What was it, 10 to 20 years ago, people started to be noticeably nervous when they were coming near a description of my disability. It used to be so simple. I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short. But all of a sudden, people external to the community started to fumble around with "visually challenged", and all the nonsense variations of that in my native language. It is so weird, because it adds yet another layer of distance between "us" and the "normal" people. You can almost feel how the stumbling-word is making communication even more awkward. I (and almost all of my friends with a similar disability) make a point of letting people know that we actually prefer the word blind over everything else, and not even that does put people at ease.
It sounds a bit provocative, but it feels like that: The language terror they were subjected to has made them so unsecure that they actually dont want to hear that blind people have no issue with being called blind. They somehow continue to argue, sometimes not wanting to accept that and going on to use weird language.
Its a weird phenomenon. The longer I watch all of this, and I also mean the gender-language-hacks, I feel like this move has added to the distance between various groups, not made it smaller.
It is so condescending to believe your own language-police more then the person you are talking to. Yet, the peer pressure seems to be so high that this actually happens. Sad.
I see it as unintentional discrimination. It's treating the people they are relabeling as children that need the kind progressives to step in and save them. It's so condescending. Minorities don't need white Knights to save them, neither do the disabled. If an individual wants me to not refer to them as x because they find it offensive, no problem. But a group of academics should not be able to sit around and decide that a group as a whole needs saving. It very much forces otherness on people and to your point furthers the divide. it forces us to see them as different.
Side note, and this is completely off topic and I really mean this in the most positive way but you typing here has completely altered my perception of the need for following web standards for accessibility. I don't know any blind people in real life so really just assumed that accessibility standards really weren't worth the effort as they wouldn't make a difference. But here you are reading and responding in a manner that's probably better than I do. I am 100% on board now. You opened my mind today, thanks for that.
Web accessibility is indeed a very important thing for people like me. I am aware we are a very small minority with rather special needs in this regard, but believe me, investing in accessibility and therefore allowing people with visual and motor disabilities to interact with the digital world can have unexpectedly wonderful consequences for those benefiting from it. It is not often that I manage to pull tech people into this topic such that it actually lasts, but the few I know have made quite a difference. I am pretty thrilled to hear I might have sparked an interest in web accessibility in you. Thanks for caring! Its a wonderful rabbit hole.
I'm only colour-blind, but I am too, benefitting from accessibility work meant primarily for blind people.
And so do the elderly. Which will be all of us in the future (except those who plan to live fast and die young). Humanity is getting older and older on average, too.
Thats right. My girlfriend works for an assistive technology reseller. A growing number of their customers are elderly people who end up using technologies designed for the blind to keep on communicating. iOS with VoiceOver comes to mind. This was designed for the blind. But a determined elderly person whoes vision has deteriorated enough can also use it to avoid being cut off from everything.
I'm interested as well. I run a small science club for kids, mainly coding and electronics. Accessibility and being more inclusive is a very old bullet point on my long list of things to do, but I never found a place to start. Do you have any recommendation on where to learn this?
Hard question, because the field so diverse. In a sense, accessibility is much more then just trying to make computers useable for the blind. At a fundamental level, it is about making software flexible enough to be used in different modalities. People with very little motor capabilities are quite capable of looking at a screen, but they need help moving the mouse and perhaps a good predictive onscreen keyboard to be able to type. Blind people on the other hand are mostly quite content with a standard keyboard, but they need a totally different way of output, like tactile braille or synthesized speech. For the output part, it boils down to having an API which makes a third party app (like a screen reader) able to traverse the logical structure of what the application is presenting on-screen. That is mostly a sort of tree which reflects which widget contains what, and the different types of content. Such an API, however, is not only required for screen readers, but also very useful for things like automated testing, for instance. So a web automation or testing framework could actually be written on top of the accessibility APIs, and sometimes actually is. I am rumbling about this to get you in the right mindset. Its so hard to not see the forest because of all the trees around...
That said, if we're talking about web accessibility, the obvious recommendation is the WAI WCAG. Maybe not the best reference for learning on how to implement things, but its a good start.
Depending on the platform you're at home with, there are screen readers (NVDA, Orca, BRLTTY) which are open source and can be studied. On the user side, and on the "how is this implemented" side.
Installing NVDA on Windows and turning the monitor off is a good way to get your feet wet. It might feel strange at first, but you will notice that things can actually get done this way. Its also a good way to test a website if you have no specific accessibility knowhow yet. Just try to navigate and read its contents.
> [...] and turning the monitor off is a good way to get your feet wet.
Is it weird that I, as someone with normal sight, had never thought of that as a simple way of testing whether your software (and the whole operating system together with it) works correctly with screen readers? It's like there's some sort of unconscious bias which links typing on a computer with its monitor being turned on.
And I lived through the times when most computers didn't come with any pointing device, which led to most software back then being accessible to keyboard-only users (notable exceptions being things like Paintbrush, which required a mouse), so I understand the link between the lack of a device and software being designed to work well without that device.
There seems to be a quite widespread confusion regarding input and output devices when it comes to assistive technologies for the blind. I am being asked a lot how my "braille keyboard" works. Even by people from the tech industry. Thats when I typically gently explain that a good secretary doesn't need to look at their keyboard, the faster you type, the more you need to type blindly. Most assistive technologies for the blind are about output, and not about input... But it is frequently being confused.
> In a sense, accessibility is much more then just trying to make computers useable for the blind. At a fundamental level, it is about making software flexible enough to be used in different modalities. [...] For the output part, it boils down to having an API which makes a third party app (like a screen reader) able to traverse the logical structure of what the application is presenting on-screen. [...] So a web automation or testing framework could actually be written on top of the accessibility APIs, and sometimes actually is.
I agree. If the features are well-designed, then they can be good for many uses, whether or not you are blind.
You could also add pronouncing file (especially if a document is using unusual words), it is useful if you are blind and using synthesized speech, but also if you are not blind and do not know how is the word pronounced then you can easily learn. (Likewise, if you watch television then you can put on caption in case you do not know how to spell some unuusal word (such as someone's name). Captions could also be useful for a "caption scrollback" menu to display prior captions in a list, although I have never seen this implemented, but I think it would be useful.)
Another situation where speech synthesis is often used (by people who are not blind) is GPS-based navigation systems. They often pronounce the street names wrong, so adding data for pronouncing, and then implementing that properly, would be better.
(I have mentioned before that I think that adding a "ARIA view" (with user-defined CSS) might be a best way to make a consistent visual display which uses ARIA instead of the visual styles defined by the web page author (widgets, etc can also be used, and would also be consistent instead of each web page having its own widget styles). However, I have not seen such a thing implemented in a good way.)
I'm currently debating with myself whether I should create GUI programs (with the main code written in Rust) using Qt or Tauri. Tauri is a Rust based GUI framework based on a webview, similar to Electron, although it can use the OS's native web renderer [1]. Do you think one would be better than the other with regards to accessibility? Or is it mostly a question of how I, as a programmer, make use of the tools? For context, those are currently just small tools and utilities I make on my own and provide as Open Source.
I don't currently have Windows. Is there a good way for me to test accessibility on Linux? As a fallback, I will get myself Windows once I port the tools to Windows, so I could test accessibility then.
I have no experience with webview based local apps and their accessibiility, nor did I ever look at Tauri. So to assess if it works, I'd have to check. I am a bit reluctant to recommend Qt because they have let me down in the past at times, but all in all, Qt is mostly accessible, even cross-platform.
Which brings me to your second question. Linux has a GUI accessibility API as well, the AT-SPI. GNOME Orca is the screen reader to use on Linux. If your distro configures things right by default, you should be able to access your Qt application with Orca as a screen reader on Linux.
I recommend taking a look at https://teachaccess.org/ as a starting point. They are non profit focused on bridging the gap between accessibility and education.
I think they are mostly focused on college level exercises, but if your kids are doing coding I'd imagine their tutorials would be something to take a look at: https://teachaccess.org/initiatives/tutorial/
As a complete aside for anyone reading this post, I think of improving accessibility as the "curb-cut effect", curb cuts (those ramps on sidewalks while cross streets) were created to improve urban access for those in wheel chairs, but also make it easier to use strollers, bikes, carts, and really for everyone walking in a built environment. When we as technologists make design decisions to make things more accessible I believe we end up with better products for everyone.
After reading Ian Hickson's proposal[1] to kill HTML and replace it with proprietary, binary content structure, I'm starting to think accessibility APIs might end up being the future of open, interoperable web publishing.
One way to look at accessibility is that it’s a side effect of a well designed data exchange format. The same type of semantic document structure that let screen readers work, or increasing font size, is allowing all kinds of advantages to the user, such as adblocking and customizations. Every year that the state of software and apps deteriorate further, I am more and more impressed how the initial web struck such an incredible balance of all facets of a healthy software ecosystem. It stands as one of the marvels of the world, imo, that it remains virtually the same today, surviving the most vicious attacks on openness by both mega corps and governments alike.
Hey man, what software do you recommend for screen reading? I'm trying to test my websites on accessibility and I've tried JAWS and NVDA so far (while using Lynx to navigate it) but found them a bit confusing. I'm not sure how one would use them in practice to navigate a site like Hacker news, which is relatively simple.
I am not quite sure I understand. If you're really trying to use JAWS or NVDA to work with lynx on the web, you are mixing things up. There are basically two worlds for blind users: the "old" text-only terminal interfaces thing which started in the good old DOS days at least for me) and was kept alive in Linux terminal applications. And the GUI world, where you have a screen reader interact with the various elements an application is putting on-screen. In the first world, the screen reader basically just sees a grid of characters. In the second world, the screen reader needs to reconstruct a text representation from the widget info it can obtain.
In other words, if you want to work on the web, with something like NVDA as a screen reader, you want to use Firefox or some other modern browser, not lynx.
If you are like me, spending 99% of your time in tmux, lynx is a nice thing to use, but there is nothing really accessibility specific here. Lynx is just a terminal application. And if you are a skilled blind user used to dealing with plain-text grid-stuff, you can use it just fine for whatever it still works for...
> If an individual wants me to not refer to them as x because they find it offensive, no problem.
It's a pretty big cognitive load though, to remember what everyone finds or doesn't find offensive. This is what bothers me about the recent obsession with pronouns - I have enough trouble remembering people's names; and now I am also asked to remember how to modify my grammar or lexicon when in vicinity of a given person? That's the complexity I don't want.
We have externalized what used to be an internal issues
Offense is a you problem, not a me problem. We have abandoned the axiom of "sticks and stones" and replaced it with "words are violence" or even worse "silence is violence"
Today it no longer enough to be "tolerant" you have to actively affirm, support, and validate everything about everyone at all times and support their emotional state no matter the practicality or reality of the situation.
> Offense is a you problem, not a me problem. We have abandoned the axiom of "sticks and stones"
I think you miss the point of "sticks and stones". The point is not that it's ok to say whatever you want to anyone else. The point of "sticks and stones" is not to let other people bring down your self-esteem.
Other people will intentionally try to denigrate you. They'll call you "stupid". They'll call you "ugly". Or they may call you a racial slur. That's all unacceptable. That's a "me" problem for the speaker. The point of "sticks and stones", on the other hand, is to resist internalizing these external insults and degradations. It's to put on a virtual suit of armor to protect you from verbal attacks — and let's be clear, they're real attacks.
You don't just "accidentally" beat someone with physical sticks and stones, right? The intention is to hurt, to break their bones, as it were. That's the analogy, with intentionally hurtful words.
> Today it no longer enough to be "tolerant" you have to actively affirm, support, and validate everything about everyone at all times and support their emotional state no matter the practicality or reality of the situation.
That’s absolutely not true though - you only have to affirm/support/validate people’s identities and emotional states when their identity/emotions aligns with the zeitgeist; if those things contradict the zeitgeist, then affirmation/support/validation is somewhere between optional and evil.
Most definitely not. Of course people need to work on themselves to avoid being offended.
But if you communicate with other people, it's because you want to achieve something. Probably not offending the target (or else fuck you I guess ;-)). So, usually, offense gets in the way, so you should care about not offending your target. And beyond this, as human beings, we usually care not to hurt other human beings.
It's a we problem.
> no matter the practicality or reality of the situation.
Do you have example of this? Of course you are expected to show some empathy/sympathy, but I've never seem people impose unrealistic expectations.
How about the push to rename words in technology that have been in use for decades, like changing the default git repo from master to main.
or the parent comment I replied to originally -- "This is what bothers me about the recent obsession with pronouns - I have enough trouble remembering people's names; and now I am also asked to remember how to modify my grammar or lexicon when in vicinity of a given person? " for which there is not even any social indicators of this, and for a given person could change at any given time from week to week or day to day. A person that changes their pronouns daily seems to me to have an unrealistic expectation that people will be able to keep track of that.
> Some people adopted main, some people kept master
Some people used “trunk” since well before Git existed. If ever there was an example of how the umbrage at renaming things was baselessly manufactured, master -> main has to be right up there.
Have you come across anyone who changed their pronouns daily and expected you to keep track of it?
It annoys me how often this discussion gets bogged down in weird hypothetical scenarios. In my experience, people who use nonstandard pronouns (or pronouns that you might not guess from their appearance) are completely reasonable about it. They only ask that you make a genuine effort to remember the correct pronoun choice – which is not very much to ask. It's certainly no more work than, say, remembering the correct pronunciation of their name.
I might add that almost anyone will be ok with singular 'they', if you're ever unsure, as it is gender neutral.
I have met people like this. And heard someone correct someone else for using it wrong. In fact, when during introductions, this person said their pronoun so loudly that I forgot their name (partly because it made no sense to put two pronouns after a name, so it spent a lot of time trying to parse the grammar, as I had just recently moved to a very Progressive city and it was the first time I had encountered it personally).
There is another group I am in that has name tags and there are stickers with pronouns I've never even heard of (something like ver/ver, xe,xer, etc.).
I cant imagine ever getting to the point where I care enough what people call me to make a big deal out of it. I work with people that have been saying my name comedically wrong for months now and I couldn't care less. I have a couple other people that think my last name is my first name and call me by that. Its hilarious. Imagine getting upset or aggressive with someone just because they don't remember the pronouns you made up. That's a you problem, not a me problem.
I don't know the name's of 75% of the people I work with (I work with a 100+ people a week) and I really have no time or inclination to make the effort. If someone makes up pronouns that don't correspond to their image they are going to get mad at me because I am pretty much incapable of remembering their name let alone their pronouns. If I remember, cool I will use them but I'm really not going to spend hours practicing. Its not an intentional insult, I want everyone to be happy, I just don't have the effort or inclination in me to expend on it.
So many ifs in this thread! It sounds like no-one has ever got really angry with you in reality for using the wrong pronouns, right? I’ve never experienced anything other than a polite correction. The person you’re replying to also doesn’t describe any such experience. They said (1) that someone they met loudly emphasized their preferred pronouns and (2) that they went to an event where some people put neopronouns on their name badges.
Those don’t sound like people who are changing their preferred pronouns daily, unless I’m misunderstanding. You’re just talking about people who use non-standard or difficult-to-guess pronouns.
The more times I read through your story the less there is to it. Someone introduced themselves, said their pronouns, and you didn’t remember their name. Ok, so what?
Neopronouns are an interesting case, but my previous comment about ‘they’ applies. It’s gender neutral, so use ‘they’ if you forget which more specific pronoun is applicable.
To some extent this is a hill I’m willing to die on. Singular they is pretty entrenched usage now, and as it implies nothing about its referent’s gender, I don’t see how someone could legitimately object to being referred to in that way.
However, if someone tells me that they don’t want me to refer to them using singular they (something which has never once actually happened to me outside of arguments on the internet!), then I would respect their wishes.
If you live in an English speaking country, listen closely for a week or two. You’ll probably find that people around you are already (without conscious intention) using singular they to refer to individuals of known gender.
I also wonder if you might not be undermining your own line of argument elsewhere in the thread. If you get to be fussy about being referred to using singular they (which is certainly unobjectionable from a grammatical and semantic point of view in modern English), then presumably everyone else gets to be picky about their pronouns too.
The singular they is entrenched when you don't know who the person was ("I hope they realize they left their umbrella here and come back and get it.") It is not entrenched at all for referring to an individual who is standing right there.
I recall being contacted by a distressed neighbor who had been referred to as "they" in a thread on NextDoor. She has a name that could be male or female (it's short for different things), but her photo was unmistakably female. She was offended that someone referred to her as "they" and asked me if her photo looked at all male.
I would also imagine that someone who is presenting as a particular gender and wishes to be referred to as that gender could also be offended to be referred to as "they" because it could imply that the person is in-between, and not successfully presenting as their desired gender.
Lastly, people who are unaware of the changes in pronoun usage (older people, people who don't interact with people in liberal enclaves) may be confused by usage of they. They may think you're talking about multiple people, for example.
It is in fact quite common (at least in some parts) to use singular they for people of known gender. I hear it all the time here in London. Here’s an abstract that covers some of the patterns of variation: https://www.colorado.edu/event/cuny2019/sites/default/files/... There’s even an example in Shakespeare: “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend.” It would clearly be ok to use ‘his’ here, but we find ‘their’ nonetheless.
> could also be offended to be referred to as "they" because it could imply that the person is in-between
‘They’ is gender neutral; its use implies nothing about a person’s gender. If someone gets offended anyway then the simplest solution is obvious - use their preferred pronoun. But taking offense at singular they doesn’t seem to be something common, at least in my experience. It’s certainly the option that’s least likely to cause serious offense if you can’t remember (or were never told) a person’s preferred pronouns.
If we’re ok with cis people being fussy about being referred to using singular they, then presumably we must also allow trans or non-binary people to be fussy about their own preferred pronouns.
> [older people] may be confused
Confused != offended. But singular they has such a long history that I think such confusion is rather unlikely in practice. (Are older people confused by the Shakespeare quote above?)
> taking offense at singular they doesn’t seem to be something common
That's probably because most people don't refer to people as "they" except when specifically asked to. If people went around using "they" as the standard pronoun when referring to known people, there would be much more offense.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree on that point. I often hear 'they' used in that way and have not see anyone take offense to it. Nor can I see any logical reason why people should take offense. There are plenty of languages where pronouns are gender neutral (e.g. spoken Chinese). People who speak these languages seem to do ok without constantly explicitly referencing each other's gender. There's a huge difference, both logically and emotionally, between misgendering someone and simply not making reference to their gender.
By the way, I am totally fine with not using singular they to refer to people who are genuinely offended by it. I just have not actually encountered any such person outside the class of 'argumentative people on the internet'. For this reason I think that 'use singular they if unsure' is good, though not infallible, advice.
> There's a huge difference, both logically and emotionally, between misgendering someone and simply not making reference to their gender.
Referring to someone as a "they" would be considered misgendering to a lot of people. It is not "not making reference to their gender" because the vast majority of people who want to be referred to as "they" are not cisgender. Referring to someone in this way suggests that you think they are not cisgender.
> I just have not actually encountered any such person outside the class of 'argumentative people on the internet'.
The neighbor who approached me after having been referred to as "they" was not an argumentative person on the internet. She was someone (who lives in a very liberal area, BTW) who was perplexed and offended to have been referred to that way.
I see what you mean, but I think it's slightly the wrong analysis on a linguistic level. 'They' doesn't generally introduce a presupposition of non-binarity (either semantically or via pragmatic inference). If it did, it would be hard to account for the innumerable examples of 'they' being used with unambiguously masculine and feminine quantificational antecedents.
For this reason I think that people who are offended by being referred to by 'they' are wrong to be offended. I think they're wrong in a way that, say, a trans woman is not wrong to be offended if someone insists on using 'he'. In the former case, the person may feel that they are being misgendered – but only on the basis of a dodgy linguistic analysis. Of course, we should accommodate people's pronoun preferences, regardless of whether we agree with their underlying logic in any given case.
The story about your neighbor doesn't really make sense to me. Surely it occurred to her that the other forum poster might not have cared much what her gender was, or have paid much attention to her photo, or simply didn't care to take a guess even if she appeared clearly female. To interpret this as intentional misgendering seems a bit nuts. If she was simply worried about whether she appeared clearly feminine in the photo, then that's an understandable anxiety, but one that has little to do with singular they. (If singular they were off limits then I guess the poster might have used 'he' instead, which hardly seems better.)
> For this reason I think that people who are offended by being referred to by 'they' are wrong to be offended
My understanding is that these days, we are not allowed to opine on whether others are wrong to feel offended. In modern parlance, I'd say that you don't understand why they're offended. It seems you're trying very hard not to, considering that this term is not the preferred term of reference for practically anyone who is cisgender.
Are we not? I’m doing it right now and no-one has come to arrest me yet.
If the best you can do is tell me that I have to accede to the ineffable and indefinite reasons for your neighbor taking offense, then I suppose the discussion is over. (Of course I do accede in practice - I’m not going to refer to her as ‘they’ just to be a dick.)
If you really believe that people are entitled to be arbitrarily offended by pronouns, then you can have no objection to trans or non-binary people being arbitrarily fussy about their use. I mean, I’m “woke” by HN standards and am all in favor of respecting people’s pronoun preferences. But even I don’t believe that the subject is entirely in the realm of subjective feelings of offense and beyond rational discourse.
