest an unpopular idea or political view. It is bad for open discourse, even open society, and needs to stop.
As someone who isn't American but grew up in California in the 90s, I find myself often explaining American public behavior to others who are baffled by it.
As I see it, the US - the first place with a supposed egalitarian bent on the cosmopolitan society - created a system whereby people from all backgrounds and ethnicites could interact in the public sphere without tripping each other's emotional wires - that is the basis for Political Correctness. Keep your baggage at home, and out in the real world and in the market you can interact with everyone as equals (so, Mike Munger's "the answer is trasaction costs!").
The system worked pretty well for a time (fine, it's called the 90s). The problem is that the edifice kept on being built up, as more voices raised more touchy subjects that needed to be sanitized in public, enough that it began to bother people. I think that as alternative means of communication allowed people to more be "themselves" in the digital, if not real, public domain, the discrepancy between public discourse and private thought became more glaring.
Now, for every system, there are those who naturally like to uphold norms, and these are the ones you say are "virtue signalling" - I think they're just norm upholders. But for the rest of us, it takes only one euphemism that hits us the wrong way to get us questioning the whole over-built edifice.
The fact that one political side arbitrarily took it up as a cause, of course, made the other side all the more dogmatic in its application.
So it will be eventually torn down and replaced by something identical and the cycle will continue anew. ~fin~
Not a native speaker, but while I would not have reacted, it is strange to use a term some negatively connoted instead of "Chinese man".
I think the Englishman comparison is not very smart. With the same logic, it's fine to use pedophile to refer to someone because it's grammatically constructed similarly to audiophile and no one never complained when associated to the word audiophile. I don't think a pejorative word (recognized as such in all modern dictionaries) stops to be pejorative because it exists a similar construction that is not pejorative.
And I don't think you need to be the one accused to be a pedophile to be offended when you see someone uselessly accusing someone else to be a pedophile. (but again, I would probably not have reacted, and have given the benefice of the doubt to the interlocutor, assuming they were unaware of the pejorative connotation)
> I recall one such poster getting upset over the word 'Chinaman'. Something this Englishman, sharing an office with two Irishman, a Frenchman and a Dane, found rather bizarre, particularly as the chap complaining was not Chinese themselves!
And yet "Chinaman" is considered derogatory. If you believe the Wikipedia page, it has been considered so since at least 1965 in British English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman
You might not consider it logical for "Chinaman" to be considered derogatory when similarly structured words like "Frenchman" are not, but the reality is that if you use the term then you will be evoking the current meaning.
> and needs to stop
The point of the article is that you can't stop the euphemism treadmill, no matter how emphatically you request it.
"Chinaman" is not inherently/originally a slur, but seriously who says that today? Even Englishman, Irishman and Frenchman sound slightly old-fashioned to me - surely you'd rather say "He's French" than "He's a Frenchman".
It's one of those words you certainly shouldn't be offended at finding in an old book, or not even if an elderly person uses it, but if a young person uses it then he's probably dug it up deliberately for questionable political reasons.
If the word had been "Chineseman," maybe it would fit with your other examples better. No one says, "He's an Englandman, Irelandman, Franceman, etc."
To me, this set of words would already lean negative and imply someone hopelessly devoted to a specific country, not someone of that nationality, even if "Chinaman" didn't also already have a pejorative history.
This is very typical, you observe that the expressions are slightly different linguistically, and then make a leap from that and posit that this makes it pejorative.
It's a bit similar to how some people just posit that "The Ukraine" or "The Congo" is somehow pejorative just because most countries don't have a definite article.
I don't even sort of follow what you mean here. All I'm doing is telling you what this set of words that nobody actually uses sound like they would mean to me.
The term that does exist, Chinaman, already has its own pejorative sense. It doesn't need that from me.
All I'm saying is that these other words (again, words that I didn't "make up," but also that nobody actually uses) would sound negative too, and are the actual parallels to the term in the parent's example.
On the contrary, your example shows that any pejorative connotation is NOT related to the etymology. "Englandman" doesn't sound pejorative, it just sounds strange because it's not an actual word. "Englander" is a real word that is not pejorative, but derived from the name of the country.
Of course it is. It comes directly from the etymology.
By using the name of the country rather than the demonym for its inhabitants, it implies some sort of preference for the country as country, to the degree that a person defines themselves by it, rather than a simple point of history about a person's ethnic heritage, over which the person had no control.
No it doesn't. It's just historical accident. If you look around you will notice that some demonyms are based on the country name, some or not. It doesn't correlate with it being pejorative. "Italian" or "Congolese" are not more pejorative than "Frenchman". They are just newer, because the countries are newer.
Not that any normal person thinks that there is anything negative with "some sort of preference for the country as country, to the degree that a person defines themselves by it". It's politically quite extreme to see that as "pejorative".
I love that you're still arguing with me about what words I cobbled together--which are not actually words anybody uses--sound like they mean and why.
I'm having real trouble coming up with a single country that has the demonym "[Country name]man."
There is a meaningful difference between the name of a country and the term for someone from that country. The second is inherently neutral, because no one controls where they're born. The first connotes that someone defines themselves by their connection to the country as a country (or that the person calling them that sees that as their primary identity, subordinate to the identity of the country itself).
Putting aside the fact that it technically IS named "Republic of the Congo ", technically Mexico is named "The United States of Mexico", that's not really important.
People who claim that "The Congo" is offensive don't say that because it's not the official name (which it is), I guess they just presume that there must be some colonial racist reason, and not just the fact that it's named after a river.
"Republic of the Congo", or "République du Congo" in French, "du" being a shortened form of "de le", "of the". Other French speaking republics just have "République de N".
People who claim that "The Congo" is offensive don't say that because it's not the official name (which it is),
Except it isn't. Not without "The Republic of ..." (or "The Democratic Republic of ..." if we're talking about that other much larger country the phrase usually refers to) in front.
And given that there are two such countries -- there's absolutely no modern use case for "The Congo" as a country name in any case.
I responded to this:
> neither of those has “the” as part of its official name
which is clearly untrue.
Yes, there are two Congos. Both of them have "the" in their official name:
-République du Congo (The smaller one, with Brazzaville)
-République démocratique du Congo (The larger one, with Kinchasa)
It is true that the official "Republic of the Congo" is typically shortened to just Congo" in everyday speech, my original point was just that there is nothing "racist" or colonial about say "The Congo". It is not called that as a slur because it's somehow lesser than e.g. Namibia, it is just that it's named after the Congo river. But I have heard many people who like to be offended have a vague idea that the "the" is somehow offensive because most countries don't have it.
There is nothing "racist" or colonial about say "The Congo".
As regards the river basin. When applied to the respective countries individually (and without the "Republic of" qualifier), which are after all the context we're talking about here (not the river basin) it has an entirely different connotation. And again, there's simply no modern use case for "The Congo", by itself, as a name for either of these countries.
What connotation is that exactly? Does "The Virgin Islands", or "The Hague" for that matter, also have that connotation in your mind?
I am again just saying that there is nothing racist about the "the" in "The Congo". It is just a natural way to shorten "Republic of the Congo". It might be unusual nowadays, but that does not mean that there is anything pejorative about "The".
"Use case" has nothing to do with it, nothing about language use is fully "rational" or "optimal". It is obviously _possible_ to make do without the article, but what I am getting at is the misdirected anger some people seem to feel towards it.
The connotation of intentionally ignoring their very, very, very clearly stated preference as to what their official name is. Neither of these countries refer to themselves as "The Congo" as such, and they've made it known that they would prefer that you not do so as well. That's all there is to it.
People don't "just posit" that the outdated forms are pejorative. They hold that view because the countries themselves (at an official level) have deemed them to be so, due to their colonialist implications. And have therefore kindly requested you to stop using them.
Probably because Denmark is a very old country, it predates most nation states, and the word originally referred to the tribe. Same with "Swede". They correspond to "Angles" I suppose.
It's not weird at all, and it's the same in all languages. Some of the countries are very new, or the speakers of the language only came in contact with it recently. Then it's more likely they will use a country-related term. If on the other hand you have been in contact with the people for hundreds, or thousands of years, long before modern nation states, you will probably be using a tribal name for them, like Dane or Swede.
It is usually easy to understand if you just look into it.
The comment you reply to does a good job describing one goal of this usage.
You can see virtue signaling in this behavior, and there may be a part of it, but that is not the only reason it is used and it's dicey to jump to the conclusion that virtue signaling can only be the main goal. The fact that you don't see these others goals or refuse to believe that they may be the main reason does not change the reality of the existence of these goals.
It's like people who are saying "if you say you prefer Linux over Windows, it's only because you are jealous of Windows popularity and want to feel different". Maybe it is, maybe it is not. But they just refuse to even consider that maybe the other person is not acting by jealousy.
> I have NEVER met someone using alternative language like "differently abled" who actually did something substiantial for the community or for a particular person. Almost all cases have a touch of patronisation.
That sentence sounds very strange to me: why on earth someone using alternative language like "differently abled" would suddenly be required to do something that you don't even blink an eye for people who don't use that language?
It feels like the virtue signaling resides in your eyes only: you are seeing someone saying X, you _invent_ that it is because they want to be seen as a knight helping the disabled people, and then you show that there is an incompatibility because they don't really act like a knight helping the disabled people.
But what if people using this language don't do it to be seen as a knight helping the disabled people. Then there is absolutely no incompatibility at all.
The fact that this incompatibility exists is even a clue that maybe this behavior has nothing to do with virtue signaling.
> And as a disabled person, I can tell you, I need nothing of it.
I think that the goal as described by the previous comment has nothing to do with you. The goal is to reshape the way of thinking "there is a hierarchy of 'good situation' with abled people on top" into "there are differences, with sometimes good situation and sometimes bad situation, but it's more complicated than that and simplifying the picture as a simple hierarchy is incorrect". The goal is not to please you, the goal is to avoid having a way of thinking that does not correspond to the reality.
It's the same reason why some people stop saying buzzwords like "artificial intelligence" when referring to a smartish complex algorithm composed of if conditions and no machine learning at all. They are not doing that to be fair to algorithm, they do that because there is a gain for them and for the society to not maintain misconceptions.
OK, I guess you have ablesplained everything now, thanks for teaching me the error of my ways!
Writing a serious reply doesn't feel like a good use of my time. You have already demonstrated that you have no regard for the lived experience of minorities and prefer your pseudoanalytical explanations over everything a person from such an in-group could tell you.
The truth is, the story is much more complicated. But trying to explain that to you feels draining and useless, so I just stop here.
YOU are the one explaining what other have in their mind. I just tell you "maybe it's not so simple".
And you get all virtue signaling, explaining that everyone who dares not agreeing with you can only be a bad guy because you have a disabled get-out-of-jail-for-free card.
And that is not a "pseudoanalitical" explanation, that's sooo simple, if you don't get it, it's your problem. That's very easy: I don't call "artificial intelligence" an algorithm that is just a bunch of if-conditions, just because it's misleading. Others use "different abled" FOR THE SAME REASON. The fact that it does not affect you is irrelevant, you are not the reason they prefer to use a term they think (correctly or not, who cares) is better suited, and they don't do it to look good. It's very simple.
Oh yeah, I am of course using my disability to win an argument. Its not possible that I might have much deeper insight into daily communication between disabled and non-disabled people, no. I am just a frustrated blind guy trying to win an argument. As said, it is totally useless to continue this discussion with you. You are not willing to see.
The first comment is saying that one reason to use that is just because some people think that the other term is misleading and reinforce a representation of the reality that does not correspond well to the reality.
You answer by saying it's virtue signaling and that somehow if they use this term and don't also do things for disabled people they are inconsistent.
How is that virtue signaling? Is using "Netherlands" instead of "Holland" virtue signalling by pretending they care about dutch people? If they say "Netherlands" but they also don't actively participate to dutch charities, is it inconsistent?
You are talking about deeper insight into daily communication between disabled and non-disabled people. What does it have to do with the fact that some people prefer to use a term that they think correspond better to the reality? If I prefer to say "disabled people" instead of "disobled people" (because I prefer to use a term that I consider better because I consider spelling mistake not ideal), how your deeper insight into daily communication between disabled and non-disabled people is relevant?
Well, I guess that if I tell you "I prefer not making spelling mistake", I am ablesplaining to you, and you are not at all using your disability by explaining that I'm a bad person for not saying "disobled" because you are disabled so you know best.
Jesus Christ what kind of Le Redditor (tips fedora) response is this?
He's just pointing out that "differently" and "dis" have different connotations. You're not dis - abled. You ARE able to do things. And some things you have to do differently.
Stop belitteling my dsablity. You, as a non-disabled person, have absolutely no idea how much energy I have to invest to exist in your world and compensate for all the barriers that you are putting up (mostly unconsciously) to make it even harder. This is actually one reason why I am against euphemisms like differently abled. It might sound cosy from the perspective of a unexperienced outsider, but its just ignorance in reality.
There are so many things I can not do independently, and cant do with external help either because that is not always aviable, that I definitely feel disabled, not differently abled.
All of you have been spoiled by leftist ideas have absolutely no idea what are you doing and how patronising you actually are.
Its my life, I decide what words are appropriate. If you have been spoiled by language whitewashing, the problem is you, and not me.
Nobody is "belittling" anything, and the only reason you're resorting to that language is because you don't have anything of value to say. If you did, you'd actually say it. But no, let's just cry instead.
Look, all I'm saying is that the changing of these words ISN'T baseless and there IS some thought behind it.
Yes, you are disabled. But... you're not dis... abled. You ARE able to do things. That's not up for debate, so I'm not sure why you're arguing it. Will you really argue you're useless? No, you won't.
> I decide what words are appropriate
Absolutely not a soul on Earth is telling you this. Go ahead and drop the victim mentality, it makes you look really bad.
First of all, I could have interpreted this incorrectly, and if I did so - I apologize.
However, I think the parent tried (and seemingly failed) to convey the idea that the use of certain euphemism is intended to affect public opinion among the outsiders rather than the minority group in question.
In other words, it's not for disabled (or any other group) but the rest of the society, meant to change public opinion through removal (by avoiding use of terms that evoke those associations) of harmful stereotypes, thus the weird language. The meaningful purpose of virtue signalling is not to comfort oneself into how nice human one is, but to establish a societal norm by sending this "we're all considering ourselves decent folks here and we aren't looking down on $group, right y'all?" peer-pressurizing social message. Which is, of course, fake, but the idea is that given enough time it ends up becoming true. Generations change, young people don't have inherent biases, so they end up ingesting whatever is around them, which is the reason, I guess. Again, this is just my understanding of it trying to rationalize the idea (my logic is "it can't be just something stupid, right, someone must've thought it through?"), so I could be totally making things up.
Of course, I can't say this is all working as intended. Surely, not well, given how it feels offensive to the actual $group (like the example of calling a person disabled in this thread; or I've yet to see a Latin person who wouldn't frown at "latinx" linguistic nonsense, etc.), so it doesn't look like a great idea overall.
I have been privileged enough to only be discriminated based on my nationality and ethnic group (rather than more permanent things), so I have limited experience here. Just trying to figure it out and make an opinion of it.
Euphemism is a funny cloak for something you don't like, something you'd rather not mention at all. Those who use euphemisms are often allergic to plain speech, as it shows everything as it really is, not as how they'd like to see it.
Edit. Dolores Umbridge from HP is a brilliant caricature on them.
This opinion of yours is a bit shit. Euphemism is a barrier that can give you welcome distance when you need to discuss or reference something unbearable.
I also want to point out the inherent absurdity of referencing an admitted caricature as if it was somehow demonstrative, especially considering the cartoonish villainy of the caricature.
This explanation strikes me as euphemistic. Though it has some insight as well: "(and why it courts controversy) it is interventionist".
> Part of the role a phrase like “differently abled” plays is to estrange your base assumptions about disability and to signal the existence of and your membership in a group of people concerned to change the conditions around disability
Less euphemistically, you want to make other people think and act differently. And if disingenuous language policing or the threat of condemnation by said "group of people" gets the job done, that's just fine.
They state that directly - reread the bit where they mention the role the phrase 'differently abled' plays. They use no euphemisms.
What you're doing is asinine because it attempts to cast the familiar as alien and ironically is an example of the behavior you describe - you're being disingenuous and trying to 'make other people think and act differently'.
I don't know how else to say this: someone trying to change your mind is not an attack. People disliking you because you behave like shit is not a conspiracy.
>Part of the role a phrase like “differently abled” plays is to estrange your base assumptions about disability and to signal the existence of and your membership in a group of people concerned to change the conditions around disability
This is part of why this political language is so abrasive. Who are you (the "general you," not "you the person who posted this comment") to tell me what my current assumptions about the group are? It's incredibly presumptive and sanctimonious.
The article definitely elides that the words didn't become loaded on their own, but there were deliberate projects and fights to load words like "welfare" with baggage. While "differently abled" is the result of disability activists gaining new ground, many of the other renamings listed represent retreats from contested territory.
I’m also skeptical that all of the things the article lumps under the umbrella “euphemism” are really the same thing or best described by that word. But to your point “retreats from contested territory” are probably the best examples of where that label would be appropriate
> It is an inevitable and, more to the point, healthy process, necessary in view of the eternal gulf between language and opinion.
I don't know if this is a "healthy" process. Inevitable it may well be. But it doesn't change attitudes, it doesn't help the people involved and one issue I don't see talked about is that the quality of the language itself seems to drop through this process. "Crippled" has a certain pithiness and is a distinct word. "Differently abled" has many more syllables and verbal overlap with words like "different" and "able". We're shrinking the ability to describe things in a process that might literally be Orwellian.
Not every attempt is a good attempt. I'm disabled, not differently abled. But I'm also not crippled nor retarded.
If, a decade from now, someone comes up with a better term I might be whatever that is.
But I still am glad we've moved on past early 20th century labels and are trying new ones on. Some might not fit nicely, but they are progress generally.
> It's considered quite infantilizing among many disabled communities.
I wonder how common this is with any minority. The majority gets to decide what to call you. Guessing they didn't ask first to see what you think, either. I would be wildly irritated to be in that position.
But also, pushing back against it sometimes get labeled as woke. Eskimo and Gypsy are both terms that were applied to groups without their choice. And some people are now preferring other terms that they do choose. (Eg Inuit or Roma)
But why are you glad that we moved on? Almost none of the old words were offensive in themselves. "Retarded" or "crippled" may sound offensive now, but that is completely unrelated to the etymology or meaning, it is _solely_ because it refers to something people don't want to be, so people started to use them as slurs.