The point in this case was simply that singular they isn't a recent phenomenon. This is relevant when considering the (probably incorrect) claim that singular they is confusing for older generations.
In any case, my mention of Shakespeare was an aside and not crucial to the overall argument of my post. So it is arguably you who are missing the point.
Nice example. So the photo should be enough to infer the gender, and the person somehow expected that, failing it, was offended. Very nice. Imagine how a blind person must feel, in this social minefield? Thats exactly a problem we have. Given unspecific voices and unusual names, we are left pretty much out in the cold regarding how to address someone. We cant just look at the body or clothing.
I would not call anyone the N-word but would ask for a brown paper bag if I needed it at the grocery store. I have personally never met someone that is offended by the use of eg. colors as a concept but yet some people are trying to remove them from language.
You can name a branch master on git to your hearts content. We still have branches named master. We still have stuff we refer to as "whitelist" even though that was never an accurate descriptor for it in the first place.
This shit isn't banned. Nobody stops you from using them.
Companies now have "inclusive language" policies. There are dashboards that track team compliance and people that cheer this stuff on.
Master branch gets renamed to main meanwhile one can freely talk about how they used their MasterCard to buy a new Jazzmaster guitar that they keep in their master bedroom with a Master lock on it and they're almost done with the master of their new album showing off their mastery of musical and production that they learned taking lessons on MasterClass. Did I mention there's a cover of Master of Puppets?
It would be unconstitutional in the US to ban it, the question or comment thread is not about being illegal to use the word..
The issue the social pressure against these terms, and the ever changing landscape one political segment of the population has in being forever offended by everything
This entire comment thread should be a master class in logical fallcies as every reply shifts the goal posts back and forth....
Which i suspect is the end goal as that way no one actually have to address the underlying issues of compelled / socially enforced speech and the ongoing attacks on free expression on top of the ever shrinking mental health of the population has society coddles people into believing everyone else has to manage an individuals mental health instead of having to harden your own mind and come to terms with the fact the life is rarely fair, kind, nor do people (nor should) about your "feelings"
> This shit isn't banned. Nobody stops you from using them.
Speak for yourself. I had a PR rejected because I named a variable `blacklist` and was unaware that it's now considered a social faux pas. Of course, changing it to `blocklist` was simple enough, but wasted a couple hours because I had to ping the person again after finding out the PR was rejected, fixing it, retesting the code to make sure it didn't break stuff, pushing the changes, waiting for those tests to rerun, and then finally waiting for the person to re-review the code.
It feels a bit hypocritical to make this sort of proclamation on a social media site with extremely strict moderation.
Almost as though this isn't as simple a topic as "stick and stones" and that everyone has different tolerances for what they'll put up with depending on the setting and context.
> I am also asked to remember how to modify my grammar or lexicon when in vicinity of a given person?
No? Same grammar regardless of who is near, just need to remember which pronouns to designate which people, which:
- is the intuitive one for most people
- the asked pronoun for the few people who have pronouns that don't match your intuition.
(I also have troubles with remembering names, but pronouns are fine)
And for not implying a gender when speaking of someone for who we don't the gender, it's a constant exercise that also does not depend on the vicinity of a given person.
I work with maybe 100 people on a consistent basis. I probably know 25 of their names. Many of these interactions are random one offs, large meetings, etc. Many of them are foreign (to me) compounding my difficulty with their names. In addition I'm remote so can't associate names and faces, everyone is just white text on a black background. If any portion of this group started requesting I use varied pronouns I would probably lose my job in short order. Not because I don't care but because I am so incredibly busy I simply don't have the mental reserves to do it. Currently I am regularly working weekends and until 4 in the morning. I'm burnt. To expect me to somehow remember people's pronouns is a mission impossible.
I don't remember individual interactions with many of my coworkers at all, they all blur together.
If work wants me to do it then they'll need to reduce my workload by half just so my mind can absorb it.
You situation doesn't seem very healthy regardless of the topic at hand. I hope you'll be able to find a way to get a lighter workload.
Remote too, but I met most people in person at least once, we use avatars, and definitely don't work with 100 people.
That said I know a few trans people, the number of people I know with pronouns that don't match the name is 0. The number of people wanting the equivalent of they in my language is so small I can remember it easily.
Why would you need to know someone's pronouns just to speak to them.
This is what I do not get, these pronouns refer to someone in the 3rd person and do not affect your conversation with them in anyway. They could easily be referring to you in all sorts of derogatory manner, worse than that of the wrong pronoun, "Dickhead Dave". etc. etc.
I myself have a name that's most used with the opposite gender, I am reminded of this atleast on a weekly basis by others in society. Them accidentally referring to me as the wrong gender does not bother me in the slightest, firstly they did not know/it's not out of disrespect and secondly, why should it matter? What is wrong with being a woman if I am a man and vice versa?
Unless someone is publishing something about someone, there is very little need to know this upfront. If interactions are frequent, you can tell them if they didn't already know as your bond would be deeper. And if it's an issue you can tell them.
It's much like the whole idea of cultural misappropriation, a twisted idea that basically encourages segregation/apartheid. It's as simple as don't be a dickhead about someone's culture (don't demean it) is the common sense, age old and correct solution, not that new thing.
They requires effort... or just using they left and right for everyone, who needs pronouns when they exists anyway? Or better yet, avoid using pronouns by using the name over and over.
That is what I do, not he, not she, not it, not especial ones. Only they, they supremacy.
Repeating the name over and over would be cumbersome.
I would agree with always using a genderless pronoun, the gender should almost never matter, but I would probably be in for endless debates if I started to do this now.
I agree that would be an actual progressive agenda. But people wanting me to call them with another pronoun where I can no longer use biological cues is just cementing gender roles. Because if I present as a man but say I am a woman you just also gotta accept that since a woman does not need to conform to some societal gender role. If a guy dresses up like a woman he can still be a he, maybe he just likes skirts and nail polish. If a woman can be whatever she wants what does being a woman even mean except biology. If you want to assume a gender role previously tied to sex it clearly reinforces the idea that gender roles are an actual immutable category. How you can at the same time also hold the belief that biology is not doesn’t make any sense to me.
Maybe it is the just deserved revenge on a society that ties so much to sex and gender roles that logically has no relation to it. I am talking about things like job expectations or assuming competence at random skills, division of domestic responsibilities etc. I cannot believe though that this fixation on gender identity continues forever. It just doesn’t seem like a sensible end state.
> But people wanting me to call them with another pronoun where I can no longer use biological cues is just cementing gender roles
I believe there's more to this. IIUC, for some (most?) trans people, there's actually something, probably related to their biology, that makes them feel as the gender they were not assigned at birth. They have may look like one gender, but feel like the other one: gender dysphoria [1].
These people might be fighting more for solving this issue than for getting rid of the gender roles. Some would actually transition to the other sex for this, though I would expect trans people to also be more familiar (and sensitive?) to these gender identity questions, since they had to think about them.
Would gender dysphoria be less of an issue in a society that would not have such gender-assigned roles? Open question for me.
Now, it would be best if a trans people could directly speak about this, because this stuff is mostly theoretical for me, I haven't experienced it first-hand.
Your understanding is largely right, though I'd expand "look like one gender" to "be perceived and treated as one gender". I regularly confuse the hell out of people with my obviously feminine name and appearance and very deep voice.
> Would gender dysphoria be less of an issue in a society that would not have such gender-assigned roles? Open question for me.
Depends on the person, I think. Many trans people still would. I probably would've just shaved a bunch of body hair off and started wearing skirts and been done with it.
As for pronouns, "he" is just another sound people use to refer to other people. It has no inherent meaning beyond what we ascribe to it. I don't use it because society does ascribe a lot of meaning to it that doesn't apply to me - the same sort of feeling a man would get from being called "she". If genders weren't so much of a thing in society, I can't imagine myself caring nearly as much, though maybe in that world we'd all use the same pronoun anyway.
But there's a whole spectrum of trans people - in the same way you don't really grok dysphoria, I don't really grok e.g. genital dysphoria, so I can't and don't intend to speak for anyone else here.
I have a random question and I really mean no offence by it, I just want to get the opinion of a transexual person on something I have wondered. I know this question is out of left field. My apologies for asking but you are the only trans identifying person in the thread and are answering questions. Please feel very much in your rights to ignore me, I really do mean no offence with the question. I will not take your answer as representative of trans people as a whole.
Do you think people can be trans racial? Should society be accepting of it? For example a white person identify as black and shade their skin to pass? Why or why not?
Again feel free to ignore me, I'm not going to argue with your response I'm just curious about your perspective as you have a very different life experience than me. I am not trans anything its just a random thing I have pondered occasionally and wanted to get a trans persons opinion. I know its a loaded question so again feel free to ignore me.
I take no offense to respectfully asked questions, just as a general principle.
I have no idea, though. I've never considered that before, or even heard of it. It's hard for me to comprehend why anyone would care what race they are, but also holds up the hands of a very obviously white person
I see no reason to not let people do whatever makes them happy, though, even if I don't understand it. That's all I ask of other people for gender, no reason I shouldn't extend that courtesy to other people.
In English, "they" has two main purposes: Theoreticals where sex doesn't matter, and as a gentle nudge to the person you're talking to that you don't really know the person you're talking about. That second one is completely lost when you just use "they" for everyone.
Though I haven't felt the need for this so far, nothing comparable in French, annoying to have to stop to say the equivalent of "he or she, btw?". I guess we could use iel now. Still sounds new and weird to most people but it might become familiar at some point.
I've seen people using -@ as a suffix in Spanish to cover both the -a and -o forms of gendered words. I have no idea how it's pronounced, and it's probably comically inconvenient in actual use, but I have to admit it looks mildly clever.
I can't speak towards how other people, particularly minorities or the disabled think, but, as a woman, I hate the unintentional "othering" of people trying to do the right thing. I am typically the only woman at work, and people will often correct others who use terms like "guys" with statements like "guys or girls". I understand that they are doing it with good intentions and don't get angry, but to me it just serves to drive home the point that I am different. I am not like the others.
As a "minority" I completely agree with you. IMO, the White Knights target the "others" for an opportunity to virtue signal. It got old after the first time it happened.
I think that's not the only reason, sometimes not a reason at all.
Instead, 1, sometimes, someone is looking to make a career, or get a job, make money. And then, in identity politics, they might see an opportunity. Career, status, money then being a goal, and any division a side effect.
And, 2, I'm not saying that identity politics is or would always be bad or anything like that. So many unfairness in the world, to try to correct.
Well, it's a newish power niche that's getting exploited.
(One (postmodern) interpretation is that it's yet another "society of control" in crisis. Basically, the old tools that provided stability (social conventions, morals, beliefs/prejudices) all used to look like big formalish institutions, from family-school-factory-military-prison, and you were either in the system or completely out of it. But as this system of systems post-WWII has "eaten the world" it's now bound to face its own limitations, hence the crisis. Hence all the reforms, real and so-called ones.)
The niche is (was) that most people has (had) only a super basic over-simplistic belief about language, which could be summed up as "something something the n-word". Instead of the more correct "when talking to/about someone it's very disrespectful to call them names they don't like".
In general, creating division between classes, races, religious groups presents opportunities for individuals to gather power by taking up the cause for one group. By establishing an “other” you have an enemy to rally support for your leadership. This is the basis of power for every demagogue from the Cleon in Athens to Joe McCarthy and the American Red Scare. This is also a core theme in Orwell’s 1984.
In the context of the OPs topic, there are those who honestly are trying to improve the world, but many people have new found careers and political power created by the division on both the Right and Left.
I mean, this sets off my satire alarms but wouldn't that be a worthy goal? We can cynically deride all attempts to connect humanity as worthless hippy mumbo jumbo, and while I think perfect adherence would be impossible, I think a step or two in that direction is both possible and beneficial for us. This cynical attitude (assuming satire) is exactly the type of thing preventing us from making that kind of progress.
Call me a cynic but I am all for that. And afterwards you encounter the flat earthers and the holocaust deniers and the Putins and Alex Jones of the world and all kinds of other extremists in all kinds of extremes of all directions. And then it's not so simple.
While partially true, what most fail to see is that identity politics is played by virtually everyone. It’s just “your” side is the right approach and “not really identity politics”.
Identity politics has been the bedrock of American politics since before the Mayflower Pilgrims[1] landed at Plymouth rock, and hasn't ever stopped for even a day. Any claims of recency says a lot about the speaker rather than reality.
1. That they were "pilgrims" is enough evidence. All the jey moments in American history are underpinned by "identity politics": the the 13 colonies, manifest destiny, expansinf west, the declaration of independence, slavery, civil war, reconstruction - all of it.
The absolute worst incarnation of this is "latinx". Don't worry latin world, the english speaking world is here once again to tell you how backwards your entire language and culture is! The absolute height of "offensive sensitivity" in my opinion.
> But a group of academics should not be able to sit around and decide that a group as a whole needs saving
If this isn't one of the core problems with every aspect of society...
>It's treating the people they are relabeling as children that need the kind progressives to step in and save them.
It also help give the later a role, some power over others (policing various such language and issues, using it against their enemies -out of good nature of course, sure), and sometimes, a full career...
I think that people feel increasingly alienated. They feel bad so they search for their special "community". In doing that they alienate themselves further from average person. They create terminology and adopt language for their niche with clear disregard of any real people and issues.
I have been told in no uncertain terms that the word “minority” is offensive, as it has come to have pejorative use. No alternative term was suggested, rather that one should refer to specific groups of people with their specific terms, and never generalise.
Additionally, “white knight” I have also been told off for, for the reasons you might expect.
In both of these cases (actually, almost every case I can think of) my language was being policed by, um, materially unencumbered birthgivers of reduced melanin.
I love the term white knight specifically because it's offensive to those I reference with it and because it does such a great job describing my view of them and ironically their unconcious view of themselves. Also the amusing thing is that they are always white.
I feel like, Materially Unencumbered Birth Gives of Reduced Melanin, is approaching an actual usable acronym for the typical pejorative, Karen. I bet chatgpt could bridge the gap
I don't see white women standing out in their behaviour, but they sure will always remain an acceptable group to beat up on without losing your progressive or otherwise credentials.
Karen at this point is always pejorative and pretty much just not well hidden sexism at best.
That's been the most impactful change of the entire progressive movement. It's now ok to be sexist and racist against white women. It's feminism stood on its head. The reduction of white women to a meme has been incredible to watch. No idea why anyone would be for this.
... but ... are "group of academics [..] sit around and decide that a group as a whole needs saving"? (Yes, probably some are, academia always has a few truly crazy people.)
Mostly they parrot the same "old tautologies" (like language matters, structural issues are real, people's personal prejudices manifest in many ways, etc) in various new forms, shapes, phrasings.
However, that doesn't mean they are wrong. (Nor that they are automatically right.)
white knights are not academics, they are usually the walking-talking examples of severe Dunning-Kruger phenomena.
... I'm writing all this, because your post uses very broad and general terms like progressives and academics, and I think that's bad. (Because it forces my ego to reconsider the `progressive` label, that I used to apply to myself. Naturally without doing anything good/bad progressive really. :| )
> I see it as unintentional discrimination. It's treating the people they are relabeling as children that need the kind progressives to step in and save them. It's so condescending.
The dynamic is entirely consistent with them thinking about themselves as shepherding sheep. It's why they don't really care that nobody likes "Latinx." Who care what the sheep want to call themselves? It's also why they don't care whether the people they platform as icons of minority groups (Ilhan Omar, etc.) are representative of those groups or not. It's not coalition politics with give-and-take and compromise. It's a parent/child relationship.
Isn't it enough just to point out that Hispanic/Latino people reject "Latinx", rather than continuously trying to psychoanalyze the people (who are not exclusively white) who do choose to use it? At a minimum, you're now citing social science research to make your point, but you are yourself a vociferous critical of social science research.
You're making it hard to agree with you or to reach a shared understanding; like, I think "Latinx" as a universal term for Hispanic/Latino people is silly and mostly an elite discourse shibboleth, too, but the Extended Rayiner Cinematic Universe of paternal white behavior is not something I buy into.
"Latinx" is just an easy-to-analyze example of a wider phenomenon where elite whites intervene on behalf of minorities while being wholly indifferent to what those minorities actually want. "Defund the police," racial preferences for hiring and education, "micro-aggressions," and many others are examples.
I think the psychoanalysis is necessary to understand the phenomenon in a coherent way. Obviously I can't get in their heads. It's just a theory based on conversations where mentioning polling and statistics would be met with dead shark eyes in response.
Well, racial preferences for hiring and education was something you used to support. What were you thinking when you supported it? Does it line up with your diagnosis here?
Pretty much, yes. That was before I got kicked out of the house and become one of the objects of that elite concern. It was also before I confronted the prospect of my kids having to do some sort of diversity dance to pique the interest of some white admissions officer.
I don't understand the first part of this but I do understand the latter part about your kids. I'm a white dude who sent his kids to their flagship state school; they'd have been better off, just learning-wise, if they'd started at directional state, or even a community college. So consider that the elites might be doing you a favor. :)
> If your point is that this is noodly enough not to be interesting to anybody else: fair enough.
Not at all. Please carry on. It is a good discussion. I meant, I would enjoy hearing you guys debate this topic in person where you're not limited by text or latency.
What happened for you to get "kicked out of the house"? This is sometimes in the back of my mind. I'm usually just curious - but sometimes even asking a question is seen as an indication of wrong think.
You may be surprised at the spectrum of people who are a)admissions officers and b)support the current thing.
I think if minorities didn't want jobs as lawyers, they could simply not apply for the job. Getting hired at a big law firm isn't something done to people unwillingly.
we’re not a monolith, nor is any other minority group. and for that matter, navigating society and learning that not all people prefer the same terms/words/pronouns is just life.
i’m sorry people cant do and say what they please and offend others, but that’s just part of being an agreeable human and living in society
Absolutely, each to their own but its never really bothered me. There is obviously a difference in the tone its said when used by someone like Kanye or a neo-nazi vs a rabbi. I've never really allowed myself to be defined or bothered by things like that. I've had beers with neo-nazis before with them full on knowing I was jewish. They obviously toned downed their rhetoric and we had a pretty decent conversation. No friends were made that day but it was a fun chat. Obviously there are levels to this though, they were not marching calling for my death.
When that congressman claimed he meant he was Jew-ish I flat out laughed. Dude is a liar and a crook and totally undeserving of serving in congress but the sheer chutzpah that took was amazing. I found myself more amused than offended. I still chuckle when I run across a reference to it.
The thing that makes it weird is that "Jew" represents both a religion and a people. We really don't see that in other cultures or religions. Now as likely as my profile isn't going to be outed, but 'joining in' is a great way to be tarred as an anti-semite, whether you sincerely hate Jews or not.
And also, since you're Jewish, you're allowed to use comments and jokes like "Jewbilee". It's similar to how African Americans can use "nigga/nigger" amongst each other but is completely forbidden for anyone else. That's primarily due to the power dynamic of those words, and how they traditionally were used as a slur. This is examples where members of the group change the definition to be positive rather than negative.
I grew up with my trash of parents teaching 6 year old me to negotiate at flea markets by "jewing them down". And although I won't have children, I make a conscious choice not to continue that language. My language shapes my reality. So no.
What do you call a group of Jews though? If Jews is off the table?
I totally hear what you are saying though and I know you are coming from a good place. The Jewish race/religion thing is an odd one. Ive always considered myself Jewish by race, 99% Ashkenazi but not religion, I have no religious beliefs.
Conversation reminds me of the infamous lunar new year invite.
To be fair, its best not even to discuss. It's not like discussing Jewish stuff is normal... well, outside being Jewish or being a neonazi/white supremacist, or awkward discussions here.
But discussing here, I try to keep as neutral as possible. If we're talking about the religion, I use people of Jewish faith. And if talking about Ashkenazi Jews (hereditary), I use that term. And past that, I try to keep as matter-of-factly plain simple language, and check for any colloquiums that have alternate white nationalist meanings.
But usually, this topic doesn't even come up. It's only awkward HN comment chains that have this weird political forced neutral writing. But that too is self-defense.
> Auschwitz was effectively a factory of death. Bombing the gas chambers, crematorium, rail lines might have helped.
I think there's a misunderstanding happening here. You seem to be suggesting Auschwitz get bombed assuming it would not blowing up the Jews (and gypsies, and homosexuals, and others that made the Nazi list of "deviants") being actively imprisoned, which sounds great but would have been unfeasible.
The previous reply doesn't seem to be asking what would be specifically helpfully in blowing up Auschwitz. I think it's unanimous "that factory of death was bad and making it stop is good, " so I think it's more like they're taking into account how dropping bombs in WWII actually worked, which was a pretty imprecise process. Ultimately, bombing Auschwitz would also have blown up the people held prisoner in Auschwitz, and those people might not think being blown up was super helpful for them, regardless of whether Auschwitz was destroyed in the process.
There a historical documentary film that tells the story of people who escaped Auschwitz to bring definitive proof of the atrocities happening there to the Allies.
As I recall it, their request was for the Allies to bomb Auschwitz, though presumably targeting railway lines and other elements that could knock it out of action.
Train loads of people were coming in daily to be slaughtered, over 80% were killed on arrival and were not kept as prisoners, while deaths among prisoners was very high.