It just seems so futile to have to keep coming up with new words for the same thing, when the new words will inevitably become slurs in the same way, at least if anyone uses them. So it's not like we can avoid the offence, it is just transferred to a new word. Wouldn't it be better to accept that some people will say mean things, and focus on learning to live with that, and on making people be less mean?
Good question. Sometimes these terms come from a medical background and people do not like to be medicalized. Sometimes the terms are too narrow, eg not all disabilities are crippling. Sometimes these terms are exonyms and people do not like them. Sometimes the words change meaning over time.
And sometimes we return to them. Queer is a label I use for myself that's a reclaimed slur. I know plenty of gay men who call themselves fags. Some disabled people use "crip" as a term of endearment. But usually these reclaimed slurs are for the exclusive use of the members of the community internally.
There's also the loss of some connotations and nuance when the next euphemism comes in. The loss of the connotations is often the whole reason for the euphemism, but ideally you'd keep both words to allow describing the thing with/without the connotation.
The author here uses "differently abled". As a member of the disabled community, I've never met a disabled person who uses "differently abled".
But also, don't call us crippled. (Some people with disabilities do reclaim that term.)
Likewise, I call myself queer, but don't call me queer unless you are also queer.
Language like this fascinates me, because not only does it evolve, there is insider and outsider use. The cishet community can use lgbtq+, and that describes the same group of people as queer, but it means something quite radically different. Queer is steeped in radical implication in a way lgbtq+ is not.
Nothing in my post is meant to judge you, reader, more to say, "wow! Language is fucking wild!" I'm excited to see where it goes over the remainder of my life.
Nothing. They are just long and have the same meaning. The Latin opposite of "trans-" prefix is "cis-". See the use in terms like cislunar vs translunar.
Agreed, people get bizarrely up in arms over how git's 'master' doesn't have a matching 'slave' but also set max line width to 80 characters.
I don't know if you ran into this one but I was convinced to use 'allow list' and 'block list' over white/black list purely on the basis that its just a bit more descriptive. I sort of wish we could clean language up like this more regularly, just imagine a world where we didn't maintain the notion of an electrical current that flowed opposite to the flow of electrons. So tidy.
Maybe we should replace positive and negative when talking about electricity. After all later certainly carries negative connotations... I suggest protonic and electronic with sähkö going from electronic terminal to protonic one. Sähkö is nice and easy to write and much simpler word than electricity...
I think your suggestion has much merit, though I think the positive/negative thing may have value due to coincidentally lining up with the math used to describe the forces that act on those particles. Though 'protonic terminal is positive, electronic is negative' isn't any more difficult or arbitrary.
I used to have this memorized and I've lost the details... So Benjamin Franklin established the standard for charges being positive and negative (based on a theory he was operating under that electricity was a fluid that flowed from place to place, and too much fluid was a positive charge and too little was a negative charge). He declared that glass rubbed by cloth was positive and the charge from rubbing fur or rubber was negative, and we were off to the races.
(Worth noting: something I picked up while trying to reboot my memory on this is that from an electrical engineering standpoint, it's actually not super-useful to think about current as "flowing electrons" unless you're dealing very specifically with a situation where electrons are jumping through air or a vacuum and it matters. In a battery, the flow is ions; in a hydrogen fuel cell, the flow is protons; in wires, sure, the flow is electrons, but the fact that what's really moving around and causes phenomena is charge concentration matters and, conveniently, conceptually covers all these cases, and as long as your concept of charge concentration is consistent it doesn't matter if you're considering the concentration to equalize by flowing from positive to negative or negative to positive, there's a symmetry to charge density minimization.)
That is my understanding as well regarding the path here.
That is a good point, but, it would still be really nice if the convention for current just so happened to match the flow of electrons through a wire since it is the common case. At least, I remember that being pretty disorienting for me at times in some electrical engineering classes. Wish I could remember something specific though!
Do appreciate you pointing out some counter examples though, always fun.
It definitely matters when you start actually caring about electrons leaping through space over long distances.
Like... You'll get the wrong answer if you think the electrons in a CRT go from the screen to the gun, or if it's positively-charged particles that are causing carbon deposition inside a vacuum tube.
But that actually turns out to be (for most people) a specialized context. I'm startled to discover (because I was in the same camp as you) that the math is so symmetrical that it really almost never matters how the physical charge-carriers are moving, since it's the change in electric field that is causing things to happen.
"Allow list" is only more "descriptive" to someone that doesn't know what whitelist means. It is generally not considered a problem if you can't guess the meaning of a word from how it looks, most words are like that.
Why does there have to be a slave just because there's a master? That is just one very specific meaning of the word, out of several dozen, and in the git context it was pretty clear that it wasn't used in that sense, but rather something like "master copy". So the master to main renaming thing was especially silly.
You should probably think more about that first sentence yours and about what I said. I'll try to help: which phrase requires less knowledge to understand due to being self describing? does that mean it is more, equally, or less descriptive than the other? do you need to have a specific problem in order to improve something? did I ever say or even imply that there was a problem?
You are unironically doing the thing I was talking about by not noticing that I already said that about git's master branch. Master/slave is also a pretty common phrase in computing when talking about hardware, and its a pretty ugly concept when applied to humans, so I'm also not terribly surprised people chose to change their default branch name even if the association is only tangential. You wouldn't be surprised if the old name was 'ScrapedCornea' and people didn't love it. But again, its bizarre that a shift from 'master' to 'main', which is shorter, provokes this response. Do you feel personally critiqued by it somehow? Genuinely curious.
If you had ancestors that were slaves in the 1800s and for that reason want to avoid any word that looks like "master", even if used in a different meaning, then by all means go ahead and change your git branch name, that's your business, as silly as it is. I only object if you want to project this absurdity on others, and make THEM change THEIR branch names.
I personally have much closer ancestors, that were tortured by the communists within living memory. What if I told you that for this reason the word "comrade" triggers me? Or in analogy with the github situation, if I asked people to stop wearing Che t-shirts? Would you say that was reasonable, or a sign of insanity?
As I said, "allow list" is more descriptive if you don't know the word whitelist in the sense that it's easier to guess its meaning the first time you see it. My point is that this is not generally considered important, just look at 100 random words, most of them would be hard to guess the exact meaning of, even if like me you studied classical languages.
Yeah, it would be pretty reasonable to tell people that you found something upsetting. You should give it a try. It doesn't need to be a universal maxim for people to care about and respect your feelings in the spaces you occupy.
Do you think anyone would take that seriously? I sure hope anyone I associate would just laugh and presume that I'm joking. It just isn't reasonable to be that sensitive. It certainly isn't adaptive, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was something about it in DSM.
Sorry, you're confusing the hell out of me, is this a way that you feel or not? Pretending to care about something in order to score points is bad behavior.
Pretending to care? I am not saying I care about communist symbols, I am saying it would be absurd if I did, I wasn’t in the war. And yes I agree that all the people that pretend that the word ”master” is an issue are behaving badly. It’s pointless virtue signaling by proxy.
> What if I told you that for this reason the word "comrade" triggers me?
Then out of respect I would would attempt to stop using it around you, And if enough people agreed with you we would probably mothball it in favor of something else.
What's remarkable about the treadmill isn't that it exists or that ultimately words become slurs over time. That's predictable. What's remarkable is the rapidity with which language changes are superimposed in top-down societies. To the degree that one could probably measure the authoritarianism or top-down nature of a society based on how quickly verboten words are removed from its published vernacular.
One thing I like to point out, is that some fairly recent, openly racist societies were completely on board with language policing. You did NOT say the K word in apartheid SA. They had hate speech laws, and they prosecuted people over them too!
Isn't this the China Winnie-The-Poo experience? The euphemistic label for "leader I don't like" has to cycle at a frequency somewhat higher than the rate of word-bans but somewhat lower than the minimum acquisition time for ordinary people.
Well, being deliberate with words is definitely a great attribute. However, I came here to say that, as a blind person, I cringe whenever someone calls me "visually challenged" or in any other way tries to crawl around the seemingly bad word and does all sorts of linguistic hoops to avoid calling me what I am.
This tendency is totally counterproductive, since it creates yet another barrier between the disabled and "normal" people.
I am blind. If you dont like that, stay away. But it is even more hurtful if I can feel your uncomfortableness through the language.
One of the big issues, I think, is that people outside of the group decide what people inside the group should be called; I believe that's called virtue signaling. But since it's people outside of the group making up the words, they are effectively excluding the people involved. Speaking over them, if you will.
That. My partner (blind) recently met a teacher on a train ride. After a bit of awkward conversation, she told my partner that she is currently trying to find a new word for disabled, together with her class. When my partner answered that she thinks there is no need for that, the teacher totally ignored her opinion and continued to press on. This pretty much confirms your post. Mind you, no disabled people involved. Just a teacher that decided she needs to play language police. Thats systemic patronisation. And the worst thing is, she wouldn't listen to the opinion of a disabled person. She just stubbornly continued on her path of patronisation.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] thread> The crucial thing is to be able to step back from our instinctive reactions to the way such words sound to us now [...] and to realize they’re steps on an escalator, moving slowly but inexorably
Is this an ironic attempt to demonstrate notion of the euphemism treadmill, by renaming it to an escalator?
Because escalators and treadmills are kinda the opposite of one another.
With an escalator you do nothing, and get to where you want to be.
With a treadmill, you expend lots of energy and get nowhere - and if you don't expend the energy, you get flung off the back.
i can’t find it offhand though, but the idea’s the same.
I wonder what the author would think of the fresh cycle of euphemism derived from platform algorithms, like "unalive."
Many social media websites do not allow discussions about violence, or self-harm. Some have automated bots scanning for words like, "murder", "suicide", "gun", etc. Because it can be very difficult to avoid mentioning those topics in conversations about things like history, social media influencers started using alternate words and phrases, like "unalive" for murder or suicide, and "pew pews" for guns (imitating the sound children tend to make when they're pretending to shoot guns). [0]https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/18vdpyg/whats...
Perhaps related in the sense of being self censorship of restricted topics, although not liguistic, is the recent trend of firearm-related YouTube channels showing disassembly but not assembly. Of course assembly is mostly just disassembly in reverse, but one is permitted by platform terms and the other is not.
I'm 99% sure the organizations that do this - tiktok, roblox, etc - are well aware of the users' attempts of euphemizing around the filters, so they are OK with it. That, or it's from higher up but the legal whatsits can't keep up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXknwMx0_BQ&t=3m38s
Deadpool's fourth-wall awareness (which manifests in-universe as mental illness) enabled him to know that he was in an animated cartoon series, but he was applying the standards of animated series from the 1980s and early 1990s, in which death was not discussed and the topic was avoided entirely. Sometimes the baddies spoke of "destroying" or "eliminating" their opponents, but never killing them. Ultimate Spider-Man was a more mature series released in a time when we thought we'd moved beyond such standards-and-practices nitpicking in the name of "protecting the children" but... apparently we have not. New media (YouTube) provoked new moral panics and the cycle repeats...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/2...
Frankly, I think these are developed by HR so that they can more easily write inoffensive copy without considering their bias or the audience. Most people I've worked with know whether they're black, indigenous, european immigrant, ESL, partially blind, suffering from PTSD, paraplegic, etc. The problem is that those things are just too specific to quickly gloss over in an anonymous uninformative screed. Easier to have a catchall phrase to abstract and dehumanize the issues.
I think it could be simplified to: the euphemism treadmill is driven by fear of how those, other than the persons involved, will react to its use.
"Latinx" is a great recent example [1].
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/us/latinx-gallup-poll-prefere...
Uh oh. I’ve been using it wrong for a while, whoops.
Note: I am not saying that it achieved those goals or that it's a good or bad term, just explaining the intended understanding.
Yeah that's because they're different things.
Some things refer to POC, and some to black people, and some to indigenous people etc.
You can still say black, brown, south Asian, what have you. But if you need to refer to all non-white people, you say "people of color". Which makes perfect sense to me.
This lengthy 2018 video on the phenomenon [0] discusses two examples, where:
> When "Illegal Immigration" comes up [...] one of the candidates says he wants to tighter the border because "Mexico is sending us rapists and thieves." I'm sorry, what? What just happened!? [...]
> Now they're talking about "The War on Terror" [... ] but then that same candidate pipes up that, if elected, for the sake of security, he wants to create a "Muslim registry" and--what the hell is going on? [...]
> The guy seemingly tanking his candidacy by appealing to extremists is the one who finally secures the nomination. You realize with some shock that in each of these cases you are witnessing the death of a euphemism. The death of a euphemism is a rare celestial event. Politicians only let a euphemism die when they don't need it anymore. This does not imply good things for Mexicans or Muslims.
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[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dBJIkp7qIg - "The Alt-Right Playbook: The Death of a Euphemism"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc
The author of this article pointed our some similar examples: welfare -> cash assistance -> TANF.
Is the problem just shortening it because it takes too long to say?
I wish I could cleverly work in a "QED" here (from Latin) but it just doesn't fit.
By the way, QED is just a calque from Greek. (Like most things Roman...)
As an American, I'd find it hard (at least in my circles) to find an American who doesn't find it cringe worthy.
In fact, I don't think I've heard anyone use that term in at least forty years.
Horrors of War Syndrome would probably be better.
I doesn’t have to be a negative thing either. PTSD is more inclusive, since it doesn’t imply that you’ve literally had bombs dropped on you relentlessly, like shellshock does.
You're still allowed to form opinions about people and your mutual suitability based on their traits! Obviously! This isn't difficult.
Next up: thinking cancer is bad is bad.
There's no sugarcoating that diseases are, well, negative.
If I say to someone to "make way for the blind person walking there" I'm not attacking them, but trying to help them navigate a crowded area safely. That's true regardless of whether I referred to them as blind, unsighted, vision-impaired, differently-abled, or anything else. Similarly, If I were mocking them I'd be stigmatizing them regardless of the word I used for it.
She primarily worked with sexual abuse victims, but spent a lot of time veterans as well. Her focus was PTSD, and talk therapy is really effective for PTSD.
Her opinion was, in world war 1, They didn't really have the psychologic or physical frameworks to really distinguish. Certainly, some people had mechanical damage, like football players. Certainly, some people really had a hard time experiencing the horrors of war. They just didn't really know.
Calling it shell shock, that helped some of the veterans. Helped them sorta get that they're not alone. People have dealt with this for a long time.
Rape victims, shell shock isn't a great name. For a lot of reasons.
It's kinda about recognizing that this trauma is a real thing, there's nothing wrong with you. This is a normal reaction, everyone goes through it. Some people need a little help finding their way back to normal.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-...
When it was written, "African-American" was the politically correct term but now it seems it has regressed to "Black"
Its quite useful, means I can safely ignore any opinion they have on the topic at hand.
The absurd part is you are acting like everyone who uses that phrase has casual access to the interior life of absolute strangers: if it isnt a myth and the only reason someone wouldn't point it out is politeness the it follows that you know their motivations.
For example, many thinks that saying "I have many black friends!" is just virtue signaling by someone not very virtuous, and that is often called out. The virtue there is to have those friends, ie not being racist about who you choose to be friends with, the signaling is that you say you have black friends.
See the difference? And I bet you think that someone saying "I have many black friends" is more about signaling than being a virtuous act in itself. Many people signal that way, words are cheap actions are not.
What I don't get is why nobody says "stop virtue signaling" to those people, because that is what they are doing. Virtue signaling is absolutely a real thing and people do it everywhere, regardless of political alignment etc.
Of course, people can try to smear genuine virtue by calling it mere virtue signalling. Philanthropy might be called mere virtue signalling by some, even though it does materially benefit people. But I think most cases are more clear-cut.
Ah ha! The misunderstanding is on your end!
Speaking of an incredibly negative and gross "virtue"—this growing trend of people actively seeking to identify members of an out group who they can safely ignore is disturbing.
Once upon a time we actually tried to understand even our opponents, if only so we could beat them in the debates. Now we're so confident that we're right, they're wrong, and right makes might that we don't feel the need to attempt to understand them even to debate them—we just throw meaningless insults at each other and win elections based on who can drum up the most fear of the "incredibly negative and gross" other.
I have to say though, when I see people using popular buzzwords, it shows me they're not really thinking and are just LLM-like regurgitating what they've been exposed to.
It depends, some people are radicals. For example, if you think climate change isn't real that's not even an opinion. That's just... not true.
Someone who's perception of reality and reality itself are so misaligned can't be understood. Because their position doesn't come from understanding, it comes from emotions. Typically fear of the unknown, hatred, or maybe they're just dumb (dumb is the least likely).
After a certain point, it crosses to the delusional. After a certain point, they're just crazy.
I don't listen to the man on the corner yelling about the bugs under my skin that signal to aliens. Because that's crazy.
Nor do I listen to "5G microchip in the vaccine!! Plandemic!!" type people. Because they're just crazy people.
The problem is, and I don't know exactly why, but that category of person is expanding. Rapidly. My own family has fallen victim to it. And now I can't ever reason with them because their minds are so forgone they're living in an alternate reality.
If you are like, "oh, shoot, didn't know, I'll try to remember that" then most folks are pretty chill.
It's only when someone is like, "it's too fucking hard to remember the current term every decade I just want to use the term that offends people because I refuse to update a pointer in my memory!" That people generally get edgier over.
I don't know if the above statement is parody or reality in this ever changing political correctness climate.
The only moderately strong objection I'm posing is to the characterization of language evolving as a shibboleth.
My grandad used to use a bunch of WW1 era slurs. Constantly. They were just language to him. I never got angry, I just let him know that if he used those slurs, people would have a perception that he was unwilling to believe in equality. He didn't realize and he tried, not because I said he was bad, but because he wanted to.
If you want to not keep up, that's fine! But language always changes. Whether it's yeet, sus, aura, brat, or disabled, the use of words is going to change.
So, if you choose not to change with it, you will eventually, accidentally, make someone who is keeping up feel hurt. That's not evil or bad. But at that moment, how you respond is something you can control -- talk to the person, share with them how it was unintentional, listen about how they felt. Explain to them how you feel about trying to keep up. Learn from one another.
Getting angry because inter generational language gaps exist is like getting angry because someone bumped you accidentally. Accidents are gonna happen, it's how we get together and give each other grace and listen that matters. Don't assume every bump of a passing stranger is an assault.
I think you might be reading my posts believing that I'm disagreeing with you, or that I'm insisting the new language is the only acceptable language. I'm really not.
When I showed up at my most recent job I used "you guys" once and immediately regretted it. Things got awkward for a second and then someone in the group constructed a sentence that allowed them to use "folks" and place the emphasis.
I adapted, but if that's not a shibboleth I don't know what is.