This was not a static prison camps that kept the same people during the war (except for very few). That’s why I think this was effective even if bombs had hit the living quarters themselves.
Well, they are known not to have correct answers, but in my brand of ethics risking the lives of people that are destined to die in order to save millions is pretty clear cut
Especially during a war where Dresden was fire bombed and Hiroshima was nuclear bombed
You mean the home-country-challenged people living among THE biggest oppressors in history needed help after literally-hitler was about to unalive them?
I forgot it is friday and "white Knight" is a trigger word for some.
So when there's a headline that says:
"Banning words won’t make the world more just"
and then I say "it depends" to a subpoint with white knight, then I seem to represent the woke enemy to them, who wants to dictate what words they are allowed to use (even though I am actually very pro free speech).
And as a german regarding the righteous and why there were so few of them:
I know the mindset from my grandparents and it was/is one of having a very strong taboo of doing anything against the state, or just thinking about it. They were not nazis and knew what the state was doing was wrong even though they didn't know the details. But they kept their head as low as possible, as most did. And marched in line, if ordered so. So they share their responsibility.
I would like to think, that I would have acted different, but would I? I would have been a different person, being born into that time and culture.
So it is also a tough question of what I personally feel about it. Should I feel personally sorry about industrial mass murdering done by "my kind"?
Well, I don't really feel connected to those germans as a whole at all.
But I do feel connected to my grandparents, so sorry on their behalf, that my family didn't do anything to my knowledge, to help your people. (And personally I do my best to keep the local nazis in check today)
edit: and those words still feel empty. But I don't find better words.
Because the holocaust was just outstanding industrial mass murder with the goal to wipe out a whole race. What can you say about it? Certainly not, what a member of the new german right said: "The german history is a great one and the holocaust was just a litle dirt on it"
So back on topic, I think this person should have the right to say this. Because everyone else now knows what those people (who are all officially against nazis) are really standing for.
There are always exceptions and genocide is very obviously one. I was referring more to the socially constructed self inflicted battles society has been engaging in lately.
I was looking around for societal battles that were not socially constructed. But I guess I'm visually impaired in that respect. Maybe you can help me?
I was looking around for something that is not socially constructed. But I guess I am socio-constructually visio-impaired in that respect. Maybe you can help me?
In that case I think we have to find some one-eyed man and make him king.
Maybe we can take some of the 'intellectual dark-web'figureheads and blindly follow them. They pretend to have a grasp of this scoial-construction thing.
But I'd rather like to continue searching the intellectual deep-web for a person with actual sight.
So your family members would have rejected the help of Schindler and co while under occupation and in direct death threat?
Or would have rejected the allies when they came liberating the camps?
Seriously?
As far as I know, the jews and all other surpressed minorities of europe were making great risks, to get information (like from a hidden radio) about the advance of the allies. Because this was the main thing bringing hope.
edit: and sure, it was the gestapo who flagged you and not simply people annoyed by your insulting debate style.
>So your family members would have rejected the help of Schindler and co while under occupation and in direct death threat?
They would have accepted it out of necessity. Doesn't mean depending on "white knights" is desirable or effective. Didn't work out of several other million, for starters.
Even less desirable when there is no "direct death threat", and the victims are perfectly capable of having opinions and speaking for themselves, as opposed to others co-opting and/or hijacking their concerns.
"Doesn't mean depending on "white knights" is desirable or effective."
Well sure, no one wants to be in the position, where he or she needs to be saved in the first place, but if you are in that position - help is still needed and wanted.
"Didn't work out of several other million, for starters."
And that is simply, because no one came in time.
"Even less desirable when there is no "direct death threat", and the victims are perfectly capable of having opinions and speaking for themselves, as opposed to others co-opting and/or hijacking their concerns. "
And yes, which is why I wrote: "if you want to emporer people in general, you cannot fight their battles for them and declare them uncaple of fighting their battles. "
Nope. I did not made any claims about myself here.
I merley stated, that no one came to save the jews in europe, which is why they went to the death camps.
Which you are debating for some reason, along with personal insults.
I suppose because you think the jews should have been organized better and fend for themself?
Well, maybe. But they were not organized. They were in the weaker position and chased by the Nazis. In this situation, outside help is needed in my perception, but you may think whatever you want about it all. And if you can share what you think without insults, I might read it.
Parent doesn’t say that they manufactured blight but that they manufactured famine.
This is also incorrect although they did preside over one and were reluctant to intervene for a variety of reasons, some economic and some philosophical.
Edit: and just to add, it was certainly not an attempt at genocide.
If you mean blight as in "a thing that spoils or damages something", that something being the Irish substinence, they absolutely did. Read some history.
And since a million died, it's not exactly laughing matter to joke about.
The blight in itself of course was not manufactured, however the policies that led up to the total dependency on one type of crop never failing, and the botched emergency reponse; was.
However, this famine is of course, not even a tear in the sea compared to the holocaust, which remains the most horrific act ever, forever; and every other act past or future will only be a tiny fraction of the depth of its importance. History begin and ends with the holocaust the plight of the Jews.
My partner is disabled, and by chance and via support groups she is a member of, she has many friends annd acquaintences who are as well. And while it's by no means universal, she and all her disabled friends absolutely loathe the "people first language" currently in vogue (ie, "person with a disability" over "disabled").
And it's odd! Because while there are certainly disabled people who prefer one form over another when they speak or when people refer to them (although again, in my experience, the overwhelming majority prefer the clarity of "disabled"), the only time I've ever run across someone making a universal dictate about how everyone should speak about all disabled people everywhere, the speaking has been non-disabled. And invariably backing a viewpoint which is tenditious at best among actually disabled people!
And to what end? It sometimes feels - certainly to my partner, hence her anger - an attempt to just sort of pretend the issue dosn't exist so that nobody has to be uncomfortable. Her disability is, at the moment, entirely incurable. She has experienced significant grief over her disability; she would love not to have it. But she does, and relabelling her as "differently abled" or a "person with a disability" doesn't suddenly remove the physical limitations she is struggling with.
Of course, 'disabled' is just the euphemism you grew up with, so it feels neutral enough.
The euphemism treadmill has a long history. At some point cripple used to be the neutral term for many kinds of disabled. It's long been deemed offensive. Similar with idiot or retard.
Give it a few decades, and all of the 'people first language' will perhaps turn into neutral and then offensive, too.
(I am writing the above dispassionately. But given the generation I grew up in, I share your sensibilities about the words. 'Disabled' feels fairly neutral to me as well, and 'idiot' or 'cripple' feel somewhat offensive.
But I recognise that this is just an artifact of exactly when in time I grew up. And old people complaining about shifts in language and culture is an even older trope than the euphemism treadmill.)
'Idiot' is a particularly good example of how pointless it all is. "Person of idiocy" is probably still offensive, so 'people-first language' doesn't really do anything.
Didn’t most of those terms change because they evolved into common insults? Disabled is not used as a common insult as far as I know. This case feels more like a dictate from “well meaning” groups vs a reaction to evolving use of language.
Do you know many older or elderly people? I’ve met many who basically do not know, and have a very hard time understanding, all the unspoken rules about talking about things like disability (or race, religion, etc.).
I sympathize with them a bit because it really is complicated. Why is saying “the blacks” bad, and “black guy” suspicious, but “black person” fine? Why is it ok to call someone disabled but not crippled? Why does saying the word “Jew” range so much in terms of offensiveness based on context and tone?
I know, from my perspective it’s kind of silly and not that hard too. But for people who are perpetually confused about things like that, I can totally see why they lean heavily towards the side of caution to avoid offense. Then of course there are the people doing it for performative reasons, but I’d wager a lot of those people are motivated by fear of saying the wrong thing or being branded a bigot too.
I can relate to what she told you about language changes not improving ones own situation.
I am well past the point where I have any grief related to my disability. Its a fact of life, a part of me, very much like not being able to fly, or having a nose above the mouth.
But there are of course situations in life where I feel that the world isn't always particularily accessible. But it doesn't help at all if someone uses appropriate language to explain to me that they dont want me as a customer because they are afraid of liabilities. Thats a bit cynical, I know, but thats another trend. With "awareness" about special groups comes more exclusion. Anyway, I digress.
Slightly related: in German, a strange thing happened at the end of the last century. Disabled people used to be called "behindert" (might be translated as "impeded" or "hindered"). I think the word was a good choice, because it took the blame away from people, and just described that they had to overcome bigger obstacles because of their situation.
In the eighties or nineties, people started to use the term as a slur. School children called each other "behindert" as an expletive.
This lead to a new term being used for the disabled: "invalid". Which in my opinion is the worst word you could use, since it origins in Latin and just means "unworthy". But it seems to still be in broad use.
This points towards part of what's actually going on and why people keep trying to change the terminology. There's always a subset of people that use the terminology as a pejorative, because they see the people it refers to as either lesser or embarrassing to be a part of. Often children, because they don't know any better, but adults (whether children that never stopped or for other reasons) as well. Then the fact that the term is used as a pejorative spurs people (whether part of that group or not at this point) to change the accepted terminology to something else. Rinse and repeat.
English has "handicapped" which is similar and also became offensive. I thought it was a good word because it allowed for more nuance than the binary abled/disabled.
It doesn’t feel offensive so much as a little outdated, especially for physical disabilities, since the current vogue is the term “disabled.” Which taken literally is not as nice as the term handicappped, but it works better with language like “I have a disability”
The "unworthy" meaning has been lost over time in Latin derived languages, the Italian "invalido" is (was) an official word to mean someone that for any reason was not fit for work, typically, but not only, soldiers wounded in the war and workers wounded on the job (amputees).
It was also common (with no negative connotation whatever) to extend the term to people with mobility issues, to blind people, etc.
It has been replaced first by "disabile" (disabled) and later with the more politically correct "diversamente abile" (differently able) which is (IMHO) really terrible.
The latest euphemism is "persona con disabilità" (person with disability) which makes even less sense.
"Invalid" used to be used in English in the 19th century. I see it in old books sometimes; had to look it up the first time. It's not a great word choice and sounds more like an illegal immigrant status or something.
"People with autism" carries a connotation that the person and the autism are separable. Given the deep, dark, nasty history of autism "cures" that's a very raw nerve, and stamping out that type of thinking will materially improve conditions.
Depends on if you’re talking to autistic people, or professionals who work with autistic people/their parents.
The latter group still tends to use “person with autism” and I think it’s more funny than anything but people get really pissed at people who developed this vocabulary without actually asking Autistic people what they thought of it.
I love the phrasing “person with autism” because it allows me to make a bunch of fairly accurate assumptions about the type of person you are, which is generally somebody who sees autism in a very paternalistic light. Why stigmatize the use of language where somebody self-identifies themselves as hostile to your interests and seeing themselves as being your woke saviour? What was that saying - don’t interrupt your enemy while they’re making a mistake?
Good point, weird constructed language can also be utilized as a filter to avoid hostile and/or paternalistic people. Weaponizing SJW language to fight bigots, I like it!
I suffer from a disability and so does my girlfriend. Note that our main language is French and so there is a bit of nuance to how the terms are used.
Disabled is usually said "handicapé" (this word means more "incapacitated" that anything) and "person with a disability" is usually said "personne en situation de handicap" which more literally translates to "person in a disability situation" / "person currently incapacitated".
While we don't have any problem with the term disabled, I can see some advantages to the "people first language" and try to use it when I can - but I agree it's often way more simple/clear to say "disabled", "blind", etc...
The advantages are :
- Including temporarily disabled people (maybe more in french than english). If you break your legs and spend a few months in a wheelchair, you might not feel legitimate to use the term "disabled" in comparison to someone who has never been able to walk and suffers more from it. I'd also add my personal story: I suffer from chronic pain that is very incapacitating in my life. I don't feel legitimate when I call myself disabled. It's not temporary, but it's not as clear as blindness etc... Using people-first language feels more right.
- Including more person means reducing stigma and reducing the gap between abled/disabled.
- Not letting that disabilty define you as a person. I am not disabled, I am Sunderw, a complicated person with many different aspects.
That said, it should definitely not be a dictate because it only serves to divide more. Also, I had never heard the term "differently abled" which could sound almost sarcastic when employed to speak about someone in a wheelchair for example.
> If you break your legs and spend a few months in a wheelchair, you might not feel legitimate to use the term "disabled" in comparison to someone who has never been able to walk and suffers more from it.
I would say "I am hungry" even if I have food in the fridge, I do not need to compare myself to poor starving people and decide to say "I am currently hungry" or "I am in a situation of hunger"
> Not letting that disabilty define you as a person. I am not disabled, I am Sunderw, a complicated person with many different aspects.
also I am still a complicated person and hungry does not define my personality.
> Including more person means reducing stigma and reducing the gap between abled/disabled.
Actually, taking too many steps to think of how to describe a person with a certain medical situation already increases the stigma, I would feel more bad if people try to avoid calling me "sick" so I don't feel bad about being sick, this is even worse.
Imagine calling a midget "A person with less height" or some nonsense like that.
Well, the difference may come from the language. "I am hungry" translates in french to "J'ai faim" using the "have" auxiliary. You "are" hungry in english, but I "have" the hunger, in french.
So for me your example does not count as a label. Is there no nuance at all between "being hungry" and "being disabled" in english ? If so, you're right, my argument does not stand.
> Imagine calling a midget "A person with less height" or some nonsense like that.
I think midget is pejorative so this is not a very good example. But I don't know much about that so I'll take your argument as if it wasn't at all.
I should have added that this is of course useful in some contexts. If you are talking to a specific person, then changing the language isn't very useful (except if this specific person feels the term is offensive, but that does not mean we should all change how we speek).
Where it is more useful, for example, is when you talk about limitations due to a problem. You are writing an article about height problems ? No need to say it's about dwarfism, there are other small people that might relate. You're a store and design a special help to get objects on high shelves ? No need to call it "dwarf help" or "midget help", but just "help for small people" or even "high shelf help".
In this case this is not about thinking about how to describe a person with a certain medical situation. It is about taking a step back and removing the medical situation altogether.
This applies much more to "deaf"/"hearing impaired" (or whatever, my argument is about generalizing, not about a specific term). A lot more people have difficulty hearing than are completely deaf.
Knowing about it is good. Trying to think about what your language implies is good. Forbidding the usage of words is obviously extreme and bad.
> I would say "I am hungry" even if I have food in the fridge, I do not need to compare myself to poor starving people and decide to say "I am currently hungry" or "I am in a situation of hunger"
But saying "I'm starving!" when you are just hungry is a bit different. It's fine where there are no starving people around. It's just a exaggeration then. But if one of your friends starved last week while you are still fat and just a bit hungry it might not sound well.
'Solving' the 'problem' of words only makes you feel good about yourself and gives you the feeling that you are helping somehow while actually doing nothing.
> - Not letting that disabilty define you as a person. I am not disabled, I am Sunderw, a complicated person with many different aspects.
The flip side of this is that it allows / encourages others to see your disability as a mere "inconvenience" or something that should be able to be separated from you. I find at least for people I know with mental health disabilities they feel "person with X" tends to lead very quickly into "I know you have X but why can't you just be/do/deal with Y". In fact, I have a general theory (untested) that where someone with a disability falls on the "I am a person with X" vs "I am X" is probably directly proportional to how much X is a strong defining factor in their lives. I notice this particularly in ADHD and Autism spectrum disorders, where being on the "less support needs" side of the spectrum tends to be described as "I have ADHD / Autism" but being on the side of the spectrum that requires more suppoed "I am ADHD / Autistic" is more common. And for those I know who prefer the "I am X" format, part of that is because, paraphrased "this is a major part of my life that fundamentally alters how I live and interact with the world and I need people to understand that about me"
Obviously to a large degree this depends on your language having an adjective form in the first place e.g. we have yet to come up with "I am cancered", though in a related way we often. see "I am a cancer survivor" / "I am fighting cancer", but it's still relatively common even for bad cases to be "I have cancer".
I'm supportive of all those goals, I just don't see how person-first language does anything for them. Does "he's a person with visual impairment" really stigmatize a person less than "he's blind"? Or does "he's blind" really one-dimensionally define a person? It seems to me that stigmas are not bourne out of language, and that a blind person is their own person seems understood and implied no matter the language that's used. If I say "sunderw's French" then it's also understood that you're more than just "French" and that your "Frenchness" does not singularly define you.
You can construct some armchair psychology arguments such as "the language explicitly acknowledges that there's more to a person", but does that really affect people's thinking in any significant way? And if it does, does it affect the thinking in the right way? Or does it trivialize the condition? No matter what language you use, being blind is a serious handicap and it really does affect what you can and can't do in this world; trying to euphemize the very real problems blind people face also isn't a good idea.
Is this mean someone is determined or steadfast in their constitution?
I worked with someone who was really smart but annoyed me because his variable names were cartoon characters, like Tom,jerry,bugs, etc.
I asked him not to do this and he said that each variable was documented so it’s better to use an arbitrary label that never needs to change should the business change it’s name (ie if you called a variable division_names and the org decides to rename divisions to units). We argued over this and he never changed his variable names.
But now I get it. I’d rather just have some arbitrary label that means disabled and never have to change it as “prepend is foo” would stand the test of time while “prepend is disabled” might change to “pretend is of disability” might change to “prepend is not hindered by disability” to “prepend is a human first and valiantly overcomes a limitation in ability” to “prepend only has one arm” etc.
Well, that might make sense for natural language terms, but it's still really bad coding advice: changing variable names is easy, or at least should be easy, if you have tooling worth a damn.
> The language terror they were subjected to has made them so unsecure that they actually dont want to hear that blind people have no issue with being called blind.
It is unusual for the opinions of the minorities involved to be relevant.The language policing appears to be a power play within the majority. What you are observing is consistent with that - they aren't worried about offending the blind, they're worried about how their language will allow their peers to jostle for position.
It not even a majority that dictates. It’s ostensibly a vocal minority of professional offence-takers who wield power, generally on social media. My partner has MS, and I made an off-the-cuff joke about it, and got pilloried by people that neither of us know. Not one of them took the time to consider that this is how we deal with it; they were too busy being offended on her behalf.
A role that used to be filled (in Ireland) by priests and nuns, and the Legion of Mary. One of the big problems I used to have with religion was the moral policing - imagine my surprise when the power of the church waned, but the moral policing only intensified
This is the exact same dynamic that happens with comedy. When a comedian offends a group, it's typically not people from that group who complain - it's third parties who step in to represent that group.
IMO the purpose of language changing is not to improve the world; instead, it's to give the feeling of changing the world without putting any real effort.
Fun (in a sad way) fact: a friend of mine collaborates with an association that deals with diverse people. Some high-up complained that my friend's group (within the association) is "not diverse enough". Thing is: my friend is actually non-binary themselves. Go figure.
EDIT: replaced the definition of my friend from "diverse" to "non-binary", in order to be exact; the same principle stands, though!
> IMO the purpose of language changing is not to improve the world; instead, it's to give the feeling of changing the world without putting any real effort.
It's worse than that. It's a way of signaling.
When I started to read the article I hoped that it would mention Steven Pinker's Euphemism Treadmill. I was disappointed. The short story is that changing language is a quick way of differentiating an in-group from an out-group. The in-group are those that are aware of the change and align by adopting it.
We saw this with the instantaneous change of Kiev to Kyiv in news media at the start of the war. It is not just a thing that society does with the names of disabilities, oops, I'm sorry, "different conditions."
But it's still Moscow, Russia and not Moskva, Rossiya. It's Tokyo, Japan not Toukyou, Nippon and Germany and not Deutschland. If you're going to drop exonyms, you should at least do it consistently, rather than only for currently-trending locations.
The main difference is that the request to change the English spelling from Kiev to Kyiv came from the Ukrainian government. As far as I know Japanese or German government haven't requested that we stop writing "Japan" and "Germany".
The closest current example going on right now is the Turkish government wanting to change the English spelling of their country from "Turkey" to "Turkiye".
It went beyond official names of cities. Supermarkets actually changed the spelling of the Chicken Kiev to Chicken Kyiv. (But left Bombay Potato and Chicken Madras unchanged, even though Bombay and Madras haven't been called that for decades.). Zelenskyy probably has better things to do right now than dictate the spelling of breaded garlic chicken fillets.
> As far as I know Japanese or German government haven't requested that we stop writing "Japan" and "Germany".
Because they know it would be silly. Do they go to every language and ask for a change? For instance ask France to stop using “Allemagne” and use Deutschland instead? Now repeat for hundreds or thousands of languages… not only would it accomplish nothing, it is pretty disrespectful to demand of the other language users how they refer to places.
In the examples you list, AFAIK, people from those countries are happy to use those names when speaking in English. At least, I've never met a German who insists on calling their country Deutschland when conversing in English. If they did, maybe things would be different. That's the way it is with Istanbul/Constantinople, and also Bombay/Mumbai.
Allemagne's name is appealingly populist, though I suppose not much different from how all the "primitive" tribes' names also just mean "the people". You might even eat Allemansratten there -- though you might do better in their northerly neighbor, where the traditions lived a little longer. Eat it next to the hearth on Freya's-day.
One version of your question that's interesting to me is that of translating people's names, rather than countries'. This seems not to be what people do -- but why not?
There are the obvious correspondences across European languages, like with William and Guillermo. But I suppose a tweedy old Brit named Reginald could even become Rajesh when he visits Delhi, given the shared meaning and etymology. He might take to it happily.
I suppose you're generally better served by keeping your native pronunciation, so long as the people around you can more-or-less say it, because it will be more unique in your new location, and give you some appeal of the exotic. In England, who would you reckon to be sexier -- "Katherine" or "Katerina"?
Some names can be translated in meaning, but there is no shared etymology. For example, the Frenchman "Pierre" might take the name "石" ("Shi") in China. Would this make sense? There is the added complication that the latter is more likely to be a surname than a given name. I wonder what Dwayne Johnson thinks.
If there is no pronunciation at all for your name, you may become "formerly know as Prince" (there's Raj again), deposed by choice and deadnamed by necessity.
I suppose direct translation was commonly done with Native American names. We remember "Sitting Bull", not "Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake". On the other hand, we remember the Patuxet man nicknamed "Squanto" -- given name "Tisquantum", you can see how it's a longer form -- and not "spiritual power of Manitou" (the exact translation is sketchy, but the meaning seems to be something like that). And of course, "Manitou" can also be translated, so we might even say "Power of God". Perhaps "Manitoba" is "God's Country".
Allowing semantic meaning to penetrate an ethnic boundary may be fraught with controversy. Here you're playing with sacred words. Of course, after studying the Greek Titans for a while, you realize that each is simply a noun. Gaia is Earth. Chronos is Time. They are not separate characters. They are the ideas. So maybe all words are sacred. Yet here I am spelling them.
Likewise "pho" is just "soup", but outside Vietnam it's more than that. Likewise "chai" -- at home it's "tea", but abroad it's a particular style of tea. Likewise probably every food there is. And they become jealousy-guarded totems of identity. "What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?", asks Lin Yutang.
Or, should I say, asks "forest language temple", or perhaps, "sacred forest library". (Nominative determinism much?)
I would like to meet this German who insisted on saying only "Deutschland" though. I imagine he would also insist that anything with more than the Reinheitsgebot's 4 ingredients is not "beer". He would drive a Volkswagen and brag about its double-clutch. He would be a great character. I'd watch that TV show.
Do anglos read Kiev and Kyiv particularly differently in the first place? In any case, it sounds further from a normative Ukrainian pronunciation than Caillou.
I read Kiev with an /ɛ/ sound, and Kyiv with an /ɪ/ sound.
In my head, at least. I've just realized that I haven't needed to verbally refer to this place since I became aware of the renaming. In fact, I don't know that I've ever said either one out loud.
A single person shouldn't be able to be diverse on their own! That's a property of groups. You can try to define a "default person" and then say you want each individual to differ from that in your favourite characteristics, but that's a different game and provides none of the benefits of actual diversity.
It's me, actually. I'm 48, white, male, cis, hetero, graying, healthy, overweight but not obese, married with two kids, and slaving away in a wage job behind a computer somewhere.
"Diverse" specifically means different from me.
I feel it's good companies are looking for more diverse people to fill their jobs, I can't do them all.
> A single person shouldn't be able to be diverse on their own!
Agreed, but I've seen it used like this more than once, and it's both hilarious and unintentionally offensive.
A diverse group -- which makes more sense -- means something inoffensive: that the people in that group are different from each other, representing there's variety within the group according to some parameter (say, skin color).
A "diverse" person as used in PC language is... exactly what? Someone with "diverse ethnicity" (seen this used!) is someone who what? Was this person the offspring of an orgy of people with different skin colors?
Oooh.. I get it, a "diverse" person is someone who is not white, meaning the standard/normal skin color is white, and being "diverse" is to be "other than white", which is of course abnormal, because being white is what's normal. And people saying "diverse" don't even notice the irony of this!
I think you could reasonably describe a single person as 'diverse' in the 'diverse set of skills or experiences' sense. Like a jack-of-all-trades handyman. Or maybe for somebody that has a wide array of personalities which they reveal in different social contexts.
The realization that it would be pointless, alas, came to me too late. Let me just give you a taste:
While serving in Vietnam, American soldier Nick Parker was blinded by a mortar explosion. Rescued by local villagers, he recovered his health and, though he remains blind, was trained to master his other senses and becomes an expert swordsman.
So, he wears 80s sunglasses and wields a goddamn katana. He is also a hobo. Like Caine from Kong Fu he roams the earth and lowlifes always pick fights with him because they underestimate his... err... blind fury.
There is an "adorable" little kid aptly named Billy, and one dimensional baddies, 'etc. The character is masterfully portrayed by one of the best b-movie actors of all time -- Rutger Hauer (best known for the best bit of Blade Runner).
Anyway I think it is a shame woke imbeciles who run movie studios would refuse to make such a thing today because when I saw it as a kid it made me realize being blind is really not the end of the world. Here you are posting on HN and your insights about society are more astute than the majority of the population. So I just wanted to say that you certainly see what is going on accurately.
P.S. - if you wish to visualize the language police people, they typically look like vogons and pull ugly faces when they speak.
Hehe, thanks, I know about Blind Fury, Daredevil, and See No Evil, Hear No Evil...
As I am embedded in a visual culture, I do consume movies from time to time, so there is actually no reason to be self-conscious about mentioning media products like that...
Not self conscious at all my dude (I'm not one of those insensitive woke people who get off on making everybody feel like shit to try and elevate themselves at all costs), glad I made you chuckle. How do you consume movies? I didn't know that the ̶a̶c̶c̶u̶r̶s̶e̶d̶ "visually impaired" do that. Dope.
Don't know why I'm surprised. I bet blind fury would watch movies somehow too. Also, you should obviously change your username. :)
P.S. - Daredevil sucks so bad it makes me wish I was blind. You aren't missing out on anything there.
See No Evil, Hear No Evil is a classic. Yet another example of something great that currently wouldn't get made.
I've decided I want a blind friend. Prank potential off the charts.
Regarding how to "watch" movies: Its actually as simple as turning the TV on and listening to what comes out the speakers...
In the 80s, movies were actually much more story-driven then today. Even if you missed something happening because you didnt see the visuals, you would get it typically a few seconds or minutes afterwards, because somebody was refering to the event and therefore uncovering the riddle. Something like "Hey, did you see the car explode back there?"
These days, there is the concept of audio description.
You might have noticed a second audio channel with some movies or sports broadcasts, depending on what country you are in.
Even Apple TV has an ability to configure such a descriptive audio channel, and have it played back when the movie actually comes with one.
Makes sense actually. Now that you mention it I can imagine Casablanca to be enjoyable to "watch" even with my eyes closed. A lot of the black and white stuff. I guess they were (better) written, more like plays, with actors projecting their voices. Now they do the mumble whisper thing, even native speakers are forced to turn on subtitles for increasingly terrible plots.
BTW you should know my comments had a +5 and now are being downvoted by the woke mob, who know what is best for you.
Edit: And its back to very positive. I only remark on this when the cowardly woke losers try to bully people with downvote brigading otherwise the points don't matter. Bet there's a lot of screeching on a Mastodon somewhere.
The “subtitles for deaf and hard of hearing” on modern videos are a wonder and amazing. We regularly use subtitles because it can be hard to hear the movie over the kids, but SDH is great if you are mainly listening. Highly recommend everyone try it sometime.
Sometimes it is even a separate “language track” that describes what’s happening.
When I first got Disney+ because an ex-girlfriend wanted to watch Wanda, the app was misconfigured to have the audio description turned on. It's a pretty weird show, so it took me 3 episodes of being confused by the weirdness of the show to realize something was really off and it wasn't meant to be watched like that. Took me forever to find the setting to turn it off; and it got a bit more watchable after that.
Well, now that you mention it. My take on this is pretty subjective because I am not a native english speaker. While I watch a lot of english-movies these days, I was brought up with a rich world of overdubbed movies in my native language. These overdubs tend to have a very good quality when it comes to clarity because they are always done in a studio afterwards.
When I started to watch english movies, I was thrown into an abyss of very hard to follow dialogue, but that was mostly because I was not used to hearing the actors speak on set during whatever they were actually doing.
However, that said, I do also feel it is getting harder with more action-loaded productions, which is basically everything in the past 10 years or so.
Part of the problem with modern movies is they're designed for surround sound 5.1 systems or similar. In those systems, the middle front channel is generally used for dialogue, but that channel often gets entirely dropped when remixing for stereo systems. This predictably results in inaudible dialogue.
This was discussed on HN a few months ago, but I can't find a reference to that thread.
Some receivers have “dialogue boost” or otherwise let you adjust each channel individually.
More and more we just leave subtitles on, as too much dialog is easy to lose in the rest of the sound. I think it’s also a difference in how movies are made now; compare the pacing of Rocky with anything modern. Older movies stop the action to dialog; modern movies have quips over explosions
As you mention Blind Fury, do you know of the Zatoichi movie franchise [1], which is about a blind swordsman wandering Japan around the Edo to Meiji period? Really good films! (Blind Fury is a reimagining of the 17th movie in the series, Zatoichi Challenged.)
Exact same sort of asshole and arguments as today. He called them blasphemers and tried to cancel them. During the commercial break he would lean in to John Cleese and say "this is great television" with a wink.
Someone asked Mel Brooks the same about Blazing Saddles once.
"Today? You couldn't even make it then!"
We overestimate the effect the this sort of thing has.
I imagine someone reading that line is about to talk about the cancelling of some so-and-so, but in almost all cases that is either just a lot of hot air from Twitter or the so-and-so in question is legitimately and obviously actually a bigot.
it is definitely seems a patterns that alot of people who claim to be "canceled" or complaining about "canceling" are usually very well-off people who usually get thousands of re-tweets/posts and millions of subscribers on youtube or sell-out whenever they make an appearance somewhere...
People who say you can't make movies as offensive (or playing as much with offensiveness, anyway) as Tropic Thunder or Blazing Saddles anymore need to look into some of Lloyd Kaufman's output with Troma... the 2020 Shakespeare's Shitstorm is about as wildly-offensive (but maybe to good purpose? I'm still not sure, LOL) as it gets, and even directly targets the (in the pejorative sense) "woke" crowd (plus, like, a lot of other groups, including stuffy conservatives, big business, and shitty bigots) which is one of the riskiest moves a film could make these days, and that's just one of several risky moves it makes. Like, the movie's basically built of risky, boundary-pushing creative choices relating to very-relevant topics, which... might serve some greater, noble whole? Maybe? I think it's trying to, at least.
Now, a wide-release, mainstream movie, that might be true.
Ben Stiller himself has commented on the blackface in the movie being a satire of blackface in cinema. There would be no problem with a popular director making that kind of movie today.
I would note (and this was true at the time, too) that there are people that would either fail to make the distinction of “satire” or fail to find its invocation in the case of the particular work a convincing excuse.
I suspect there would be more resistance to the same film now, but its well within what could be made.
A school I would visit had a native American name for their sports teams. I attended a game where they opened the season with local tribe members singing, and drumming, the dedicated it to the coach of the opposing team who died during off season. If you've never heard Native American music live in person you really should, it's like nothing else.
Several local tribes supported the school using the name, but one chose not to. The school the had to use another name, logo, etc.
It struck me how nothing seemed to be gained except distance ....
>It is so weird, because it adds yet another layer of distance between "us" and the "normal" people.
Yeah, and those "sensitive" people also don't seem to get what normal means. It just means "how the majority is supposed to be/the baseline fully functioning state regarding X". It's not a moral judgement if one is not in the normal group regarding some ability.
>Its a weird phenomenon. The longer I watch all of this, and I also mean the gender-language-hacks, I feel like this move has added to the distance between various groups, not made it smaller.
I think the smaller distance is when groups can be relaxed and casual about language - and even joke about their differences.
This is as opposed to hostile (as back in the day regarding e.g. whites against blacks) and overcautious tip-toeing around the other group.
This line is probably smaller than it may appear. The reason much of this language policing started is because of the dominant group using language to reinforce the inferiority of a less powerful group.
It’s always easier for the dominant group to say “it’s just words — no one cares” since the words are never at their expense.
>The reason much of this language policing started is because of the dominant group using language to reinforce the inferiority of a less powerful group.
I think it's the inverse: the reason this language policing started was because the dominant group had reduced its hold... That why it started when it started and not when things were much worse...
Everyone is subject to slurs. That’s not what I’m referencing.
I’m talking about the use of language where you use the less-dominant group as a negative reference point. For example “retarded”. Or “fag”. You apply those terms to people who are neither as a way of disparaging them.
I’m gay. Whether someone calls me fag or gay or LGBTQI+ (this one I hate more that “fag”, BTW) is orthogonal to:
a) how they treat me
b) whether they would actually stick their neck out for me when it really matters (e.g. marriage equality).
I will almost universally guarantee that the same person who insists on non-offensive language for me would NOT fight for marriage equality if it means they have to give up something or risk something. True ally.
I think you missed my point. It isn’t about calling you a fag (which they may). It’s about calling people they think are less than in general - fags.
On your other point, you think that people who call you fag or other offensive language will fight for marriage equality? As a black person I’ve found that people who call me coon typically haven’t fought for me — even when they have something to gain (drain pool).
You’re right that someone who calls me X or you Y won’t fight for us. What I tried to communicate is that folks who spend a lot of time fighting for using specific verbiage to refer to me so as to not offend, are not really helping me. In fact, as Dave Chapelle has pointed out, when it really comes down to it, even people who obsess about using language that they think would offend me don’t stick their necks out when it really matters; they might correct speech or go to a march (gay pride for instance), but ask them to sacrifice something and it is crickets.
> It’s about calling people they think are less than in general
OT, but does anyone know where this specific usage of "less than" came from? I'd never seen it until about five years ago and now it's everywhere. The word "inferior" would have been used before. What's the origin of this?
I've been reading "Cynical Theories" by Pluckrose and Lindsay which explains this whole thing as coming from a one-dimensional, activistized Postmodern framework. In this framework, society is a subtle network of power that creates oppressors and oppressed, sustained by "truth" created through language. There is no such thing as objective truth, so truth is a social construct created through language. But since the word "blind" is used by the default, in-power group, your claim to prefer "blind" is acquiescing to the oppressive in-power structure. So if they really buy into the framework, they cannot actually use the word you prefer, or they would be furthering the oppressive structure.
Ironically, intersectionality adds that truth is created by identity groups (e.g. "blind", "blind females", "blind black females", etc.), and cannot be truly known by people outside that identity group. So even by their own assumptions, your claims as a member of the blind identity group ought to trump their assertions. But, this is functionally a fundamentalist religion, and the assumptions are sacrosanct. (I am using "fundamentalist" here meaning a one-dimensional ideology that is non-negotiable, which is essentially how Christian fundamentalism, for example, currently operates.) You might be able to mess with the minds of cultural believers, though.
This absolutely has increased the distance between groups, because the real goal is not kindness but activism to disrupt entrenched power structures.
I once had an injury in both of my legs after a long hike. It caused my legs to be so swollen that I had very limited mobility, but I could still walk - though it probably looked very awkward.
In school, children get taught that when someone looks disabled, you shouldn't look at them, because staring at them is some kind of discrimination or so. I couldn't disagree more.
When I had that injury, and was kind of crip-walking, people would intuitively stare at me for a second, then -very obviously- force themselves to look away.
The injury wasn't that bad and went away after a week or two. But the way people forced themselves to look away, was much worse. I can't imagine dealing with that every day.
I'd argue that the people who make up these kind of "rules" probably aren't themselves affected by it.
I kind of feel the euphemism treadmill is the language version of “looking away”.
Blind is stark; powerful; forces me to contemplate the lack of vision - I can’t escape it.
But if I start using “visually challenged” then it’s softer, sounds like a game, challenges can be overcome, this isn’t something I need to worry about.
> When I had that injury, and was kind of crip-walking, people would intuitively stare at me for a second, then -very obviously- force themselves to look away.
> The injury wasn't that bad and went away after a week or two. But the way people forced themselves to look away, was much worse. I can't imagine dealing with that every day.
Having experienced this, I personally find that what's worse is the way people look at me in the first place. It's not as simple as someone looking at me, I can _see_ on their face or in their eyes or ... what's going through their mind, before they reassert control and hide it again.
> It is so condescending to believe your own language-police more then the person you are talking to.
This is exactly it. They have theories that spin a narrative telling them that you just don't understand why your preferred language is oppressive. Like women who just want to be housewives and stay at home with kids are suffering from internalized misogyny, or that Hispanic people almost universally hate the term LatinX but we must keep using it because gender neutrality is way more important than pissing off almost everyone.
From non-native speaker perspective, it sounds like it also obscured the truth: visually challenged can still consume visual info, blind - can’t. For the former larger fonts, adapted color palette, simplified graphics, etc can be useful, for the latter no amount of adaptations will work and you have to completely switch to audio or tactile mode of communication.
Interesting, thanks for chiming in. I wonder if the best way to push back against language policing is to simply poll various groups, see which language they prefer, and publish the results. The deltas could be interesting as well, e.g. even if most blind people dislike the term "blind", it would still be interesting if they are more likely to prefer the term "blind" than a member of the general population.
I think public opinion polling might actually solve the problem, because the actual group has greater moral authority than language police activists. I suspect people might not cite this Atlantic article during a discussion of whether their organization should adopt language policing for fear of coming across as a reactionary old fogey. But if you were citing a poll of the group in question, that's a level of moral authority that's hard for a language police activist to argue against.
Basically the hypothesis to test here is that a latinx-type reaction is fairly common, it just doesn't generally reach public consciousness the way it did in the case of latinx.
Groups don't have homogeneous opinions on this stuff. The prime example these days being Latinx.
If people aren't called what they prefer, as long as they weren't called a slur, a simple correction is fine. Or, if you're never going to see them again, just let it go.
From what I read about Latinx, a significant majority of that community seem to hate the term that has been applied to them (which doesn’t even make any linguistic sense in Spanish anyway). Seems to be a small minority pushing it.
The challenge is when there is no single term that doesn’t offend everyone.
So you can call a group “Latinx” and offend some and call a group “Latinos” and offend some and call a group “Latinos/Latinas” and offend some.
I want to offend the fewest people with my speech. I would like to use opinion polling to both offend fewest as well as signal that I’m working to offend the fewest.
What’s annoying and frustrating to me is when someone tells me “You must use term X because term Y offends.” Then I change it and someone else tells me “You must use term Y because term X offends.” And the worst part is the circular waste of time. I work in an organization that has a communication clearance process for the purpose of scientific accuracy and we spend a decent amount of time on this kind of editorial preference change/revert. Most isn’t even “offensive” words but stuff like Oxford comma, data are plural, etc.
I don't want to be offensive to people either but I also don't want to have to keep up on polling of what the plurality of any particular group is okay being referred to as. There are an infinite set of groups that I'd have to keep track of.
I'll find out if something's offensive when I say it, with no ill intent, and someone respectfully lets me know that they'd prefer to be called something else. My language will change over time in response to the overall language changing over time.
Recently I came across a discussion on Twitter where a selection of scientists were arguing that the long-used term "blind peer review" (i.e. where the authors do not know the identities of the reviewers, and vice versa) could be construed as able-ist and should be referred to as "anonymous peer review". I'm all in favour of using inclusive language, but at the time this discussion struck me as odd because I've never connected the definition of "blind" in "blind peer review" to the disability, although its obvious that the link exists from a linguistic standpoint. What are your thoughts on such discussions? I do believe that none of those arguing for the change were themselves blind.
Not OC, but I am also totally blind, so I'll bite. IMHO, just more silliness. The biggest problems that I as a blind person face don't generally stem from my blindness. Don't get me wrong, it's incredibly inconvenient, and causes a whole host of problems. But the biggest, most life altering problems tend to stem from societies misconceptions. And the best weapon we have against misconceptions is communication. But all this fuss over words does not aid communication in any way. In fact, I think it does the exact opposite.
The only thing the language police have done for us is to make communication more awkward. How am I supposed to have a real conversation with anyone if they're constantly worried they're going to not use the right code words (which, by the way, change routinely). How is a blind person supposed to convince a potential employer that they can handle the work when they (according to the language police) can't even handle people using regular words. People learn by asking questions, and people aren't likely to ask questions if they are afraid of stepping on a verbal landmine and being labeled insensitive, or worse.
I don't know who the language police think they're serving by all this outrage and/or false concern, but it certainly isn't me. If I need to, I can get offended on my own behalf just fine thanks.
Wiktionary has attestations for use of 'blind' to mean 'concealed' or 'not visible' going all the way back to the 16th century, and if you follow the etymology it becomes likely that that was the original sense of the word, with 'sightless' coming later. This same disingenuous reasoning was used with Twitch with the phrase 'blind playthrough' (to mean 'playing a game without having seen any of it before').
Got to love scrubbing the culture of positive references to blindness in the service of inclusiveness simply because bunch of scientists are uncomfortable with disability.
I remember the second in command of a rather esteemed starship remarking that somebody should be taking notes about how a blind man teaches an android to paint.
Funny you could argue that "disabled" is language that distances us from reality. Since describing someone not present as just "disabled" doesn't tell you anything whether that person in reality is able to do one specific thing, eg tedious react frontend development in a large organization. "differently abled" doesn't tell you anything more but clearly signals that "more information is needed".