How do you reckon that they were judged here at all? This is a level of transgression roughly equivalent to mispronouncing someones name for the first time, I can't imagine anyone else even remembering this incident aside from OP and even they may only remember because the human brain reserves 10% of its space for reliving minor faux pas.
Using the word 'head' to refer to the bathroom would be a shibboleth.
Side note: I find that preference odd because I come from a context where 'you guys' is neutral, but ultimately view it as a deficiency in the english language.
If someone is using a term maliciously to express real prejudice, I'll call them out on it. If they are just communicating using the terms they know for the same concept that a newer term now exists for, that doesn't strike me as a reason to dock any points.
I'm disabled. Do not call me differently abled. I'm sorry if you had a textbook that taught you to do so, and I will gently gently correct you.
Language always evolves. If you can learn what "yeet" means, you can practice using words people prefer for their groups.
If I can manage not to forget your username, hungie, then I will try to remember not to call you "differently abled". But please be patient and forgiving of my confusion if, between now and our next conversation, I encounter a third individual who insists that I never refer to them as "disabled" and instead call them "differently abled", and my memory for which of you preferred which term fails me. Forgive me doubly if you're both in the audience at the same time when I'm giving a presentation about installing a wheelchair ramp, and struggling to come up with a mutually-satisfactory term. I already struggle enough with names alone, such that I often decline to use them out of anxiety of making a mistake!
I don't think most groups are unanimous in self describing, but I do think there are general trends. We know, generally, that certain words aren't ok! Plenty of slurs we avoid, even ones used by in groups in a reclaimed way.
I don't think most reasonable people expect perfection. I spend a lot of time in disabled and queer (and disabled queer) circles, and I've primarily observed people expressing preferences, not anger.
Some people will cheerfully adapt their language and continue without missing a beat; others will feel deeply ashamed and embarrassed, and simply shut down out of the fear of making a mistake again. There are all sorts of people, and the burden of language weighs differently on each.
There's not a great one size fits all solution, so I push for grace and I push for understanding. Two people might have mutually impossible to reconcile experiences with language. I believe if we assume good intent from others and attempt good intent towards others, we'll clear many, many situations with a minimum of harm to all.
(Anyway, cheers! You seem like the kind of person I'd enjoy hanging out with in person, even if we disagree on things. Sorry if I seem like I'm just posting rebuttals; text is a hard medium).
I don't always succeed, but at least I felt likewise: you disagreed, but didn't resort to obvious flame bait or straw person arguments. Appreciate it!
The more time goes on and the more experience I get the more cemented this becomes. The best example is the expression you guys. Nowadays that expression is fully gender-neutral and is routinely used to refer to a group of mixed gender individuals. Some people can feel excluded by the term, and for that reason I do often try to substitute a different term for it, but many of the women I work with use the same expression of you guys even when referring to a group of entirely women. I strongly wish that most people would hear that and not think of a gendered reference. I think that would radically improve communication.
If there is doubt about what the person meant, sometimes a clarifying question can be extremely useful. For people that are trying to use offensive or exclusive terms, it is good to push them on that a bit and ask for clarification and such. But I don't think I've met anyone who was using the term that way in many, many years.
I absolutely never assume ill intent. But it does cause a cd-skip mentality for me, so I usually privately tell people. "Hey, heads up, you guys causes me an unfortunately unavoidable mental hiccup. It's not major, and I recognize it's common language. If it's low cost to you to use an alternative, awesome, but I don't want to cause an even bigger hiccup for you."
My goal is always to share the impact, and to be open to solutions that might include "nothing changes". I assume people would want to know they are unintentionally having that impact and also that I'm not going to roast them for using a very very common expression.
Really like how you worded that, that also perfectly captures how I feel about it! Thank you :)
I get a big mental hiccup when trying to reference a group and am fearful to use the wrong terminology in case it causes offence / hurt / outrage.
I never mean malice, and it’s especially bad when a term changes and isn’t even fully agreed on by the group it refers to.
Like a Pavlovian dog, this kick of anxiety actually feels like it estranges me from groups rather than brings me closer (my intention) because of the fear I have of making a miss-step.
The problem of "determine what group X wants" gets even worse when we go online and the people whose words we read are now not randomly sampled from the group, instead being the tony minority who care enough to campaign about it online (or those who arent even group members but campaign for them).
We're talking about using words. I have never used that word.
Rizz, zhuzh, doggo, sus, cromulent, phishing, nerf, npc, gram/grammable, etc etc.
The point isn't about yeet, specifically.
Also, 'nerf' and 'grammable' are obvious? I know what nerf means but neither are in any way obvious. I think you've got some unexamined ideas about language that have more to do with the words you learned as you were coming up than any principled or aesthetic reason.
Which part of what I said was unwarranted?
> Also, 'nerf' and 'grammable' are obvious?
If you know the brands, the verbs/adjectives can stick easily.
> I think you've got some unexamined ideas about language that have more to do with the words you learned as you were coming up than any principled or aesthetic reason.
I think you have problems understanding why people say what they do.
If you see someone performatively policing language feel free to call them out on it. Unless I missed something though I don't think anyone is asking you to pull a shift as a language cop, or otherwise 'dock points'.
Can you explain why this struck you as disingenuous? ESL struggles are a daily concern for me and the people I know.
As for being a language cop, I have no interest in doing so; I'm more concerned about the people who find themselves on the receiving side of feeling policed. When I say "that doesn't strike me as a reason to dock any points" I'm talking about my ideal that everyone will behave in a non-language-policing way. In order to avoid sounding lecturing or critical, I often refer to myself when expressing how I hope other people will behave too. ("When crossing the street, you should look both ways" --> "When crossing the street, I should look both ways"). It seems you interpreted it rather differently than I meant, which just goes to show again how clear communication is already hard for all of us.
Certainly! In essence because shifting euphemisms are a drop in the bucket of learning a language, the challenge is already present because words are always shifting in meaning (do you remember when 'figuratively' and 'literally' swapped?) and in my experience people give a lot of grace to non-native speakers. This made it feel like concern trolling to me.
As for your other point I believe I understood you, but in the absence of a specific example of language policing to analyze I think I should let it drop.
Okay. Stop policing[0] the language of others! Is that about right?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41318158
I'm very clearly not policing anyone's language there. Did you mean to link a different comment?
It's a useful lesson, once learned.
Edit: Fixed punctuation.
I object to the word cishet that you used early, strongly. From my point of view it seems one particular crew is declaring that there need to be all these new words, and I don't agree that these are the people who get to decide that. Consider me a Blood, and I'm not accepting words created by the .... wait, respecting your wishes, I mean, consider me a Crip, and I'm not accepting words created by the Bloods. Come talkin that trash, we'll pull your card, knowin' nothin' in life, but to be legit, don't quote me, boy, 'cause I ain't said shit. Thanks, Eazy-E, couldn't have said it better myself
For others, who may not be aware, cishet is a portmanteau of cisgender heterosexual. Cis being the opposite of trans, Latin prefixes for "the side of" and "the opposite side of". Transgender is therefore just "the opposite gender" and cisgender is "the same gender". (These prefixes are commonly used across science.)
Most folks are aware of homosexual (same sex attracted) and heterosexual (opposite sex attracted), which are the Greek prefixes for same and opposite.
Maybe you are one of today's lucky 10,000 who didn't know where that term originated! (https://xkcd.com/1053)
I'm half convinced the parent isn't serious, but since you asked: I prefer to not be labeled at all. If you have to pick one, I'd prefer something closer to "neurotypical"—a word that effectively communicates that my sexual identity is defined by existing comfortably within the herd of the 90%+, not something that I've actively shaped or given much thought to.
Aside from the fact that the pronunciation is... hard... "cishet" doesn't fit me because it labels aspects of myself that I never stopped to notice until well into adulthood and seems to give them greater importance than I actually assign to them. It feels a bit like putting a name tag on my left elbow introducing it as "Bob".
I've seen people use "gender or sexual minority" to describe lgbtq+ folks, so maybe you feel better described by "gender or sexual majority"? (Which I think is a judgement free expression of percentage?)
In all ways I am how I was born, and I have no desire to have that impact who or what I associate with or how I associate with it. I have to deal with these things when it is obvious to peoples eyes how or what I might be, I have no desire to add to it with intangibles. This feeling should hopefully be familiar to you: It should be the feeling you have when you are in the minority in any way considered important by those around you or those you care about, but especially so when it is not relevant to most of anything.
My relationship with non-gender-related aspects of myself follows this same pattern: Autistic or not, ADHD or not, I have no desire to be categorised as neurodivergent, neurotypical, neurospicy, or any such term. These are epithets all and the use of them when discussing specific others, even when benevolent, is almost always in a way that serves to other. And they are terms that will almost inevitably be used as deliberate insults.
Downthread, you mention that you call yourself queer but you would reject that label when applied to you by others. I cannot help but think that your feeling there is similar to a number of other people's feelings about the parts of their identity that they do not wish to label; I do not wish to label myself, so please do not label me.
There are others who may wish to identify with a group or a label because it is a part of their identity, and because that label comforts them or softens the edges of how society may treat them or whatever it might be. For most of those who are objecting to the cishet label, I suspect you may find that it has almost always only been used in their presence to discount them or their opinions. This is not the fault of the label, but its intent, for many. There is no trick of semantics that you can pull to strip the label's fundamental semiotic purpose, which will inevitably be used for scorn, as always.
What you are asking, in this case, is to put people on the treadmill.
I can't (and wouldn't attempt to) speak for anyone else, but the label I use is Nobody9999 (okay, I use my actual name, which isn't any of your business -- consider that, as it's important here).
I don't broadcast my gender, sexual identity or personal sexual proclivities unless it's relevant in some way. This conversation, for instance -- my gender identity (whether it matches the hardware I have or not), what sorts of people/animals/objects/concepts hold my sexual interest, and/or what sorts of things I like to do with those, are completely irrelevant to you in this context.
And they're not relevant because my use of language doesn't depend on what sort of anatomy/identity I may have, nor does it depend on who or what I want to exchange bodily fluids with (assuming that's something I find sexually satisfying -- and I'm not saying that at all, just using it as an example) and in what way I wish to do so.
If we meet down the pub/on a dating site/at the laundromat/museum/washboard concert/etc. and I chat you up or vice versa, perhaps those things might become relevant.
But until that time, it's none of your damn business and I find your focus offensive. Please don't.
People objected to the word I used for non queer people, so I asked for alternatives that people would prefer.
So it is directly related to the topic and the linked article, but only from the standpoint of in vs out group.
It's not that I care what you (or anyone else) calls themselves. Whatever you (or anyone else, for that matter) choose is just fine with me (not that I have any say in the matter, just clarifying my point of view).
As I said, I don't speak for anyone else, so others ("people," as you put it) may well have objected.
I object not to the terms themselves, nor to others who choose to use those terms for themselves. Rather, I object to those terms being applied to me, and even more, that it be demanded that I use those terms to describe myself in this context.
You specifically asked (as I quoted, so it would clear, but I guess not) "maybe you feel better described by "gender or sexual majority"?"
And I explained that such labels/terms aren't relevant in this context, and that I find your focus on those labels/terms in this context to be irrelevant and your continued demands for folks to participate in your verbal strip tease (i.e., acquiescing to being outed -- which is what you were doing), when someone's gender identity and/or sexuality is irrelevant to the discussion.
IMHO, it was an offensive and obnoxious thing for you to do.
If you're still not clear, I'd be happy to explain (again) why invading the privacy of others (in a public forum, no less!) is objectionable.
Not you, specifically, but the aggregate group who are not lgbtq+?
No. You clearly don't.
I said:
I shan't repeat myself again.Your own identity is not necessary not germane to this. I had used the term cishet, without any judgement intended, and some objected to that.
A Venn diagram exists, people told me not to label one section cishet, and I'm asking "if not that, what label should I use instead?"
The set exists. How do we describe that set?
It's like saying, what type of Christian are you: practising or non-practising? A question that disregards the fact that many people don't consider that religion to be an accurate model of the world in the first place.
The correct analogy would be, "I'm a practicing Christian, but you don't call yourself that. What would you call the group that doesn't call themselves practicing Christians?"
I'm not asking "are you a twink or a bear" I'm asking if you belong to a group that doesn't identify as homosexual. If you think homosexuality is evil, you probably can still acknowledge that some people do identify themselves as homosexual.
Your point only exists for an extremely narrow group of people who deny that people identify as trans or homosexual. And for those folks, I'd probably have a separate conversation about, "you might consider it amoral, but you know there are people who call themselves gay, right?"
What do I call people? Steve or Helene or Bobby or Samuel.
Because they are individuals and deserve to be treated as such.
Fuck off asshole.
On a personal level, this reminds me of my own struggle to identify with the term "agender". At best, it's not incorrect. But it describes an aspect of myself that feels irrelevant to whatever context it's brought up in, almost to the point of being a category error. I am currently wearing a black shirt. Does this make me a black-shirt-wearer? Well, yes, but this tells you nothing about who I am. Better to describe me on a relevant axis: I am an engineer. I try very hard to be kind to everybody no matter what I think of them. I am an optimist. I enjoy sour beers. All of these are more relevant than asking what gender I identify with, because the fact of the matter is, I don't.
Extrapolate that to the disagreement between you and nobody9999 if you find it useful; I may have misunderstood the debate or nobody9999's point entirely and make no claim to represent their views.
I'm not interested in asking nobody9999 to share any details about their own identity, just asking them how they'd label that section of the Venn diagram.
Either label is probably wrong, of course. That said, I understand why labels / identifiers are used and needed. One thing to point out though, rejecting labels like cishet can easily be construed as "I'm normal, no need to label me", which in turn means you see other gender- and sexual identities as abnormal, which is the core of the problem.
(I'm making loaded and generalised statements, nothing personal to the commenter I'm replying to)
The main issue isn't the label, but that people perceive a label as a slur or an "othering", which is hurtful.
Cisgender, straight is commonly used.
Isn't a new word. It's just the sort of most prolific, "default" position of human so we don't really use it because it isn't relevant.
Heterosexual is a word, cisgender is a word, and both are 100% accurate descriptions of MOST people. Since MOST people are both of those things, we have cishet.
"Why does this exist?" you may ask.
Because sometimes we need to refer to the minority - as in, people who ARE NOT both cisgender and heterosexual. Or sometimes we need to refer to people who don't face societal challenges around their gender/sexuality - those people are cishet.
I think the fact you think gays don't have the authority to "create" words is weird. Um, why not? Why don't you want to use them? Will something... bad happen to you or is it more so an out of spite thing?
Also neither cisgender or heterosexual were created by the gays. Both created by cishet people. People just put them together, boom, cishet, easy. Not a new thing or cause for concern IMO.
You have several comma splices, just as many missing commas, some dubious capitalisation and a missing full stop or two. I personally find sloppy punctuation offensive but I don’t usually point it out. How do /you/ handle being corrected? These rules change a lot less often than once a decade.
Now, you may not like prescriptivist grammar, but if you don’t, I’d like to see how you justify one form of prescriptivism and not another.
And if you don’t like how I picked on your choice of a single word in your post: That is the behaviour you’re defending.
I'm not bothered by your post! Genuinely. I find it takes all types, and if there's a way I can improve to be better understood, that's a language win for me. I level up when corrected.
>When one becomes frustrated with the way a policy or guideline is being applied, it may be tempting to try to discredit the rule or interpretation thereof by, in one's view, applying it consistently. Sometimes, this is done simply to prove a point in a local dispute. In other cases, one might try to enforce a rule in a generally unpopular way, with the aim of getting it changed.
You're trying to apply prescriptivism consistently to the point of absurdity. In turn this causes you to reply to people who hold genuine views with a bad faith exaggerated offense at punctuation, just so you can illustrate your point, and that turns a genuine discussion into a something much less interesting.
In wiki culture, they call this POINT-y behavior: Taking rules too far in bad faith just to prove a point. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:POINT)
TL;DR: Please don't do that, it makes the discussion very annoying!
At first it's partly activist, and when you adopt it it means that many people won't understand you, think you're criticizing their use of the previous term, or think you're probably activist on other topics too, when you think you're using a normal, neutral expression.
So most people are sceptical and wait with adopting new terms until they're widespread.
The passive voice thing always gets me here. It omits who is doing the considering. It's not like some word suddenly is offensive. A small group of people decides the word is offensive and then they either succeed or not at dragging everyone else along with them.
"Is considered offensive" lends it a gravity that it doesn't deserve if you translate it: "some people whose opinions you may or may not value consider xyz offensive".
By I do sometimes fall back to the passive voice.
The morally virtuous new term that the experts have decided is the correct replacement is "golly gee willikers". Please use it.
Your suggestion suggests you are not discussing in good faith.
And yet you used it anyway, a microaggression which betrays your privilege. Be kind. Above all, be kind.
> Your suggestion suggests you are not discussing in good faith.
Too fucking hard to remember the current term, is it? Seems like you don't handle being corrected very well.
Responding as strongly and as angrily as you have suggests that someone in your past was needlessly rude or over correcting, and it's made you put up some walls.
Why?
(That you don't see any of them in official publications doesn't count for much in my opinion. Official publications try to avoid all negative emotive language.)
Once an unfashionable euphemism falls out of use, people gradually cease to recognise the offensive meaning which made it unfashionable.
If someone gets offended because I was looking for the cheese where it's traditionally been, then they can enjoy the offence that they imagined. Even if I went to the effort of consulting a dictionary before every communication it could not be updated quickly enough.
The general tendency of most people to favor the in-group probably also provides enough of an underlying reality to make it hard to "destigmatize" the various ways of calling someone part of the out-group.
I think this is just not true - the underlying concepts are constantly being destigmatized. I mean compare now to 50 years ago.
Whether the words helped this or not - not sure.
Accordingly, you need new words whenever the old ones become standard, since at that point they no longer serve the estranging/interventionist role.
Especially this "your membership in a group of people concerned to change" part, which is virtue-signalling at its best.
I have NEVER met someone using alternative language like "differently abled" who actually did something substiantial for the community or for a particular person. Almost all cases have a touch of patronisation.
I need nothing of it. If you cant call me disabled, you are part of the problem, not the solution.
Lets suffice that I find it pretty funny that you, a non-disabled person, tries to tell me that the way I prefer being called is "old-fashioned" and "bigoted", therefore invalidating my own preference.
I let this stand as it is. Readers can decide who is bigoted here.
Besides, its nothing new that non-disabled people tell the disabled how things are supposed to work. Thats called patronisation. And you are a great example of people I really dont want to be around.
I recall one such poster getting upset over the word 'Chinaman'. Something this Englishman, sharing an office with two Irishman, a Frenchman and a Dane, found rather bizarre, particularly as the chap complaining was not Chinese themselves!