It does tell us many things, you're being obtuse on purpose. If someone is disabled you know they generally suffer from some health issue which is serious enough and probably chronic, to afford them that status by the state.
Among this umbrella you have many common things like, they can probably park closer to doors, if they are disabled. I'm not sure why people just pretend things are not how they are when discussing these subjects. Of course we have more information than less.
Yes if you are blind you have a disability, as per almost every developed country's rules. My mom isn't even fully blind and pays less tax due to her disability status, she is officially disabled.
Regarding parking closer to doors, I said "probably" and that was literally to illustrate that there is an umbrella that covers most cases even if there's edge cases. Obviously there are people with disabilities that don't even allow them to leave their bed so they can't drive. I think the most accurate part of my previous comment was about you being intentionally obtuse.
I don't know if you misinterpreted but I meant that "disabled" doesn't tell you everything about a persons ableness across all functions that a human can do. Eg. one disabled person is able to drive a car, and this other disabled person (your mom, sorry I had to do this) can't.
This is obvious ofc but my comment was about the OP stating that OMGWOKENESS, eg. saying "differently abled" is a language/semantic excercise that somehow takes us further away from reality and therefore is worse than using the traditional "disabled". In other words, using "differently abled" (with regard to the normal functions a human is able to do) doesn't hide any reality that "disabled" shows. IMHO.
Edit: Disclaimer: I haven't watched Carlin in a long time, didn't rewatch this bit now either so I'm arguing from my "I love him but sometimes he's a dick and othertimes he's wrong" view of him.
I also wish we could call it the "master" branch, renaming the primary branch to "main" is just pointless.
But it's simply less risky and less work to just call it "main".
It doesn't matter, and nobody gains anything from calling it "main" -- but if we call it "master" someone might get offended or waste my time arguing over it.
There is no incentive to insist calling it "master". So similarly, I guess we'll end up calling you "photonically disadvantaged" :)
Or maybe we can give it a positive spin and call it "darkness unimpaired"?
(Just kidding of course)
Sometimes you end up with a random mishmash of repos, some with the default branch called "master", others with it called "main", and then a handful with something else altogether (e.g. "develop"). Someone pushes for a massive "master=>main" rename – but once you get "master" baked into umpteen dozen ultra-complex CI/CD/testing pipelines, etc, it takes a lot of time to change them all and deal with all the fiddly breakage that results. So people do the rename for brand-new projects, and some of the low-hanging fruit of the existing ones, but the "too obscure" or "too-big-to-deal-with" existing projects get put off indefinitely. And then you are constantly scratching my head trying to remember which one this repo is. Even worse, a few repos someone creates a new "main" branch but keeps an old outdated "master" branch around just to confuse people. Even if your organisation has been so diligent as to finish off the rename everywhere, sooner or later you need to make changes to some open source project you are using which hasn't.
What Git really needs, is some kind of "branch alias" feature. Some config setting like "branch_alias.main=master", and then I could always write "git checkout main", and it would checkout "main" if that exists, and "master" if it didn't (and vice versa). That would solve it in most cases – except for the rarer "we decided to use neither main nor master" and "we made a new main branch but kept an outdated master branch hanging around".
I think that it is probably not necessary or helpful to rename branches in existing repositories, but you can do that if it is helpful for what you are doing.
If you upload a repository to GitHub, you can use whatever default branch name it already has with no problem. I know because I did upload one that uses "trunk" as the default branch name, and it did not cause any problem. (I used "trunk" as the default branch name because it is a mirror of a fossil repository which uses "trunk" as the default branch name.)
(And, someone does get a minor benefit to call it "main"; it is two letters shorter than "master". Of course, that is minor, but it isn't quite nothing.)
From spending time with students of my local school for the blind and visually impaired, I am under the impression "blind" and "visually impaired" are seperate things. Some of the people I knew seemed to care about the distinction, so it seems better to stick with something neutral until I am sure.
Sure, but I was not refering to the somewhat blurry distinction between blind and visually impaired. I am well aware there is a spectrum. I was talking about my own experience, and that is limited to being pitch-black-darkness-blind myself.
Of course, but I was also talking about my own experience. If I randomly met you I would be hesitant to call you "blind" until I knew more about you. It stems from a young man being very angry at being called "blind" when he could see.
Rereading your post, it sound like people are unwilling to call you blind even after you tell them you are, so we may be talking about different things.
Attitudes around such things vary by disability community, peoples relationship to it (self proclaimed “ally’s” or people who work with the disabled for a living tend to use pained language, people with the actual condition tend not to), and individual differences.
Personally though people using extra syllables to describe me when a more terse way to describe me gets the point across always comes off as condescending. People seem to be utterly obsessed with the connotation of words and if a word starts having a bad connotation they will just replace it with a different usually inferior word and consider themselves heroic for doing so. Blind becomes “visually impaired” making 1 syllable into 5 and ironically making language more complex and less accessible (since the entire point of such language is that it’s so awkward that nobody who isn’t woke will use it allowing it to have a signalling purpose). In reality what such people attitudes come off as is “you’re such weak shit everybody around you should be like me and constantly expend effort to protect your feelings”.
It’s the language of “allyship”, not the language of the disabled most of the time. If people need such terms to feel comfortable with the disabled, I’ll humour them I guess, but I just hope people understand that this language mostly exists for the sake of people who are immensely uncomfortable with the concept of disability and those people tend not to be disabled.
I think it’s a consequence of the well-intentioned, but foolish idea of “bias toward action” that doing something is good and not doing something is bad or complicit.
When people see something bad-discrimination against disabled- they want to improve the situation but don’t know what to do. So they do something, anything without considering if the action is effective or if the best course is to do nothing.
So making a list of words to use or not use is doing something. There’s no way to measure if it makes things better or worse, but at least it’s something.
If they don’t make a list, and do nothing then that might be confused with not recognizing the problem.
So I think it’s well meaning people who want to help and do something stupid rather than not doing something.
I wonder if just releasing a statement of values is more appropriate for noting that an organization is against all these injustices but not advocating for lots of dumb little changes.
That and I think these lists naturally suffer from collaboritis. Where someone makes a document and circulates it for edits. All the obvious stuff is already on there so people want to help and think up any edge case and add it to the document. It’s hard to argue for parsimony for fear of being called out as a bigot. And it’s hard to suggest removing an item for the same reason.
It's a superficial thing to complain about, because it's rare that isn't linked to action - from dropping kerbs, to adding lifts and ramps, to building special toilets for wheelchair users.
It's questionable how many of these things would have happened if the language wasn't made memorable.
Of course it irritates people who would prefer not to think about these things - because it's supposed to.
There's actually far more us/them divisive language on the right. Even if you hate progressive tropes and don't always agree with the politics they're at least making an effort to be inclusive.
Right wing language is always irredeemably divisive - usually aggressively so. Frequently with outright contempt, and sometimes with normalisation of violence.
In my experience it isn’t rare at all. In work I see this a lot where an error is ambiguous and changes make it worse. I see “bias toward action” frequently in work presentations and whatnot.
For debugging it’s not so much to change nothing, but to investigate and figure out what to change rather than change things without an understanding of the intended impact of the change.
Also, it’s not that I don’t think about these things. It’s that I think and determine the best course of action is no action. That gets conflated with not thinking about these things because on the outside it’s hard to differentiate those that thought and care and think to do nothing vs those that are oblivious vs those that choose not to think about this.
In this example, I think the best course is to not include disabled in the list. I want to include disabled people, but I think changing language in this way is not valuable.
Apparently people wanted to intensionally offend people so much the traditional swear words or offenses were not enogh so used anything they thought could hurt - disability or mere difference in the shade of the skin - that forgot the original meaning of the words (raising childs learned the offensive meaning first?).
People need to stop being intensionally offensive instead of using then banning more and more words doing that. The words are the symptom not the cause.
Isn't there is an actual difference between blind and visually impaired tho? The way I understood it blind people are a subset of visually impaired people, but not all visually impaired people are blind in a medical sense.
So the reasoning behind such language might be to include people who are not technically blind, but still require similar consideration, assistence, infrastructure and so on.
Language is odd here. The public used to call neurodivergent people "retarded" till the word had developed such a negative connotation that you wouldn't be able to use the word when adressing actual neurodivergent people without feeling like you are swearing. Of course that negative connotation didn't come out of nowhere, it is an expression of the way society looks (or looked) at the people it described. Of course people who live with mentally disabled people (or mentally disabled people themselves) often self-label themselves as "retarded" very bluntly and not without some sense of humour. But a bit like with race there are certain things you can say when you are part of the minority, that might not be okay to say when you are part of the majority.
When I was a kid people would constantly call something or someone "retarded", my niece's generation talks about how that is not okay. And they don't do it out of political correctness, but because they truly don't think neurodivergent behavior is something anybody should have to be ashamed of.
But of course there are also people who don't go that deep and just want to not offend anyone (good luck with that). They are the people who will feel uncomfortable when they describe something that isn't part of their perfect little world.
I myself, as someone with ADHD, absolutely despise the term “neurodivergent” (and also “neurotypical”). I hate how it’s used to lump everyone with different neurological, mental, and learning conditions under one umbrella. I hate how it is used to separate us from the “neurotypical” who don’t have these conditions. And I hate how offensive it sounds (“neurodivergent” sounds like some C-tier, crazed, antisocial comic book villain obsessed with building bombs or something.) I feel clear[0] adjectives and nouns are the best, most direct descriptors. I’m not neurodivergent, I just have ADHD. I’m not oculi-visuallydivergent, I just wear glasses because I am nearsighted.
[0] Yes I am aware that what counts as clear is itself very, very up for discussion and is a very loaded term. I hope I got my point across.
Yes and actually that subsetting is why we need the richness of the language. A school for the blind is specifically for people who need to learn to make do without hardly any visual input. Assistance for the visually impaired can range from screen reading and braille to large text and high contrast.
We also have a lot of definitions for blind and retarded, not referring to personal differences. A duck blind. Retarded bacterial growth. A blind sac. Sometimes people take offense at even these uses.
The difficult part of this being, some of the 100% blind people effectively don’t like the word and don’t want to be called blind. Then some people are ‘only’ 80% blind, and don’t want to be called blind. Then some family members of blind people don’t want the word to be used.
I think it’s pretty common phenomenon, like the people who call themselves “black”, those who are called “black” but hate it, and everyone in the middle usually not knowing what’s the position of any specific person’s on the issue.
I don’t think there even is a correct answer, as long as there are many people in different situations with different perceptions of what the words mean, there’s no way we get a consensus on this. At most we could get a majority sharing a common sensibility and bully the rest into submission, as it happened so many times in history.
Pretty simple if you don’t have to deal with the logistics of this. How can you judge if something was done with malice or not in the first place especially when we’re talking about disabilities which impair being able to read between the lines fairly often? People can make their preferences clear but how does one meet the preferences of many people in a mass communication?
Benefit of the doubt? Why is it important to know for sure if something so benign is done with malice or ignorance on an initial take. Just assume ignorance and if it continues it becomes clear that it's malice.
>I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short.
Have you ever listened to the tv show Avatar the last air bender? There's a character who's blind named Toph and she always goofs on her friends who aren't blind throughout the series. It's quite amusing since it's not done in a manner that insults her for being blind but that they sometimes say things which might be insensitive which she makes fun of in her own way.
I think it all starts from a good place. Would you rather people just using words "carelessly" without regard to how you might feel? It's questioning the assumption that the word used is fine throughout history.
I don't think there is anything nefarious about it, just that "people" always co-opt the motives in the end and make it muddled for their own benefit. Overthinking it I guess. I know it when I see it, but it's hard to articulate it to something that works for everyone.
> It's questioning the assumption that the word used is fine throughout history.
Bullshit. It forbids questioning of the questioning. That is all it is really about.
> "people" always co-opt the motives in the end and make it muddled for their own benefit
At least you can concede that point. Which is an enormously important point and more than enough of a reason not to go down this idiotic path of linguistic power struggles.
I'm not arguing what is currently happening or the end result, just that from even my own personal perspective I usually want to ask "is this word okay to use around you?" instead of just assuming it as such or automatically making someone else responsible for their feelings around my words. You might ultimately be right, but go down that road enough and these people are usually called "assholes" lol. That phrase isn't an indictment of good intentions, just a warning to be aware.
> or automatically making someone else responsible for their feelings around my words
If people are not responsible for their own feelings and the onus is on you, you are at their mercy. Some percentage of them are going to abuse you as a result.
Where is the win? All you are enabling is psychos and mentally/emotionally unstable people.
Like I said, people ARE ultimately responsible for their own feelings, but that doesn't mean we can't do with erring on the side of empathy in our day-to-day. Don't mistake this for me saying "policing language is fine to preserve someone else's feelings".
My comment was mainly to the parent on why it's bad for someone to feel awkward about potentially using a "wrong" word and for me sometimes it stems out of care.
All that said, I basically think all this shit gets perverted in the public space where there's a lot more gamesmanship and manipulation.
I mean sure, if I asked up front every single time to the point where people get annoyed? But that's what we are discussing here.
Yes, we humans have millions of years ready subtle signals, but we are also really fucking bad at reading minds and knowing what others are thinking. Thus, by clarifying with things like actual words in a direct and non-confrontational way we can actually communicate and understand.
I don't know why people are so keen to get me in some kind of "gotcha!" when it's pretty simple what I'm suggesting. Like since when has the intention of wanting to be sure that you're not offending someone become a replacement for inept social person who can't read subtle signs?
Your suggestion is akin to the Victorian gentlemen who didn't swear around the ladies and talk about intellectually heavy and upsetting things because they couldn't handle it.
It's the opposite of empowering somebody to speak up and decide on their own what they can and can't handle.
So yes you might get some pushback when you "simply" suggest we change our interactions.
what are you even talking about? My original post to the op was about why is it wrong to not want to offend someone? It has nothing to do with trying to dictate anything for the rest of the population, just my opinion. No where do I tell you that it’s better to shut up for fear of offending someone.
It’s you who is projecting whatever issue you have with people even remotely suggesting thinking about what we are saying to some greater problem.
Because it's patronizing. You can use normal language without intending to offend someone, but if you actively censor your own language in their presence, you're removing their agency.
Yeah you lost me there I guess, then. There are numerous instances I can think of where we censor our own language and it has nothing to do with removing someone's agency. And of course you can intend to not offend someone and still offend them; that doesn't mean your intent was wrong.
We can agree to disagree here. In the end, I would rather converse with someone who errs of the side of not wanting to "offend" me, but can still freely say whatever they want vs. someone who speaks with no regard to how their words might affect me and makes no apologies for it.
The outcome is the same, but to me, one person is thoughtful and the other person is a jerk. I have never thought that someone trying to be thoughtful with their words was patronizing me, but that's only my experience.
> The outcome is the same, but to me, one person is thoughtful and the other person is a jerk. I have never thought that someone trying to be thoughtful with their words was patronizing me, but that's only my experience.
I have the opposite visceral response to this sort of thing. If someone refers to me either singly or as a part of a collective such as "persons having a mental impairment" I immediately know I'm dealing with the sort of bastard that no human connection can be formed with.
The language betrays the intent, and the intent is to proclaim a shibboleth for the purposes of in-group/out-group reinforcement.
In my opinion, it is not wrong to not want to offend someone, but it is wrong to give that priority over actually communicating.
I do not intend to deliberately try to offend someone, but I think that it is more important to actually say things, freedom of speech, making an argument for or against something, etc, than it is to avoid offending someone.
Those same millions of years of evolution have also made us quite adept at reinforcing power and dominance structures through those same signals. Seems like there might be more to the discussion than "doesn't matter", no?
It's certainly unfortunate, but not that weird in my view. People in general don't want to offend, but rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that the acceptable terms for any person who has some "protected characteristic" are an ever-shifting minefield, and any infraction will be unforgivable. This fear is 99% unfounded of course, but due to the disproportionate prominence of such "woke takedowns" in media, has absolutely added to the distance between groups.
When I was a child, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. This is now malady non grata: For one thing, it's been folded into autism spectrum disorder, the DSM-5 being more on the lumper end of things than previous DSMs were, and, for another, it has a checkered history, with Hans Asperger using his position as a doctor in Vienna during the Second World War to choose which children were saved and which were murdered in camps. His collaboration with the Nazis and odious views have resulted in a backlash against the diagnosis.
Later still, the very word "Autism" seems to have faded out of polite speech, with people like me being referred to as "on the spectrum" with no explicit mention of which spectrum. This is, as far as I'm concerned, a straight-up euphemism treadmill: The DSM-5's lumping of Asperger's into autism spectrum disorder is something that can be defended on its scientific merits, but moving away from any mention of autism is purely down to the word's use as an insult. OK, so be it. The treadmill rolls on.
The final point is person-first language and why I don't use it: I am an autistic person. I don't say I'm a person with autism because I can't possibly be without autism. Is someone who identifies as a man a "person with gender" or is anyone a "person with race" or "person with ethnicity"? No. Some things are fundamental enough to how we experience the world that saying we're a person with that thing, which implies we could be without it, is wrong.
Autism is an insult, it’s a shortened version of “autism spectrum disorder”, disorder is intrinsically an insulting word, and the diagnostic criteria describes variations in human behaviour as dysfunctions and so on.
The increased use of “autism” as an insult and people avoiding it is because it is an insult and always was from its conception. That is why doctors regularly try and plot to screen people’s DNA for this “autism” to exterminate them from the gene pool. Because it’s a bad thing they want to destroy, despite the fact it’s a “spectrum” disorder and thus is a label of convenience and there’s not really such a thing as “the autism gene”.
Which to me makes the whole “autistic person” vs “person with autism” stuff pointless. You’re either a disordered person or a person with a disorder, put a gun to my head and I prefer disordered person. I react with offence to any such labels on the grounds that “Asperger’s” is obsolete and “autism” was never diagnosed so people and call me disordered as shorthand to describe me can fuck themselves because I don’t want to deal with the stigma of a label which was thrust upon me through incredibly pseudoscientific means. The dsm-iv which I was diagnosed under was called a “noble lie” by one of its chief author’s.
> Autism is an insult, it’s a shortened version of “autism spectrum disorder”, disorder is intrinsically an insulting word, and the diagnostic criteria describes variations in human behaviour as dysfunctions and so on.
No, people use "Autism" as an insult because they think it's a way to say "retarded" which won't get them slapped down.
I don't really agree, because I see people who use both the word "Retard" and "Autist" as a slur. It's only the left wing who will exclusively use the word "Autist" as a slur because it flies under the radar and can be wrapped up in woke dressing, but the words aren't totally interchangable.
The word "Autist" has become popular simply because more people are called "Autists". This justifies parents getting more government assistance's, schools being able to rationalise away their standardised test scores slipping as being the students fault, doctors getting fat insurance payouts, TikTok celebrities getting attention, everybody gets their piece. It's a label of scapegoating problems people have with an individual justified by the subjective observation of their behaviour and the inference their brains must be "disordered", "disturbed", "disregulated", and "dysfunctional" without any requirement to look deeper into societal or physiological problems. No wonder prevalence has increased more than a hundredfold since it first started being diagnosed, it's so convenient to so many people, and the diagnostic criteria is relativistic and thus pliable.
The rise of autism's popularity was to justify (POSITIVELY!) discriminatory treatment in schools, social groups, and work which were always wrapped up in this faux-sympathetic concern over defective brains which totally justifies differential treatment. People who just think that "Autism" is a funny way to make fun of somebody without any further motivation aren't even the problem, they merely reveal the reality of what over-socialised people have always thought when they call people "Autistic", and that look in the mirror revolts people.
Way I see it, this thing called autism being treated as a "mental disorder" is no different than transgenderism being called a "mental disorder". A difference in behaviour being belittled as a mental defect without non-inferential evidence or thought about if this framing actually helps people. That is how I see it more than I see it as a PC replacement for the word "Retard".
> Later still, the very word "Autism" seems to have faded out of polite speech, with people like me being referred to as "on the spectrum" with no explicit mention of which spectrum
It is terribly ignorant, because people who use "spectrum" as an alias for autism/ASD don't know that psychiatry/psychology contains many other "spectrums" – the schizophrenia spectrum, the obsessive-compulsive spectrum, the bipolar spectrum, the disruptive behaviour disorder spectrum, the trauma spectrum, etc, etc. The autism and schizophrenia spectrums are the only two which have officially made it into the DSM-5, but the others are all actively used in research and clinically, and the obsessive-compulsive spectrum was originally planned to be included (but for whatever reason didn't make the cut).
> The final point is person-first language and why I don't use it: I am an autistic person.
I seriously thought about paying a psychologist >$1000 for an autism assessment. Together, my psychiatrist and my psychologist [0] talked me out of it. They both said that if I really wanted a piece of paper saying that I had ASD, certainly some psychologist out there would be happy to take my money and give me one. But, their argument was, it wouldn't actually make any positive difference to my life, it would just be a waste of my time and money. And, for now at least, I decided to follow their advice. So am I an "autistic person" or not?