Such virtue signalling is at its worst when used to pile-on a speaker or post for uttering some perceived slight, or daring to suggest an unpopular idea or political view. It is bad for open discourse, even open society, and needs to stop.
As I see it, the US - the first place with a supposed egalitarian bent on the cosmopolitan society - created a system whereby people from all backgrounds and ethnicites could interact in the public sphere without tripping each other's emotional wires - that is the basis for Political Correctness. Keep your baggage at home, and out in the real world and in the market you can interact with everyone as equals (so, Mike Munger's "the answer is trasaction costs!").
The system worked pretty well for a time (fine, it's called the 90s). The problem is that the edifice kept on being built up, as more voices raised more touchy subjects that needed to be sanitized in public, enough that it began to bother people. I think that as alternative means of communication allowed people to more be "themselves" in the digital, if not real, public domain, the discrepancy between public discourse and private thought became more glaring.
Now, for every system, there are those who naturally like to uphold norms, and these are the ones you say are "virtue signalling" - I think they're just norm upholders. But for the rest of us, it takes only one euphemism that hits us the wrong way to get us questioning the whole over-built edifice. The fact that one political side arbitrarily took it up as a cause, of course, made the other side all the more dogmatic in its application.
So it will be eventually torn down and replaced by something identical and the cycle will continue anew. ~fin~
I think the Englishman comparison is not very smart. With the same logic, it's fine to use pedophile to refer to someone because it's grammatically constructed similarly to audiophile and no one never complained when associated to the word audiophile. I don't think a pejorative word (recognized as such in all modern dictionaries) stops to be pejorative because it exists a similar construction that is not pejorative.
And I don't think you need to be the one accused to be a pedophile to be offended when you see someone uselessly accusing someone else to be a pedophile. (but again, I would probably not have reacted, and have given the benefice of the doubt to the interlocutor, assuming they were unaware of the pejorative connotation)
And yet "Chinaman" is considered derogatory. If you believe the Wikipedia page, it has been considered so since at least 1965 in British English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman
You might not consider it logical for "Chinaman" to be considered derogatory when similarly structured words like "Frenchman" are not, but the reality is that if you use the term then you will be evoking the current meaning.
> and needs to stop
The point of the article is that you can't stop the euphemism treadmill, no matter how emphatically you request it.
It's one of those words you certainly shouldn't be offended at finding in an old book, or not even if an elderly person uses it, but if a young person uses it then he's probably dug it up deliberately for questionable political reasons.
To me, this set of words would already lean negative and imply someone hopelessly devoted to a specific country, not someone of that nationality, even if "Chinaman" didn't also already have a pejorative history.
It's a bit similar to how some people just posit that "The Ukraine" or "The Congo" is somehow pejorative just because most countries don't have a definite article.
The term that does exist, Chinaman, already has its own pejorative sense. It doesn't need that from me.
All I'm saying is that these other words (again, words that I didn't "make up," but also that nobody actually uses) would sound negative too, and are the actual parallels to the term in the parent's example.
By using the name of the country rather than the demonym for its inhabitants, it implies some sort of preference for the country as country, to the degree that a person defines themselves by it, rather than a simple point of history about a person's ethnic heritage, over which the person had no control.
Not that any normal person thinks that there is anything negative with "some sort of preference for the country as country, to the degree that a person defines themselves by it". It's politically quite extreme to see that as "pejorative".
I'm having real trouble coming up with a single country that has the demonym "[Country name]man."
There is a meaningful difference between the name of a country and the term for someone from that country. The second is inherently neutral, because no one controls where they're born. The first connotes that someone defines themselves by their connection to the country as a country (or that the person calling them that sees that as their primary identity, subordinate to the identity of the country itself).
People who claim that "The Congo" is offensive don't say that because it's not the official name (which it is), I guess they just presume that there must be some colonial racist reason, and not just the fact that it's named after a river.
"Republic of the Congo", or "République du Congo" in French, "du" being a shortened form of "de le", "of the". Other French speaking republics just have "République de N".
Except it isn't. Not without "The Republic of ..." (or "The Democratic Republic of ..." if we're talking about that other much larger country the phrase usually refers to) in front. And given that there are two such countries -- there's absolutely no modern use case for "The Congo" as a country name in any case.
which is clearly untrue.
Yes, there are two Congos. Both of them have "the" in their official name:
-République du Congo (The smaller one, with Brazzaville)
-République démocratique du Congo (The larger one, with Kinchasa)
It is true that the official "Republic of the Congo" is typically shortened to just Congo" in everyday speech, my original point was just that there is nothing "racist" or colonial about say "The Congo". It is not called that as a slur because it's somehow lesser than e.g. Namibia, it is just that it's named after the Congo river. But I have heard many people who like to be offended have a vague idea that the "the" is somehow offensive because most countries don't have it.
As regards the river basin. When applied to the respective countries individually (and without the "Republic of" qualifier), which are after all the context we're talking about here (not the river basin) it has an entirely different connotation. And again, there's simply no modern use case for "The Congo", by itself, as a name for either of these countries.
Whatsoever.
What connotation is that exactly? Does "The Virgin Islands", or "The Hague" for that matter, also have that connotation in your mind?
I am again just saying that there is nothing racist about the "the" in "The Congo". It is just a natural way to shorten "Republic of the Congo". It might be unusual nowadays, but that does not mean that there is anything pejorative about "The".
"Use case" has nothing to do with it, nothing about language use is fully "rational" or "optimal". It is obviously _possible_ to make do without the article, but what I am getting at is the misdirected anger some people seem to feel towards it.
The connotation of intentionally ignoring their very, very, very clearly stated preference as to what their official name is. Neither of these countries refer to themselves as "The Congo" as such, and they've made it known that they would prefer that you not do so as well. That's all there is to it.
"Use case" has nothing to do with it,
Au contraire. Language is all about use cases.
It's use cases über alles, in fact.
A Dane, a Swede, a Norwegian (Norseman brings to mind beards and battle-axes), a German, a Welshman, a Luxembourger.
English is weird!
Source: An native English speaker of His Majesty the Kings English, not one of those weird leftpondian dialects :-)
It is usually easy to understand if you just look into it.
You can see virtue signaling in this behavior, and there may be a part of it, but that is not the only reason it is used and it's dicey to jump to the conclusion that virtue signaling can only be the main goal. The fact that you don't see these others goals or refuse to believe that they may be the main reason does not change the reality of the existence of these goals.
It's like people who are saying "if you say you prefer Linux over Windows, it's only because you are jealous of Windows popularity and want to feel different". Maybe it is, maybe it is not. But they just refuse to even consider that maybe the other person is not acting by jealousy.
> I have NEVER met someone using alternative language like "differently abled" who actually did something substiantial for the community or for a particular person. Almost all cases have a touch of patronisation.
That sentence sounds very strange to me: why on earth someone using alternative language like "differently abled" would suddenly be required to do something that you don't even blink an eye for people who don't use that language?
It feels like the virtue signaling resides in your eyes only: you are seeing someone saying X, you _invent_ that it is because they want to be seen as a knight helping the disabled people, and then you show that there is an incompatibility because they don't really act like a knight helping the disabled people.
But what if people using this language don't do it to be seen as a knight helping the disabled people. Then there is absolutely no incompatibility at all.
The fact that this incompatibility exists is even a clue that maybe this behavior has nothing to do with virtue signaling.
> And as a disabled person, I can tell you, I need nothing of it.
I think that the goal as described by the previous comment has nothing to do with you. The goal is to reshape the way of thinking "there is a hierarchy of 'good situation' with abled people on top" into "there are differences, with sometimes good situation and sometimes bad situation, but it's more complicated than that and simplifying the picture as a simple hierarchy is incorrect". The goal is not to please you, the goal is to avoid having a way of thinking that does not correspond to the reality.
It's the same reason why some people stop saying buzzwords like "artificial intelligence" when referring to a smartish complex algorithm composed of if conditions and no machine learning at all. They are not doing that to be fair to algorithm, they do that because there is a gain for them and for the society to not maintain misconceptions.
Writing a serious reply doesn't feel like a good use of my time. You have already demonstrated that you have no regard for the lived experience of minorities and prefer your pseudoanalytical explanations over everything a person from such an in-group could tell you.
The truth is, the story is much more complicated. But trying to explain that to you feels draining and useless, so I just stop here.
YOU are the one explaining what other have in their mind. I just tell you "maybe it's not so simple".
And you get all virtue signaling, explaining that everyone who dares not agreeing with you can only be a bad guy because you have a disabled get-out-of-jail-for-free card.
And that is not a "pseudoanalitical" explanation, that's sooo simple, if you don't get it, it's your problem. That's very easy: I don't call "artificial intelligence" an algorithm that is just a bunch of if-conditions, just because it's misleading. Others use "different abled" FOR THE SAME REASON. The fact that it does not affect you is irrelevant, you are not the reason they prefer to use a term they think (correctly or not, who cares) is better suited, and they don't do it to look good. It's very simple.
The first comment is saying that one reason to use that is just because some people think that the other term is misleading and reinforce a representation of the reality that does not correspond well to the reality.
You answer by saying it's virtue signaling and that somehow if they use this term and don't also do things for disabled people they are inconsistent.
How is that virtue signaling? Is using "Netherlands" instead of "Holland" virtue signalling by pretending they care about dutch people? If they say "Netherlands" but they also don't actively participate to dutch charities, is it inconsistent?