What is "autism"? "Asperger's"? "ASD"? Well, in part, they are scientific theories; in part, they are cultural constructs, whose existence and success is quite independent of the quality or truth of the scientific theory. Focusing just on the scientific theory side, how good is the evidence behind them? Most professionals, families, and people who identify with those labels assume the evidence must be really good. But, there are voices out there arguing that they are far from proven, that the science behind them is deeply flawed, even that we ought to drop them and look for better theories to replace them with. See [1] – and for a weaker but overlapping position, [2]. Is something really "fundamental enough to how we experience the world" if it is a scientific theory which could well turn out to be false, a dead-end, a wrong turn in the history of science? What if, one day, people look back on ASD/autism/Asperger's/etc just as we now look back on hysteria, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, the Ptolemaic model, the steady-state universe, etc, etc, etc? What if "autism" is really no more fundamental to anyone's identity than hysteria was?
[0] my psychologist isn't qualified to diagnose ASD, hence he couldn't do it, I had to go to someone else. He could gain that qualification if he wanted to – all it takes is just a few short courses – but he isn't interested in practicing in that area. Similar story for my psychiatrist – he told me if any patient asks him about an ASD diagnosis, he tells them to see a psychologist for that instead, he doesn't want to get involved in it
> What if, one day, people look back on ASD/autism/Asperger's/etc just as we now look back on hysteria, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, the Ptolemaic model, the steady-state universe, etc, etc, etc?
None of that makes sense, in that new ideas about how the world works can't change the results of old experiments. That means I'll always be me, I'll always have been me, and part of that involves dealing with things that are, apparently, significantly different from what other people deal with. I am different from other people, regardless of what name is eventually hung on that, and just saying that name can't be "Autism" for some reason or another isn't changing the important part.
Here's a paper I really like – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6880188/ – they looked at the brains of four groups of children – those with a primary diagnosis of ASD, ADHD, OCD and the "typically developing" ("normal" children with no diagnosis at all). They used machine learning to assign the children to clusters, based purely on brain imaging and test results (IQ and behavioural scales) – without any reference to the diagnostic labels. The 10 clusters they got had poor overlap with the diagnostic labels – see especially figure 3 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6880188/figure/...
I don't think their research is at all the "final answer" to what is "really going on" – it needs replication, and you might get different clusters if you added more diagnoses – but let's just pretend for the moment it is. People with an ASD diagnosis were in all 10 clusters, so who knows which one you would be in. Now, given your emphasis on "I am different", maybe you are in one of the clusters which is "further from normal", such as 8 or 9 or 10. But, whatever "you have", it would be clear that (1) plenty of people who "have ASD" don't "have what you have", (2) unless you happen to be in cluster 10, the sole ASD-only cluster (which only had 10-15% of ASD), some people who "don't have ASD" do "have what you have". Doesn't it therefore follow, that whatever it is, "autism" or "ASD" or "Aspeger's" isn't a good label for it?
OK, I think I agree with you: We don't know if ASD or any of our current diagnoses are a particularly good model, but it is possible to cluster people and some people are farther from whatever group of clusters collectively contains the majority or strong plurality.
> It is so weird, because it adds yet another layer of distance between "us" and the "normal" people.
I like to call normal people "Normies", and with all the terror and hardship they've brought to the world (being the vast majority of the population), while self-righteously pointing their fingers at other people, assigning 100% of the underlying causality to them (usually based on heuristics or blindly accepting the mainstream narrative explanation) it only increases my enjoyment when I'm insulted and downvoted/rate-limited in response.
"We have met the enemy and he is us".
> Its a weird phenomenon. The longer I watch all of this, and I also mean the gender-language-hacks, I feel like this move has added to the distance between various groups, not made it smaller.
I often wonder if this is purely accidental/organic.
I agree with what you are saying, but I also have my own comments relating to such things.
What I had seen is that these use of banning words and using different words, mostly just makes it more difficult to communicate properly, rather than actually helping anyone. (Occasionally some specific change is helpful in some contexts, but often it just makes it worse.)
I think that all of these changes are rather excessive. Sometimes they do make an improvement, but often they don't, and may make it worse. Sometimes it is an improvement in some contexts, but it should not be applied to contexts in which it is inappropriate.
I also don't like such words like "visually challenged", etc. It is better to use words such as "blind", although it can depend on the context. Sometimes "unable to see" might be more appropriate (since, just because you are unable to see something does not necessarily mean that you are blind; e.g. maybe you are looking at something else at the time, or your eyes are closed, etc).
"Disabled" is OK (using words such as "people with disabilities" or "differently-abled" or "people living with disabilities" or whatever, does not help), but usually it is better to specify the specific disability (e.g. "blind" or "deaf"), which is usually much more helpful than writing "disabled". (Although, in some contexts, it may be sensible to write "disabled", because it isn't about a specific kind of disabilities. Even in some cases, "differently-abled" may be appropriate, possibly.)
Accessibility features can be helpful whether or not you are blind, deaf, or other kind of disabilities. For this reason, it is helpful to not restrict their usefulness or to claim that they are only good if you are disabled in this way. (For example, many people can use captions on TV even if you are not deaf, although they are also useful if you are deaf, which should not be disregarded.) I think that many kinds of features can be useful whether or not you are blind/deaf/etc, if the system is well-designed.
In some cases, there just aren't any good words to describe some unusual situations clearly, though.
I used to work for a while with blind people. The boss of the local blind people community was shooting dad-like jokes about blindness all the time, I loved that attitude!
It helped to make connection with these people and we needed that, because I was developing some app that main audience was blind people and to actually understand their needs and problems you need to make a connection with them.
Decade or so ago I was once in a room with a group of people where one person was blind. An acquaintance of the blind person came into the room and said oh hey good to see you to him. The blind person replied back to them with one of the best comebacks I’ve ever heard in my life with “well I’ve never seen you” before” and had the whole room laughing.
That’s because they care more they were bullied in the past than about your feelings.
People appropriating your disability to excuse their bullying has led to what is effectively PTSD dealing with the groups whose voice was appropriated.
That’s sad — and has impacted not only disabled people, but race and gender relations.
I miss 10-20 years ago, when people were people rather than defined by protected class.
Amen. Its sad, and there seems to be nothing we can do about it. To a degree, I am used to being treated in a condescending way. This is just a level up, the worst kind: "I know better how you should be treated then you because you are to simple to know what I already know."
Its this new concept that says you can only be a nice, respectful person if you sign up to a particular ideology and view the world through this lens.
This ideology is usually espoused by people who have only have a couple of years life experience as an adult yet believe they are best positioned to tell everybody else how to think and behave.
The continuing to dissent aspect and persisting to use the “nice” words is dark to me. It represents to me the inescapable self referential pathway of all altruistic behaviors.
That which makes cooperation and altruism possible also causes some strange glitches that sometimes reveals the motivating emotions are always self referential.
It's bafflingly common for someone on this site to say something along the lines of "woke people should stop being woke and instead should listen to my opinions as a minority and change their ways to suit me better because I have special insight into the problems I face that they don't".
Which to most people, is what being woke is.
But I guess if you are on team non-woke and some kind of a minority then things get complicated quickly.
i used to live on the coast and moved to a midwest state. i did it because property is cheaper in the midwest and also i thought it would be refreshing to get a break from coastal culture. i moved to the midwest but a metro area in the midwest, not a rural community. the state is red, we have constitutional carry and we have stand your ground rather than duty to retreat.
i have gotten into developing real estate in this place and i have had a lot of theft. naturally, i thought that because the state is red, constitutional carry and stand your ground i would be able to confront someone committing a crime. i thought that if that person attacked me, i would be well within my rights to defend myself. one day i did catch someone trespassing, looking for something to steal. i did confront him and he did try to attack me. luckily, drawing my gun was enough to make him change his mind. it was a whole incident. and what happened next shocked me to my core and changed my understanding of what is going on in this country. the police treated me like the criminal. they didnt charge me but they were really mean and aggressive with me, as if i were not the victim of a crime, and they lied to me. they said i should have just called and not followed the man. i said if they hadnt taken 20 fucking minutes then i wouldnt have needed to keep him in sight. i said if it takes you 20 minutes to show up to me following the guy, it would have taken you an hour to get here otherwise. and i said that the guy would have gotten away. if people follow your advice the criminals will get away every fucking time. how the fuck does that work? his response, from a midwestern cop, was that i should just let insurance cover the losses. the insanity of that statement is shocking. but not as shocking as this: people in the community didnt support me. nobody was in favor of me confronting criminals. these people, who are often victimized and stolen from, are not just apathetic about crime but look down on me because i was involved in a violent interaction. these people wont confront criminals or be associated with people who do because they dont want to reduce their social status. thats what it is, its snobbery. these people "support the police" and there are blue porch lights everywhere, and they claim to be tough on crime, but they are no different than los angeles liberals when it comes to actually confronting crime. and people wonder why we have crime in this country. its because people are fucking retarded. they have no fucking principles.
this mind virus has taken over the entire country. and its all connected. these are the same people who allow themselves to fumble over language, who bend over backwards to not call a spade a spade. people who stumble over not offending a blind person, as if it would make them less blind, are the same people who shy away from confronting crime. in both cases, there is a total lack of critical thought, a total blindness to the bigger picture.
the simple and plain fact is that society cannot be good or even exist unless everyone makes a little sacrifice every once in a while. people have to stand up to crime every once in a while or else crime will become rampant. and it has. people have to say what they think every once in a while even if it makes you look bad or else the truth, our only guiding light, will become extinguished. but all these idiots avoid any and all risk to their own wellbeing no matter whats at stake. these people wont even accept the tiny, tiny little loss of face involved in unintentionally offending someone. literally any loss of face or status, any tiny little deviation from the script, is simply too much for these people. its fucking disgraceful. everyone knows that the country has become much more crime ridden, much more seedy, much more crappy in recent times. especially when you control for technology. its cultural for sure, not economic.
and since we are on the topic, let me just say it: fumbling around when calling a black person black or a blind person blind is more insulting than not! when you dance around and fumble and so on, you are making a huge and embarrassing insinuation that the condition of the person you are referring to is problematic or undesirable. you are screaming in that persons face that you see them as less than and you are trying really hard to not portray them as such. thats what really cements these people in the category of "idiot." they are selfishly helping themselves by toeing the line and not helping anyone else despite the fact that the entire justification for that dogma is being selfless and helping others.
Don’t draw unless your life is being threatened and you’ve decided you’re going shoot that person. Brandishing to stop theft I think is illegal anywhere. There is no Wild West anymore. Lucky you didn’t end up in jail.
i didnt brandish because brandishing it showing a deadly weapon with the intent to intimidate. if a person draws their weapon in self defence they arent brandishing even if they dont end up firing. i didnt draw my pistol to stop a theft i did it to stop the man from attacking me. he turned around, put his fists up, approached me and verbally threatened me with violence and trust me he meant it. thats why charges werent pressed.
In my life, I have been deaf, hearing impaired, hard of hearing, hearing challenged. I suppose at some point I will be acoustically disadvantaged.
You know what? At the end of the day, I'm still deaf. It's true. I have limitations that others take for granted. If I can't see someone speaking or if I'm out of batteries, we aren't going to be communicating well. That's pretty deaf. I won't be offended, it's just reality.
Changing language does not, and never did, give me preferential treatment. People are always always going to discriminate and pretty words won't stop them.
This. I recently ran up against a filter on Reddit where I used a phrase that I was completely unaware of. My account was flagged for hate speech. The comment had no ill-intent.
The problem with language is that we want individual words to have inherent meaning but as people adopt phrases to identify a movement, those meanings get carried along for the ride. eg: until recently, I would have just curiously nodded along to the phrase "It's ok to be _____" but learned that it's actually a dark dog whistle thanks to Scott Adams.
I suspect the unease you perceive with people using different terms for blindness are unease with their own attachments to those words. Fighting to keep using words with established meaning is laudable IMO. I still use "literally" as not "figuratively" despite the media-dulled connotation.
> I suspect the unease you perceive with people using different terms for blindness are unease with their own attachments to those words.
Nah. I think people are just terrified of coming across as a jerk for not knowing the latest non-offensive term for things. Black? African American? Oh black is ok again? Will I get in trouble with HR/Twitter for calling you blind? And if so, what word do I use instead? Do I ask? Is that awkward? Am I making it awkward??
It feels like a minefield, where the location of the mines change every few months and stepping on a mine could cost you big time.
The language police keep finding new things to get offended by, too. The Stanford “harmful language list” includes things like “user”, “tribe”, “client” and “addict”. Pleasing these people is exhausting.
"Terrified" is a bit much, I think most people just want to get along and are happy to use whatever term is acceptable to those it describes. Our understanding of what those terms are might shift over time, and it may get muddied by well-intentioned people trying a bit hard to avoid offence (or by people clumsily trying to police it) but it's generally progressing fine. And I think as long as you're compassionate, willing to listen and learn it's hard to really fuck up to the point that you're "cancelled" (to the extent that actually exists) unless you're deliberately looking to cause trouble.
>"Terrified" is a bit much, I think most people just want to get along and are happy to use whatever term is acceptable to those it describes.
I'm supposing some people might be more anxious about it than others, and in different contexts. If you see a lot of stuff in the news about people saying things you might have said and getting hounded for it that might make you super anxious - you don't know the etiquette anymore!!
I mean people get anxious about getting robbed when they read a robbery happened, why shouldn't they get anxious about having their life destroyed for something they said if they read someone got their life destroyed in that way.
Yeah that's something where you'd hope people could step back and realise that the news is often sensationalised and seeks out salacious stories of people being "cancelled" because they get people riled up and engaged. I still think that if you're open-minded, conscientious and not looking for conflict you can navigate a conversation with even the most extremely over-sensitive of people without having any issues.
I think you can too, when you’re in person and in a calm situation. And when there’s trust between you. And when you have some skills at conflict resolution.
I’m comparatively good at this stuff, and even I find it very tiring even in best case scenarios. I dated someone who was very woke about a decade ago. She and I eventually decided to just never talk about politics. She would get really worked up over small disagreements that avoiding the subject entirely was the only strategy we found to keep the peace. And that was despite agreeing on about 95% of our political opinions.
I agree it’s usually fine in practice, but I know plenty of people who still find the whole thing quite anxiety inducing.
Having your language policed isn’t an enjoyable experience. Doubly so when it feels counterproductive - like avoiding the word “blind” with blind people who might quite like the term.
I'd say more generally "Being embarrassed isn't an enjoyable experience" - it's embarrassing to find out you're using an offensive word or to feel like you're out of touch, but what's important is what you do with those feelings, how you react.
If someone politely reminds you that some word is inflammatory and not well-liked among a given community it describes, then you can either take it politely or blow up about how the world is going crazy and complain about stuff being "woke". That said if someone goes thermonuclear on you because you used "deaf" instead of "hearing-impaired", yeah that person is clearly a dick, doesn't deserve your time of day (note: just re-purposing the example from earlier, obviously this is not something anyone in this thread has done)
It'd be good to be able to convey that to someone who does feel like there is a "language police" or that it is anxiety-inducing to engage with younger people. I should note though that when I've encountered this - among people being racist or homophobic - people tend to dig in, become stubborn and rant about "woke culture" or genders so clearly the problem cuts both ways (and I hope you can see I'm clearly not the type to fly off the handle at someone for something innocuous).
Is the word “client” offensive? Stanford apparently thinks so. Is “blind” offensive to blind people? Is “mother” offensive? Apparently some people take offence at this stuff. Should I respect them for it? Should I feel embarrassed for being “out of touch” because I don’t side with the censors here?
Being told not to use these terms is language policing. It’s especially odious when it comes from people taking offence on behalf of others. My experience having my language policed isn’t as simple as feeling embarrassed. I would angry at people who demand I stop calling my mother my mother. So would she.
And you don’t merely “feel like” something is anxiety inducing. That’s not how anxiety works. People can and will feel anxiety for all sorts of reasons that might seem ridiculous to you or I. I find awkward scenes in movies anxiety inducing. I don’t just think they’re anxiety inducing - I feel actual anxiety while watching.
I’m happy for you that you never feel anxious about the idea of getting yelled at for your word choices. I wish everyone had that privilege. But we don’t live in that world. Lots of people - rightly or wrongly - feel terrorised by the idea of using the wrong words and getting yelled at for it. And I think that sucks for them! The experience you have - of people getting defensive about this stuff - where do you think that reaction comes from? I think it’s a social immune reaction to being told what to say. People hate that.
> Is the word “client” offensive? Stanford apparently thinks so
Has someone singled you out and told you that you're being offensive for using the word "client"? I suspect not, I think you've overreacted to this a bit. The document you linked has this in its third paragraph:
> The purpose of this website is to educate people about the possible impact of the words we use. We are not attempting to assign levels of harm to the terms on this site. We also are not attempting to address all informal uses of language.
So they're stating ahead of time they're not trying to get rid of this and create a form of "newspeak" or whatever, they're outlining some words some people use that have a variety of different implications and suggesting some alternatives to them in some contexts. The word "client" is under their "Imprecise" section, they suggest "user" instead. It is worth noting that I have personally encountered its ambiguity - a “client” in my current role can variously mean:
- a user or a person
- one of the accounts of that user/person
- a hospital or healthcare provider
- the application calling an API (“client” in OpenID Connect)
- a package/lib we published to call an API
We can either live with the idea that “client” is always going to need clarification, or start using the terms Person, Account, Organization, Client and API Client (respectively).
> Is “blind” offensive to blind people? Is “mother” offensive?
Have you been confronted for saying "blind" or "mother"? This sounds very hypothetical. If you want to have my feelings on “blind” check out what I said about “deaf” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35007350 - two of the words interpreted as euphemisms were actually broader than strictly "deaf", and one sounded comical.
> Should I feel embarrassed for being “out of touch” because I don’t side with the censors here?
You've mixed things up a bit here, and I hope it was by accident so I'll clarify. This "embarrassed" was me contextualising what people feel in the situation where, for example, Andy uses an antiquated and offensive term to refer to an ethnic minority without realising it, then Bob corrects them. In your terms Bob has "policed" Andy, and it's not nice to feel that. I'm saying that what's actually happening here is Andy is embarrassed or ashamed, which is a thing that can happen easily (they could've called Andy "Albert" or farted or something else) and that's why they feel bad. What happens next is on Andy - they could do what they do in all other embarrassing situations and say "ah sorry I didn't realise" or they could fly off the handle and dig their heels in. There's obviously a limit to how forgiving people are, I don't think Andy would get off lightly for using the n-word, for example.
So I can't think why you should feel embarrassed about the existence of this document, but I also can't think why you'd get so upset about it if it isn't affecting how you talk or causing problems in your life.
> I would angry at people who demand I stop calling my mother my mother
Who is demanding that? Is someone in your life telling you to do this? If they are - tell them to fuck off, that's none of their business. If not ... why are you inventing a situation where someone tells you not to call your mother "mother"?
With the situations you've brought up, it sounds like you're more annoyed about the idea of being told what to say, than anyone actually doing it to you. That sounds anxiety-inducing but I don't know what I can suggest that would help. For what it's worth if you're a famous Gen Z streamer then yeah you're going to be held to some pretty high standards language-wise, and people will outright be looking to cause drama (and tbh they often court it and play it up themselves but that's another matter). The rest of us aren't held to that standard, and normally people don't enter a conversation looking to destroy their conversation partner, they usually go in with best intentions and if you meet them at that level and act respectfully there's not a great deal that can go wrong. When that's not the case (in a small amount of situations) and you're dealing with an oddball, you can excuse yourself or you can nod along and then later text your partner or best friend about the weirdo you spoke to :) It's very unlikely they would be in a position to cause you any trouble in either case.
> Have you been confronted for saying "blind" or "mother"? This sounds very hypothetical.
I brought up blind people and mothers to reference other parts of this thread. Seems like the thread has gotten a lot longer since I read it, and I suppose its context can't be assumed now. Blind people[1], Mothers:
> For example, it seems like we can't say "mother" anymore in medical settings. For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" because of some tiny number of trans men that exist and also want to give birth. I support trans people living however they want, but my mother was a mother, goddammit, not a "birthing person", and I don't appreciate anyone implying that this word and identity are somehow offensive. At work, a "women in engineering" group got renamed to something bland like "gender minorities in tech".
Imagine what its like as an employee at a hospital with that policy. You might personally disagree with it, but what are you going to do? Have a friendly chat with HR about it? (And risk your career in the process?) Or get in line, but feel torn up inside about it?
> for example, Andy uses an antiquated and offensive term to refer to an ethnic minority without realising it, then Bob corrects them. In your terms Bob has "policed" Andy
Thats not what comes to mind when I think about andy having his words policed. I think about things like, people getting viciously attacked on social media for not being woke enough (like what has apparently happened to knitters on instagram[2], and to the young adult fiction community). Or people being told at your workplace that all mention of the word "mother" is banned, that the word is only spoken by antisocial people and the implication hanging that anyone who uses that term will be fired.
Its this "my way or banishment" attitude that makes people feel afraid and angry. Yes; this also happens in 1-on-1 conversations. But as you say, its rarer there. Its so much worse in larger groups like communities and workplaces.
When Stanford publishes a list of "harmful language", or Google adds an AI-powered "inclusive language detector" to google docs[3], they're not having a one-on-one conversation - with all the subtly that comes along with that. They're a powerful institution enforcing their politics by telling their employees what words and ideas will put your job at risk.
If you disagree with the opinions of people on instagram, or twitter, or your employer, there's no subtly. And usually no room for differences of opinion. People either get in line, or they risk getting ostracized from their community and fired from their job. Google has made their stance on this quite clear. Employees either toe the company line re: politics, or they get fired. The same is happening in the academy, and plenty of other places. The intention might be good, but there's a lot of diversity of opinion that is being suppressed as a result.
Waaaait a minute you’re making some enormous leaps here. You’ve read a comment where someone says “it seems like we can't say "mother" anymore…” and have then projected it into this scenario where the word “mother” is banned as hospital policy, and where nurses live in fear of not speaking it lest they be fired.
You’ve described your anxiety about using the wrong language when talking to people … and you’re referring to some third-hand accounts of random online interactions on social media. I think you might need to step back from the computer for a bit and use less social media, because this anxiety does seem a bit self-inflicted. You’re describing reading about a handful of things that happened to other people, have assumed they are bigger and more universal than they are and as a result it’s caused you to be anxious about speaking to people in real life.
I think if you take my original advice - speak to some people in good faith, don’t set out to trigger or “own” them - you’ll find that your assumptions about how much of a minefield these interactions can be are completely unfounded.
In particular if you take the time to listen to some of the perspectives of people who are the subject of some of these changes in language (for example, trans people) you’ll find that they’re just regular people like you or I, who just want to live with a bit of dignity and get treated with a normal amount of respect. They often have to deal with a lot of very explicit hatred, so they tend to be quite forgiving if you mistakenly flub a pronoun, or if you accidentally use their pre-transition name out of habit since you knew them for years prior. You still need to try, it might not come easily at first but it’ll be fine if you enter into a conversation with the best intentions.
How do you think a policy like that is implemented at a hospital? I can tell you what happens - HR pulls everyone into a compulsory meeting (or series of meetings). No trans people are present. The old language (“mother”) is named as trans phobic and new language (“birth parent”) is presented as company policy. The implication - explicit or implicit - is that anyone using the old language is a transphobe and will be sacked. Are there any questions? Do you want to get in line or risk being fired for transphobia? There are no questions.
At universities they’re getting people to write “diversity and inclusion statements”. To get a job you have to write an essay talking about how hiring you will further the goals of diversity - at least how the woke mob has defined it. There is no polite conversation. Disagreeing with the policy is not a winning move if you value your career.
Online it’s obviously a bloodbath. A Finnish traditional knitting magazine was torn apart by social media for being “nazis”. Apparently they didn’t have any black people interested in traditional Finnish knit ware. The magazine immediately disbanded.
Do you think polite conversations would help in any of these situations? No. The politics of all this are not up for debate. Look at your own stance in this thread - you assume anyone who isn’t on board with the new language is transphobic. This is what I’m afraid of!
I’ve spoken to my trans friends about this and had lovely conversations. They aren’t a club who speaks with one mind. One of my trans friends hates the woke movement. She feels singled out and awkward whenever people go around and ask pronouns. She wishes people assumed her gender. In her words: “I wish my gender could go back to being the least interesting thing about me”. She hates that non-trans people mis represent her views. Another trans friend goes by they/it and loves the new world the woke movement is creating.
But it’s honestly not my trans friends I’m afraid of. It’s corporate HR. It’s university admissions. It’s crazy people on Twitter.
And I’m not alone in being afraid of all this. Read the other comments in this thread. I’ve got dozens of upvotes in the comment when I mentioned being terrified. The fear is real. Half of US college students say they are afraid to sometimes speak their mind in class[1]. Fighting political correctness is the new rallying cry for the right, because feeling oppressed by this stuff is so common.
I’m not afraid because I’m transphobic. (I’m not, and I adore my trans friends). I’m afraid because some people with your politics go around insisting anyone with a nuanced view is a monster and needs to be attacked and “educated” until they get in line. It’s awful.
There's honestly too much to go into here. I feel like you're just fucking around with me if I'm honest, if that's true then congratulations I've spent about ~30 mins typing out and reading comments :-/
> some people with your politics go around insisting anyone with a nuanced view is a monster
People with these politics aren't calling me, with my nuanced views, a monster. If you're really afraid, maybe your views just aren't that nuanced?
Look I commented because I thought you seemed like a nervous wreck, completely afraid to engage with my generation, and I figured I could reassure you a bit. If you really have a couple of trans friends, well maybe I misjudged, maybe you're not that insulated and in need of assistance after all!
Thanks for the conversation. I’m not a nervous wreck, thanks in large part to not being on Twitter. Sorry if I came across that way.
And yeah, I’ve had a lot of conversations about this stuff. Thanks for trying to help. But It’s usually impossible to logic someone out of a feeling.
To close, I think there’s more than enough reasons for feeling afraid of the woke mob if you look for them. Whether or not that’s a good idea? Hard to say.
Terrified might be a bit strong but fearful or afraid isn't.
I am definitely afraid of stepping on a verbal landmine in a work context. This is my meal ticket, and what's keeping my family housed. There is a very real fear or stepping on toes, even if accidental, and that translates to behaviors.
I'm also afraid of sticking my neck out in heated situations. I've had to push back managers, PMs, and other coworkers in ways that will often make them angry. I've seen the race card get played against other managers, so I have to CYA on any vaguely negative interaction.
It sounds like you've got a pretty stressful workplace overall to be honest. I don't exactly want to be having debates about the big social issues of today with my colleagues, but on the other hand I don't think anyone should feel like they are walking on eggshells.
I would not take claims of something being a "dog whistle" at face value. The entire concept has largely been weaponized and bastardized, appropriately enough as a means of effecting language policing. A perfect example is over the past several years how the media spent quite a lot of energy dedicated to convincing people that "America first" was some sort of a secret dog whistle. [1] The "logic", so far as it can be called that, runs that e.g. the KKK also liked this concept and slogan. So if you like this concept and slogan you're therefore somehow secretly dog whistling for the KKK. It's just a mind-bogglingly stupid idea. If the head of the KKK really liked Honey Nut Cheerios then I suppose that also becomes a secret dog whistle?
It's simply a way to attack things without actually considering what's being said. I think if you polled Americans, white/black/brown/blue/green and orange, almost all would agree that the government should put the interests of the country and the people above the interests of other countries and the people of other countries. But in a world where political power emerges from divisions in society, that sort of unity is dangerous. So rather than attack the idea, which would be likely to backfire, they instead chose to attack our language. And it was successful. People who still believe anything the media says became cautious about advocating for things like 'America first', because they didn't want to be seen as e.g. endorsing the KKK.
By contrast those who are actively skeptical of the media, mostly disregarded what they did and continued to happily advocate for 'America first.' Now the members from the other group not only were no longer comfortable saying 'America first', but even began to see those as advocating for it as secret racists, or even KKK advocates. Divisions widened, policy destroyed (or at least made into a partisan affair), language policed, mission succeeded.
I couldn't agree more. The "dog whistle" concept is somewhat brilliant as an iron-clad logic trap though. Any time anyone is saying something you don't want to engage with, you can ignore everything they're saying and claim they're really saying something else. There is absolutely nothing the person can do to change your mind, because you can make their words mean whatever you want!
The exact second you stop engaging with what people are saying, and start deciding what they actually mean, is the exact second you stop all learning and all growth.
These terms "dog whistle", "normalizing", "shifting the overton window" are all just means of being able to ignore the argument itself in favor of ad hominem.
I don't disagree, but to play devil's advocate, maybe the Trump campaign could have used a slogan that wasn't used by the KKK or Nazi sympathizers? If they REALLY believed in the idea behind the slogan, and not the historical connotations of that exact set of two words, they could have done better. But, they didn't.
To put a finer point on it, what if they had chosen "America over everything"? Would you still be criticizing those who detect certain...implications in the phrase?
edit: I am generally not sympathetic to language policing. But I'm not so sure this is language policing.
I think in the beginning both sides played into it. Trump probably knew there'd be a group of people who would say exactly that, and probably made the bet that a larger group of people would roll their eyes at that point.
Certainly the provocative language (what could probably even semi-fairly be called dog whistling) or maybe better described as "trolling" lost out to the language-policing though.
Scott Adams' descent into reactionaryism [1] has not been subtle or quiet. If you were surprised that it eventually exploded in a public way, that just tells me you haven't heard much of anything about him in the past decade.
Also, "it's okay to be white" is not a hidden rake of a dogwhistle to stumble on. If that were a serious position, it immediately leads to the question of "who is saying otherwise". And then you learn about replacement theory, "a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory" [2], and realize what Scott Adams was really saying without saying.
Lots of language policing is dumb. Hell, language policing would drive me away from even using "dumb". Scott Adams did not stumble into this controversy through zealous language policing, he charged into it with eyes open, and knew exactly what he was saying.
[1] I think the word is actually reactionism, but chrome's spellcheck prefers reactionaryism
> Also, "it's okay to be white" is not a hidden rake of a dogwhistle to stumble on. If that were a serious position, it immediately leads to the question of "who is saying otherwise".
I found a few examples if you are interested:
> conservatives are objecting after the discovery of a speech by Berkeley Professor Zeus Leonardo in which he discussed the need “to abolish whiteness.” […] “to abolish whiteness is to abolish white people”
I'll start with addressing the second one, because it sets up the first. To start, the author of that article is himself white. He seems to be saying (and pointing to others who have said) that "whiteness" as a cultural identity leads to white supremacy. For example, "white pride" is white supremacist in a way that "Irish pride" isn't. The article isn't saying anything should happen to people considered white, just that lumping us all into a single "white" identity is a problem.
Meanwhile, the reaction to that first link seems to prove that professor's point. In context, it seems clear to me that he's saying is that people interpret arguments like those presented in the second link as attacks on those people rather than just calling out that singular identity as an issue. He's not saying "the solution to white supremacy is to get rid of white people", he's saying "whiteness as a singular identity is a problem, and pointing out that it's a problem is seen as an attack on white people themselves", which is clearly true based on the reaction to his speech.
Newsweek is trash, but I'll put that aside for the moment. The training seems to be presenting the same arguments as the first two, but badly. A workplace training is really the wrong context to try and make that kind of nuanced point, and that seems to have been an especially clumsy attempt at it.
> The article isn't saying anything should happen to people considered white, just that lumping us all into a single "white" identity is a problem.
And yet, it seems to be that many Americans – including Americans like this university professor – are actually huge on doing exactly that.
Growing up in 1980s/1990s Australia, there was very little talk about "white" or "who is white". At school, this kid was Irish, this one Italian, another Croatian, Lebanese, Chinese, Indian, Filipino, etc – who was "white" and who wasn't? Who knew and who cared–"white" (in a racial sense) was not a frequently used word in our vocabulary. Even the school curriculum avoided the term – 1788 was presented as the start of the "European settlement" or "British settlement" of Australia, I don't remember any teacher ever saying "white" in that context.
But, in the last 10–15 years or so, there's been this big influx of talk about "white" and "whiteness" – which mostly seems to be coming from the US, and (my impression is) predominantly from that part of America which this university professor represents.
Australia wasn't always like that – we did once have a "white Australia policy". But, as we dismantled it (a gradual process between 1940 and 1970), I think we collectively decided that the best way to be less racist was to stop lumping people into coarse racial categories such as "white". Hence, post-1970 Australian officialdom was very happy to put people in ethnicity/nationality categories – British, New Zealander, Aboriginal, Maori, German, Jewish, Irish, Italian, Lebanese, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Vietnamese, Egyptian, Somalian, Sudanese, South African, etc, etc, etc – but studiously avoided the use of terms such as "white". Most Americans seem to have never got that memo, and the creeping Americanisation of Australia seems to be injecting that kind of "white" talk back into the conversation.
I'm really not qualified to say much on the subject of race in any other countries, but I think coming at that professor from an external perspective misses context. Pushing the audience to recognize that the system is classifying them as "white" is true for a US audience. The fact that it seems like he's pushing whiteness isn't because he's wrong, it's because he's not talking to you.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's especially surprising that the US's cultural export also includes our deeply unhealthy relationship to race.
> Unfortunately, I don't think it's especially surprising that the US's cultural export also includes our deeply unhealthy relationship to race.
I still think that professor LeVine is busy pushing that "deeply unhealthy relationship to race".
An example of how he does it, is by promoting Noel Ignatiev's very dubious "How the Irish Became White" theory. Both Ignatiev, and LeVine, ignore that most anti-Irish sentiment was actually anti-Catholic – so long as the majority of Irish immigrants to the US were Protestants, anti-Irish sentiments were almost unheard of, and they only began when Catholics came to outnumber Protestants among immigrants from Ireland to the US. At which point Protestant Irish Americans rebranded themselves as "Scots-Irish" to make clear that they weren't Catholics, hence escaping that prejudice and discrimination. Ignatiev is taking something which was fundamentally about religion, and misrepresenting it as something about race – which is one of the ways in which people like Ignatiev and LeVine keep on pushing that "deeply unhealthy relationship to race". In fact, I'd even say that their refusal to acknowledge the reality of anti-Catholicism, and their denial of it in an attempt to transform it into a form of "racism", is a sign of their own anti-Catholic prejudice.
For a scholarly criticism of Ignatiev's whole "Irish Became White" theory, see Arnesen, E. (2001). Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination. International Labor and Working-Class History, 60, 3-32. doi:10.1017/S0147547901004380 https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/6817279/mod_resou...
White ethnic groups that are predominantly Catholic being distinguished from "real" whites and being targets of White supremacists is a real historical thing (and not just with the Irish, also true of Italians, and its no small factor historically in why predominantly-white-in-traditional-racial-terms Hispanics have been largely constructed as non-White for quite some time in the US, which has turned out to be more durable than the others.)
Race is a mutable social construct that largely exists to rationalize other prejudices, and ethnic and religious prejudices are high on that list; treating race as if it were a real and fundamental thing orthogonal to other concerns is buying into race essentialism. Which is not to say Ignatiev is right, but rather to pretend that the anti-Catholicism he ignores contradicts a connection to racism and the construction of race rather than explains it is...also wrong.
> White ethnic groups that are predominantly Catholic being distinguished from "real" whites and being targets of White supremacists is a real historical thing
Anti-Catholicism is a huge part of the history of the UK, Ireland and the British Empire. As such, it has no particular connection with white supremacy – were the Penal Laws "white supremacist"? Was the Ulster Protestant League "white supremacist"? Is the Orange Order "white supremacist"?
Outside of the US, anti-Catholicism had no significant association with ideas of "race" or skin colour. Indeed, the whole "Irish weren't white" claim sounds so bizarre from a British or Irish or Australian perspective. All three countries have unpleasant histories of discrimination against Catholics, but nobody ever tried to justify it because "they weren't white". They were discriminated against because of their "popery", because they were viewed as disloyal to the state, bearers of foreign allegiance, practitioners of outdated superstition, etc.
And, much of US anti-Catholicism was directly imported from the UK. Which is why trying to view it all through a racial lens – which is a peculiarly American approach – seems so confused. It seems to come from just looking at things from a narrow US-centric perspective which ignores everything that happens in the rest of the world, and even ignores the British historical origins of much that happened in the US as well.
> Anti-Catholicism is a huge part of the history of the UK, Ireland and the British Empire. As such, it has no particular connection with white supremacy
It does in fact have a particular connection with American white supremacy and, historically, with construction of race in America. You seem to be making the irrational jump from “X originated separately from Y” to “X has no particular connection with Y”, but that’s neither logically warranted nor as at all reliable as a practical guide when looking at elements of culture.
> It does in fact have a particular connection with American white supremacy and, historically, with construction of race in America. You seem to be making the irrational jump from “X originated separately from Y” to “X has no particular connection with Y”, but that’s neither logically warranted nor as at all reliable as a practical guide when looking at elements of culture.
I wouldn't say that race and anti-Catholicism have zero connection in US history – but I do think Ignatiev fundamentally misrepresents what that connection is. People can be prejudiced against both groups A and B simultaneously, without making them the same sort of group or the same kind of prejudice; people can simultaneously have religionist and racist prejudices, without making religionism a form of racism.
And there are some deep differences between the two. Catholics who converted to Protestantism (a significant minority did) found that the vast majority of Protestant prejudice and discrimination against them disappeared, almost overnight – now, they shouldn't have to do that, and of course for most it was not a live option socially or psychologically, but for all it was at least physically possible – the impossibility was in deciding to do it, not in being unable to do it if they'd decided to. By contrast, the vast majority of African-Americans couldn't "convert to being white" – a minority of individuals of mixed ancestry could manage to "pass", but for the vast majority "convert to white" was asking the physically impossible. Ignatiev et al cite occasional historical usage of "racialised" language against Catholics, but they overstate its frequency and significance, and ignore the fact that even most people who deployed this "racialised" language would forget it the moment a Catholic expressed interest in conversion – there was nothing most African-Americans could do to get them to forget it.
The fact is, prejudiced people tend to have lots of different prejudices–that doesn't make all their prejudices the same, or make all of their numerous prejudices instances of just one of them. I mean, if someone is homophobic, is that racism? Sure, most racists may well be homophobic, but gay people can be racist too, [0] and I don't think the Ugandan politicians who have been clamouring to reintroduce capital punishment for homosexuality are motivated by racism either. [1]
But Ignatiev decided to take this one issue, race – which no one denies plays a major role in US history, and arguably a much bigger role than in the history of the rest of the English-speaking world – and turn it into the be-all-and-end-all of American history, in terms of which everything else has to be interpreted, the square hole into which everything else must be squeezed, regardless of its shape. And, this is I think the biggest particular connection between anti-Catholicism and race in US history – through pseudo-history, Ignatiev has made history, and caused very many Americans today to believe such a connection exists, no matter how ahistorical that belief may be – and believing it is true makes it true, not in the past, but in the present. I really doubt the US is going to be able to move past its "deeply unhealthy relationship to race" until people abandon views such as those of Ignatiev and LeVine, who are part of the problem not part of the solution.
> I wouldn't say that race and anti-Catholicism have zero connection in US history – but I do think Ignatiev fundamentally misrepresents what that connection is.
Sure, I tried to make clear that while I think it goes to far to separate anti-Catholicism from racism (And the evolving construction of race) in America, I'm not defending Ignatiev's particular characterization in so doing.
> The fact is, prejudiced people tend to have lots of different prejudices–that doesn't make all their prejudices the same, or make all of their numerous prejudices instances of just one of them. I mean, if someone is homophobic, is that racism?
I dunno, I think generally multiple bigotries shared by the same person are society constructing different labels for the persons "not like me-ism", so in that sense, yes they are all the same thing having different labels assigned to different manifestations of a unified whole. But, on the other hand, when you are talking about social impacts, it makes sense to look at them differently because the different aspects can have different dynamics as societal forces, whether or not they individually are part of a unified system.
But the relation between anti-Catholicism and racism isn't that they are the same social force, but that they are social forces where each colors the manifestation of the other. This is, AFAIK, not as true of, say, homophobia and racism in the same way (they interact intersectionally, but that's a different thing).
> I dunno, I think generally multiple bigotries shared by the same person are society constructing different labels for the persons "not like me-ism", so in that sense, yes they are all the same thing having different labels assigned to different manifestations of a unified whole
I think that ignores that societies treat some "not like me" groups much better than others, and even have their reasons for doing so (whether right or wrong or a bit of both). British hostility to Catholicism wasn't just "not like me-ism" – they didn't show anywhere near as much "not like me-ism" towards Huguenot refugees, or the Dutch or the Germans – on the contrary, they imported monarchs from the Netherlands (William of Orange) and Germany (George I). Protestant England treated foreign Protestants better than English Catholics, because the religious similarity was seen as more important that the linguistic/cultural/ethnic differences. It is hard for people today – in a society where most people (even religious people) don't take religion that seriously – to understand how seriously people took religious disputes back then. Also, domestic Catholics were seen as a political threat to the reigning regime (many of them were Jacobites, or at least had sympathies in that direction), most foreign Protestants were not.
> But the relation between anti-Catholicism and racism isn't that they are the same social force, but that they are social forces where each colors the manifestation of the other.
Contemporary American culture foregrounds issues of race and backgrounds issues of religion – hence, if one immigrant group (e.g. Germans or Norwegians) was accepted into American society more easily than another (e.g. Irish Catholics) – people are quick to accept the proposed explanation that was because one group was "more white", the alternative explanation of "more Protestant" won't even occur to many people. I think that says more about 21st century US culture than 19th century US history. But isn't that cultural tendency to focus on "racial" explanations for things to the exclusion of non-"racial" explanations, part of that "deeply unhealthy relationship to race" which another commenter mentioned upthread?
If you listen to the video of what Scott Adams says, he's quite explicit about it. It doesn't seem like a plausible misspeak. He didn't merely say "It's okay to be white" in an ambiguous context (plausibly not related to the 4chan propaganda campaign.) He said that because some poll claims whatever% of black people disagree with the phrase, that black people are a hate group, that white people should stay away from them, and that he would no longer advocate for black interests. If you don't trust my paraphrasing, fair enough, but you can watch the video yourself and I think you'll find that my paraphrasing is fairly accurate.