You are talking about deeper insight into daily communication between disabled and non-disabled people. What does it have to do with the fact that some people prefer to use a term that they think correspond better to the reality? If I prefer to say "disabled people" instead of "disobled people" (because I prefer to use a term that I consider better because I consider spelling mistake not ideal), how your deeper insight into daily communication between disabled and non-disabled people is relevant?
Well, I guess that if I tell you "I prefer not making spelling mistake", I am ablesplaining to you, and you are not at all using your disability by explaining that I'm a bad person for not saying "disobled" because you are disabled so you know best.
He's just pointing out that "differently" and "dis" have different connotations. You're not dis - abled. You ARE able to do things. And some things you have to do differently.
There are so many things I can not do independently, and cant do with external help either because that is not always aviable, that I definitely feel disabled, not differently abled.
All of you have been spoiled by leftist ideas have absolutely no idea what are you doing and how patronising you actually are.
Its my life, I decide what words are appropriate. If you have been spoiled by language whitewashing, the problem is you, and not me.
Look, all I'm saying is that the changing of these words ISN'T baseless and there IS some thought behind it.
Yes, you are disabled. But... you're not dis... abled. You ARE able to do things. That's not up for debate, so I'm not sure why you're arguing it. Will you really argue you're useless? No, you won't.
> I decide what words are appropriate
Absolutely not a soul on Earth is telling you this. Go ahead and drop the victim mentality, it makes you look really bad.
However, I think the parent tried (and seemingly failed) to convey the idea that the use of certain euphemism is intended to affect public opinion among the outsiders rather than the minority group in question.
In other words, it's not for disabled (or any other group) but the rest of the society, meant to change public opinion through removal (by avoiding use of terms that evoke those associations) of harmful stereotypes, thus the weird language. The meaningful purpose of virtue signalling is not to comfort oneself into how nice human one is, but to establish a societal norm by sending this "we're all considering ourselves decent folks here and we aren't looking down on $group, right y'all?" peer-pressurizing social message. Which is, of course, fake, but the idea is that given enough time it ends up becoming true. Generations change, young people don't have inherent biases, so they end up ingesting whatever is around them, which is the reason, I guess. Again, this is just my understanding of it trying to rationalize the idea (my logic is "it can't be just something stupid, right, someone must've thought it through?"), so I could be totally making things up.
Of course, I can't say this is all working as intended. Surely, not well, given how it feels offensive to the actual $group (like the example of calling a person disabled in this thread; or I've yet to see a Latin person who wouldn't frown at "latinx" linguistic nonsense, etc.), so it doesn't look like a great idea overall.
I have been privileged enough to only be discriminated based on my nationality and ethnic group (rather than more permanent things), so I have limited experience here. Just trying to figure it out and make an opinion of it.
Edit. Dolores Umbridge from HP is a brilliant caricature on them.
I also want to point out the inherent absurdity of referencing an admitted caricature as if it was somehow demonstrative, especially considering the cartoonish villainy of the caricature.
> Part of the role a phrase like “differently abled” plays is to estrange your base assumptions about disability and to signal the existence of and your membership in a group of people concerned to change the conditions around disability
Less euphemistically, you want to make other people think and act differently. And if disingenuous language policing or the threat of condemnation by said "group of people" gets the job done, that's just fine.
What you're doing is asinine because it attempts to cast the familiar as alien and ironically is an example of the behavior you describe - you're being disingenuous and trying to 'make other people think and act differently'.
I don't know how else to say this: someone trying to change your mind is not an attack. People disliking you because you behave like shit is not a conspiracy.
This is part of why this political language is so abrasive. Who are you (the "general you," not "you the person who posted this comment") to tell me what my current assumptions about the group are? It's incredibly presumptive and sanctimonious.
I don't know if this is a "healthy" process. Inevitable it may well be. But it doesn't change attitudes, it doesn't help the people involved and one issue I don't see talked about is that the quality of the language itself seems to drop through this process. "Crippled" has a certain pithiness and is a distinct word. "Differently abled" has many more syllables and verbal overlap with words like "different" and "able". We're shrinking the ability to describe things in a process that might literally be Orwellian.
If, a decade from now, someone comes up with a better term I might be whatever that is.
But I still am glad we've moved on past early 20th century labels and are trying new ones on. Some might not fit nicely, but they are progress generally.
I wonder how common this is with any minority. The majority gets to decide what to call you. Guessing they didn't ask first to see what you think, either. I would be wildly irritated to be in that position.
But also, pushing back against it sometimes get labeled as woke. Eskimo and Gypsy are both terms that were applied to groups without their choice. And some people are now preferring other terms that they do choose. (Eg Inuit or Roma)
It just seems so futile to have to keep coming up with new words for the same thing, when the new words will inevitably become slurs in the same way, at least if anyone uses them. So it's not like we can avoid the offence, it is just transferred to a new word. Wouldn't it be better to accept that some people will say mean things, and focus on learning to live with that, and on making people be less mean?
And sometimes we return to them. Queer is a label I use for myself that's a reclaimed slur. I know plenty of gay men who call themselves fags. Some disabled people use "crip" as a term of endearment. But usually these reclaimed slurs are for the exclusive use of the members of the community internally.
But also, don't call us crippled. (Some people with disabilities do reclaim that term.)
Likewise, I call myself queer, but don't call me queer unless you are also queer.
Language like this fascinates me, because not only does it evolve, there is insider and outsider use. The cishet community can use lgbtq+, and that describes the same group of people as queer, but it means something quite radically different. Queer is steeped in radical implication in a way lgbtq+ is not.
Nothing in my post is meant to judge you, reader, more to say, "wow! Language is fucking wild!" I'm excited to see where it goes over the remainder of my life.
In the same way that we say queer instead of "non-straight"
Or is it just because cishet was "created" by gay people, so therefore it's automatically bad and you don't want it?
I'll never understand this mentality. "no dude I'm normal don't call me that shit!!" Like... come on.
To be clear I'm not saying this is YOUR mentality 100%. But whenever is see people say this, almost every time, this is their mentality.
surveillance and dossier building - advertising
behavioral data gathering - telemetry
I'm sure there are more for recurring charges, dark patterns, predatory pricing and all the cleaned-up names associated with enshittification.
I don't know if you ran into this one but I was convinced to use 'allow list' and 'block list' over white/black list purely on the basis that its just a bit more descriptive. I sort of wish we could clean language up like this more regularly, just imagine a world where we didn't maintain the notion of an electrical current that flowed opposite to the flow of electrons. So tidy.
(Worth noting: something I picked up while trying to reboot my memory on this is that from an electrical engineering standpoint, it's actually not super-useful to think about current as "flowing electrons" unless you're dealing very specifically with a situation where electrons are jumping through air or a vacuum and it matters. In a battery, the flow is ions; in a hydrogen fuel cell, the flow is protons; in wires, sure, the flow is electrons, but the fact that what's really moving around and causes phenomena is charge concentration matters and, conveniently, conceptually covers all these cases, and as long as your concept of charge concentration is consistent it doesn't matter if you're considering the concentration to equalize by flowing from positive to negative or negative to positive, there's a symmetry to charge density minimization.)
That is a good point, but, it would still be really nice if the convention for current just so happened to match the flow of electrons through a wire since it is the common case. At least, I remember that being pretty disorienting for me at times in some electrical engineering classes. Wish I could remember something specific though!
Do appreciate you pointing out some counter examples though, always fun.
Like... You'll get the wrong answer if you think the electrons in a CRT go from the screen to the gun, or if it's positively-charged particles that are causing carbon deposition inside a vacuum tube.
But that actually turns out to be (for most people) a specialized context. I'm startled to discover (because I was in the same camp as you) that the math is so symmetrical that it really almost never matters how the physical charge-carriers are moving, since it's the change in electric field that is causing things to happen.
Why does there have to be a slave just because there's a master? That is just one very specific meaning of the word, out of several dozen, and in the git context it was pretty clear that it wasn't used in that sense, but rather something like "master copy". So the master to main renaming thing was especially silly.
You are unironically doing the thing I was talking about by not noticing that I already said that about git's master branch. Master/slave is also a pretty common phrase in computing when talking about hardware, and its a pretty ugly concept when applied to humans, so I'm also not terribly surprised people chose to change their default branch name even if the association is only tangential. You wouldn't be surprised if the old name was 'ScrapedCornea' and people didn't love it. But again, its bizarre that a shift from 'master' to 'main', which is shorter, provokes this response. Do you feel personally critiqued by it somehow? Genuinely curious.
I personally have much closer ancestors, that were tortured by the communists within living memory. What if I told you that for this reason the word "comrade" triggers me? Or in analogy with the github situation, if I asked people to stop wearing Che t-shirts? Would you say that was reasonable, or a sign of insanity?
As I said, "allow list" is more descriptive if you don't know the word whitelist in the sense that it's easier to guess its meaning the first time you see it. My point is that this is not generally considered important, just look at 100 random words, most of them would be hard to guess the exact meaning of, even if like me you studied classical languages.
Then out of respect I would would attempt to stop using it around you, And if enough people agreed with you we would probably mothball it in favor of something else.
This tendency is totally counterproductive, since it creates yet another barrier between the disabled and "normal" people.
I am blind. If you dont like that, stay away. But it is even more hurtful if I can feel your uncomfortableness through the language.