Suppose for the sake of argument the poll is legitimate, and suppose he wasn't aware that the phrase is a 4chan propaganda slogan.. I think he still grievously erred when he decided to judge all black people by the opinions of only a portion of black people, as though black were a political affiliation that people can enter or leave at will. But it's not a political affiliation, it's an ethnic group. You legitimately can't claim that an entire ethnic group is a "hate group" because whatever% of them believe hateful things, even if that statistic is true. It's not as though the remaining% can disassociate themselves from the ethnic group, it isn't a voluntary association. I think his failure to distinguish an ethnic classification (involuntary association) from an ideological classification (voluntary association) is where he really went off the rails with no plausible deniability.
I interpret this whole affair as: he's rich, wants to retire, and decided now is as good a time as any to finally speak his mind. He lost his inhibitions.
Previously, Scot Adams "identified as a black person because he wanted to be on the winning team".
And then he decided that 'its OK to be white' was perfectly fine and re-identified as white, and that black people hate white people, and called them a hate group that should be stayed as far away as possible.
The only good out of that whole situation is that Scott Adams is a trashy racist, and anybody who likes him is also a trashy racist.
The real insidious racists are the ones who know how to use diplomacy, and affect organizations with "culture fit" (aka: not white enough), and other types of hard-to-identify racism.
If I had time and money to waste, I'd do reddit a spiteful favor and write a WokeBot that calls out every instance of non-equity language. Maybe it even auto-submits hate speech reports for significant transgressions.
> eg: until recently, I would have just curiously nodded along to the phrase "It's ok to be _____" but learned that it's actually a dark dog whistle thanks to Scott Adams.
It was a troll campaign created on 4chan to trick leftists into reflexively saying "it's not okay to be ____". Anything darker ascribed to it came later, from people who didn't understand the purpose.
"It's ok to be _____" but learned that it's actually a dark dog whistle thanks to Scott Adams.
The fact that someone can be labeled something, because they use a phrase which is currently, out of the blue, a big deal? And you can only know if you obsessively read all sorts of popculture websites, or fluff news stories daily?
Sure. But you should do your research on the phrase and the polling company that pretends it is a straightforward question before going on a racist screed to get away from a racial group.
Context matters here I think. Historically "the deaf community" was used to refer to people who used sign language to communicate and did not include people who didn't. It is possible to be deaf, and not part of the deaf community in this context if one is not a signer.
Somebody needs to explain this to me because I know for a fact I’ve taken lunch to school in paper bags that were literally brown and I have no idea what else this could possibly refer to.
> "the phrase 'brown bag' does bring up associations with the past when a brown bag was actually used, I understand, to determine if people's skin color was light enough to allow admission to an event or to come into a party that was being held in a private home.
Yeesh, If someone hears a common phrase (and literal physical description) and immediately jumps to the conclusion that the speaker is referring to some obscure historical factoid in an attempt to slight them...that person needs to get a life. I refuse to believe a single person is actually offended by this rather than just stirring shit up because they crave attention. There's no way.
I could be wrong, but I think the parent comment is just a reference to the fact that brown doesn't exist. There's no wavelength that our brains map to brown. Instead what we perceive as brown is just orange, but less bright. And wether we see it as brown or dark orange depends entirely on context.
Colors isn’t the same as wavelengths, though. Two different colors having the same wavelength isn’t a contradiction. Similarly, different wavelength mixes can constitute the same color, because the human eye only has three color receptors.
> People of color” has in the past served as a
collective term for people who are not white.
A preferred term today is “BIPOC” referring to Black, Indigenous and people of color, which provides a unifying term for ease of use while still acknowledging the reality that Black and Indigenous people in the United States are impacted by structural and individual racism in a different way than other people of color.
I love the “first among equals” aspect of BIPOC. It’s literally just white people creating hierarchies of the other races. Again.
I think "BIPOC" is designed to be able to exclude or include asians selectively depending on political needs. They want Asians to identify their interests with those of other non-whites, and in opposition to conservative whites. In that context, Asians are "BIPOC." But when it comes to preferential treatment amongst different non-whites, for jobs or admissions, then Asians are in the second-tier of "POC" not the first tier of "BI."
NAACP stands for "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People". Interesting how "Colored People" was an enlightened term in 1909, but "Colored People" is now out and "People of Color" is the new way to go.
No, “people of color” is now in the “past” as Sierra Club says. The “preferred term today” is “BIPOC” which acknowledges that black and indigenous people are more important than other “people of color.” I don’t remember Asians signing off on this change request; I doubt Hispanics did either.
The ranking is the point of the initialism. Black and indigenous people were already included in the blanket term "people of color," so why introduce BIPOC if not to highlight those groups specifically?
I suppose it would be more similar if it went from "Queer" to "LGPWAQ", as in "Lesbians, gays, and people who are queer".
BIPOC definitely reads like "Black and Indigenous people, and the rest." Which makes sense since the intent of the term is to "center the experiences of Black and Indigenous groups." Can't effectively center something without moving everything else out to the margins.
The old phrase is inside the new phrase of course, or at least it is if you try to say it out loud. Or maybe only the initialism is meant to be spoken, I'm not sure. I suspect these kind of situations (BIPOC, Latinx, Xir/Xer etc) occur when terminally online people accustomed to text communication forget that language is spoken too, not just typed. That's why they come up with all these new terms that can be read as text but become unintelligible noise when spoken.
Colored People and People of Color are two different things. Colored People was the polite term for blacks 60+ years ago. People of Color means nonwhite. Also, side point, the founders of NAACP included both black, white, and at least one person (Mary Church Terrell) that we would in 2023 consider mixed race. And initially it was predominately led by white Americans.
This is the way language and respectful culture evolve. Something can both be an improvement over previous terms and imperfect and thus replaced by something more preferable later.
I find the terms BIPOC and AAPI to be quite erasing. While some black people and indigenous people share some issues and concerns, assigning a new group silences people where they do not align, and nominates spokespeople who might not have support from the community they're supposed to represent.
After all, not all black people have the same concerns and priorities, and there are diverse communities that sometimes butt heads. Combining that group into another reduces the voice even more.
It also permits ignoring the actual community in question for the beliefs of an outsider representative who identifies as BIPOC rather than as just one subgroup. And allows silencing people who disagree with being lumped together by declaring the lack of solidarity a form of racism itself.
It’s referring to two points from “The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation”, which is understandably (I hope), a large (and respected!) guide.
Taken out of their respective roles in the context of the conversation, comparing the Chicago Guide to the Catechism is, admittedly, a really funny comment.
We should spend less time on the crazy outcomes of these institutes and more time on why they can even exist in the first place. They are somehow funded yet not accountable to anyone.
Nobody asked for this, it doesn't help anyone, and it cannot survive the most basic scrutiny of the public or market. And yet it exists and even grows. Rather than playing whack-a-mole with outcomes, the underlying mechanism should be explored.
My unscientific take on it is that it is not a matter of real belief, instead a matter of fear. Case in point, businesses do not really care about things like DEI, but a series of impactful lawsuits has scared them senseless. Hence they dress up the optics of DEI to stay out of trouble.
Similarly, universities are under pressure to appear "on the right side of history" by aggressive student activists, fueled by the flames of BLM, MeToo, whichever other social justice outrage. Hence, they dress up an extensive administration and force it upon all staff as part of their performance review: demonstrate the 3 ways in which you contributed to the cause this year. It doesn't matter if you believe in any of it, just do it regardless. Since none is equipped to do anything actually useful (livable wages, accessible healthcare and housing, etc) the next best thing is some imagined micro aggression.
Not to mention, the amount of violence committed by members of these outrage groups against whoever stands in their way - primarily towards the "offending" group or class they're prejudiced against, particularly whites, males, and straight sexual orientation.
Worse, this violence often goes unaccounted for with impunity, without penalty, because people are terrified of the consequences of criticizing these groups, whether that's losing friends, family, or jobs that are too closely attached to these justice movements, while quite blatantly refusing to acknowledge that these movements have grifted the crap out of our world, as we find that their leaders and spokespeople are everything from: disingenuous scammers using donation money entirely for self-serving purposes that do not advance their cause, all the way to being convicted child sex traffickers (Fox: BLM, reports from 2020).
But to condemn these movements for these reasons is nearly suicide in a society obsessed with staying in line with the "current thing", without scrutiny.
I don't think it makes sense to argue against the logic of identity politics by actively identifying as a victim, that only reproduces the very logic you are critiquing, since it is they who also view themselves as victims and who seek retribution for perceived violence against them as an identity group. This is the logic of Nazism at its core, and when you use it to defend traditional values it becomes even more blatantly obvious.
The horror (for you) is realizing that now this very same logic has been adopted by neo-liberal forces who seek to use radical politics not for freedom but to impose an even stricter, more terrible form of security, where it's not that people aren't allowed to speak their minds but rather that they police themselves first, they are unconsciously compelled to limit the range of acceptable discourse. Anybody who criticizes this regime is prevented by Corporate America from finding employment, effectively starving and killing them. Its fortunate that we have protected freedom of speech (at least in the US), but freedom of speech is not in the interest of our corporate masters and this regime of power limits it to the utmost degree for nobody in particular (since nobody benefits from this, in truth), but simply to serve a vast architecture of domination that most individuals in power are not even aware of, or aware they are being subjected too.
What most people fail to see is how neoliberal politics are WORSE than fascism--its almost like an advanced form of fascism, where the organized chaos of the market is utilized to rapidly generate victimhood and individual identities which rapidly alienate and atomize each and every person in society, who then believes their struggles are theirs alone, that resistance to power is futile because everyone fights their own battles, and that its not worth it to talk to anyone who isn't a member of your "identity", the numbers of which are so vast that it becomes impossible for anyone to talk to anyone else who has a difference of opinion, staying inside their little social bubbles which only interact through the means the very same technology and infrastructure employed in that domination.
I guess you could say that, it leaves room for resistance. And its become so intolerable to the vast majority of people that almost nobody seriously considers adopting it as a political system. Meanwhile, childhood suicide rates might be sky-rocketing, there might be vast sexual dissatisfaction and income inequality, not to mention the degradation of the natural world itself, but people will still say its the "best system we have", sounding like a prisoner who has given up on getting out. I don't think the future is some authoritarian system that they have in China, its basically the same over there (if not worse), but why have we given up on building a better society? The spread of Nihlism disgusts me.
I will admit aging population might be contributing to these problems, but at least the US is not projected to lose any population in the next 30 years because of immigration. For the nation states in the world, however...well, there isn't going to be much "nation" left in them if they want to survive the next few decades.
As I said, I don't think fascism is really even possible today, what people call "fascist" doesn't at all resemble the regimes of the 30s and 40s. Its as if people think that the far-right is perpetuating violence at a scale different from the center. It doesn't matter who is "in charge", the state has become invested primarily in creating a vast architecture of surveillance and control which cannot be legally challenged because the state, whether or not they claim it, acts with sovereign immunity, since we only ever got rid of the king, not the apparatus which supports him.
It would be better to say that our current form of government (around the world) is a like a more advanced form of fascism, its worse than fascism and its a more severe form of domination that is so subtle that most people can't see it, and if they were shown how they were being kept under control, they would try to forget as soon as possible. The fact that so many on the far-right are coming to power is predictable: one form of identity politics begets another. But it does not actually indicate a change to the status quo to me. Remember, the capitol rioters only wanted to keep things the same.
Unfortunately I don't spend my days bookmarking videos on Twitter to share with people who are interested just enough to criticize these claims with strawmen / other fallacies, but too disinterested to seek the evidence readily available to them from news sources they've written off entirely.
I can't help you there. Now, I don't mean to assume you fall within the category I described above, but that's usually the case when people ask for examples, when they already know where to look, but don't wish to.
Not every online discussion has to be a formal debate with months of preparation. Sorry I didn't "have my papers" handy.
If you're interested, you'll go looking on Twitter, Telegram, etc. on your own accord. If you're not, you'll resort to gaslighting and smug nonsense. Simple.
I'm just asking for a simple link of things you've seen. Nothing more. Not a paper, or anything else, or research. Just a simple news article to prove you didn't just make it up. But I guess that's too much to ask.
I keep up to date on the news and don't see this violence you speak of, I've done my due diligence.
>Similarly, universities are under pressure to appear "on the right side of >history" by aggressive student activists, fueled by the flames of BLM, MeToo, >whichever other social justice outrage.
Oh is Turning Point USA not a social justice group
They're legally required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its consequences. Let me explain:
The act prohibits discrimination on several protected characteristics, and the Supreme Court has expanded that to cover even things that merely correlate with those characteristics, unless an employer can convincingly show those characteristics are required [1].
But how can employers shield themselves from the legal risk of a discrimination lawsuit, when "discriminating" is so vaguely defined? By showing they engaged in "best effort" not to discriminate, which means mouthing all the right platitudes, employing ever-evolving "best practices", and having departments devoted to the cause (first HR, now DEI).
It's a red queen's race to be the most progressive and anti-racist, plus positive-reinforcement as the alumni of these institutions take up influential positions in society, and these are the results after 60 years of it. Any corporation, school, or university that goes against it, that merely tries to stay neutral, will fall behind and be made a legal and PR example of [2].
Very few companies have DEI programs. DEI isn't a trend because it's a defense against specious discrimination suits. It's a trend because it's fashionable. The argument in your last paragraph is thus easily falsified.
A message board strategic tip: if you're going to try to make an argument about how antiracism is overreaching in our society --- which should be a layup! --- try to do it without citing an overt racist to support your argument.
Though I'm sure if you look at all companies, including every corner store, hair salon, and taco shop, the proportion of DEI initiatives and HR departments falls.
> It's a trend because it's fashionable.
And it's fashionable in part because any company where it's not encouraged is in legal peril.
That's obviously false. There are over 1.7MM corporations in the US and over 7MM partnerships and sole proprietorships, and you've attempted to characterize all of them by a sample of the 100 hugest of them. There are all sorts of things the F100 has that the median company doesn't, almost none of them owing to legal peril.
Hold on, that sample is a sample of the biggest ones! That’s a fair sample! Amazon having a DEI program and mom and pop hardware store not having one do not weigh equally on the scale!
Why do I need to do that to defend the specific, factual point that DEI efforts are common in American workplaces? It’s not a value judgement, it’s just a fact.
I never said anything about whether "companies have DEI programs out of legal necessity". The parent poster made a claim about "every Fortune 100 company" and you said that claim was unrepresentative.
That is not true, and that is what I said and all I am saying now.
They're not sued for not having a DEI program, but for vaguely and broadly defined "discrimination". Having a DEI program is a defense against such accusations.
It's highly likely. Much likelier than the idea that having anti-discrimination so broadly enforced that a mere IQ test is illegal would not cause corporations to take steps to reduce legal risks.
But you are correct, my evidence is circumstantial, and if you really want to disbelieve such basic inference, you can. I'm sure you apply this degree of skepticism evenly.
Your argument is that every single company with a DEI program is doing so out of concern for a legal threat so amorphous that we can't come up with a single instance of it happening --- or, for that matter, even circumstantial evidence, such as a correlation between the deployment of DEI programs and the number of discrimination lawsuits. By implication, you are also arguing that all the companies running these programs don't believe the things they're saying, but rather have been coerced into saying them. These are extraordinary claims, for which you have offered no evidence.
IQ tests, for what it's worth, are not in fact illegal in employment situations. I can name large software companies that were using them as recently as a few years ago. Of course, they're a cringeworthy affectation and a strong signal of a shop you'd never want to work in, but being off-putting isn't illegal, as over 10 years of my own activity on Hacker News should amply establish.
For my part: I am not a fan of institutional DEI programs. But I'm even less a fan of the rhetorical frame that suggests that literally everything and everybody involved in them is operating in bad faith.
> By implication, you are also arguing that all the companies running these programs don't believe the things they're saying, but rather have been coerced into saying them
I'm arguing no such thing. Hiring of people that espouse and practice DEI has been legally incentivized. Whether they believe in them or not doesn't matter, and after the law got the ball rolling (and made sure it stays rolling even in companies that otherwise wouldn't cooperate), it's perfectly likely lots of true believers would also join.
In fact, I implied the opposite in my root comment ("plus positive-reinforcement as the alumni of these institutions take up influential positions in society"), which you would have known if you weren't busy coming up with the most bad-faith interpretation of my words that you could find.
> a legal threat so amorphous that we can't come up with a single instance of it happening
I literally linked to a legal case of it happening in my root comment. Unless you want a lawsuit specifically about a missing DEI program, something which I never claimed, and already explained so.
> a correlation between the deployment of DEI programs and the number of discrimination lawsuits.
Notice how both trend upwards, therefore are correlated. Unfortunately I don't think there's a graph like that specifically for DEI programs, as "equity" itself is a word that only recently became fashionable. And I couldn't find a graph showing the proportion of companies with generic diversity programs either. A crucial weakness in my argument, that will allow a motivated reader such as yourself to dismiss it entirely.
DEI programs don't help guard vs. litigation, therefore that can't ever have been a cause for their or their antecedents' inception!
> discrimination suits are decreasing
If the problem DEI programs are intended to address was shrinking, then DEI programs would have shrunk with it! No different than how you shrink police forces after crime significantly drops.
Those whose focus is on controlling language are not primarily concerned about controlling your words. They're primarily interested in controlling you.
I'm old enough to remember when the word 'retard' was the politically correct term before it became "mentally handicapped" then "challenged" and so on. Same goes for 'cripple' which also accurately and concisely describes a particular class of physical impairment. Then it became "handicapped" and "mobility impaired". These are all euphemisms that do nothing but infantalise those affected while allowing those intent on using them to feel morally superior in doing so.
They think truth is subject to power. Look at how they describe hierarchies. And as no surprise, they power hungry authoritarians. By their own description, that’s just how the world works.
the production of knowledge is subject to power, Bill Gates has fundamentally altered medical research since his priorities decide where the funding goes. Universities require funding, academics need to eat, researchers outside of these institutions generally work for corporate-backed labs or thinktanks.
I agree with you that the purpose is to control the person, not the language—the language here being just a tool or means of control. This was made very popular in 1984 (I feel stupid just mentioning this reference but it seems impossible not to).
However, one problem here is that, when faced with this affirmative-that these people are trying to control you-I think many well-meaning persons will say ”you’re exaggerating”. That’s because I think that most of the time, the people who propose these rules (and the more passive ones who agree with them blindly) actually really believe they are doing a good thing-they strongly believe that they know better than you what you should say. I have to assume this because, if not, if I assume they are only just trying to control me, period, I’ll feel like I am wearing the same aluminum foil hat that they are using.
As such, it is important to understand that yes, they are trying to control you, and no, maybe they don’t realize this, because their moral superiority complex is just too deeply rooted. By understanding this you can be more broadly aware that these attempts of control will come from other directions than language (artistic taste, sexual preferences, behavior in general, political beliefs, etc.)
What really screws up the entire thing is that, their belief is so deeply rooted that, the next step of their logic then becomes: if they were so nice to inform you and educate you about the right way to behave, then why is it that now that you know the truth you still insist on not practicing it? The only conclusion is that you must be ill-intentioned on purpose.
> Those whose focus is on controlling language ... They're primarily interested in controlling you.
I don't know who are "those", but I think they're primarily interested in controlling backlash and preventing conflicts. They don't want lawsuits or twitter outrage.
As a practical matter, I strongly doubt whether a guy who has four small kids and makes $12,000 a year feels more empowered or less ill-used by a society that carefully refers to him as "economically disadvantaged" rather than "poor."
Were I he, in fact, I'd probably find the PCE [Politically Correct English] term insulting---not just because it's patronizing (which it is) but because it's hypocritical and self-serving in a way that oft-patronized people tend to have really good subliminal antennae for.
The basic hypocrisy about usages like "economically disadvantaged" and "differently abled" is that PCE advocates believe the beneficiaries of these terms' compassion and generosity to be poor people and people in wheelchairs, which again omits something that everyone knows but nobody except the scary vocabulary tape ads' announcer ever mentions---that part of any speaker's motive for using a certain vocabulary is always the desire to communicate stuff about himself. Like many forms of Vogue Usage, PCE functions primarily to signal and congratulate certain virtues in the speaker---scrupulous egalitarianism, concern for the dignity of all people, sophistication about the political implications of language---and so serves the self-regarding interests of the PC far more than it serves any of the persons or groups renamed.
This reeks of criticizing others for your own faults. Someone who makes 12k is poor. If this is offensive to someone then clearly they have a low opinion of poor people. Yet everyone else is reprimanded for it.
So what? Natural language is complicated, because a) It does something very complicated, and b) it is the result of a complex process.
Yes, many words have more than one meaning. That's one of the many reasons why we need formal, context-free, specialized languages to communicate our will to machines effectively.
But humans are not machines. We can do context, and we can use words that mean more than one thing. We can also deal with misunderstandings much better than an automaton.
And this newspeak even fails at the goal of providing an unambiguous: Unless context is provided, a person who makes 6 figures a year is "financially disadvantaged" when compared to a billionaire. But noone would mistake someone earning 6 figures with someone who is poor.
Are you seriously asserting when people say "poor people", they do so in a non-poverty manner and use it instead to describe people as inferior?
Also, people in poverty should be deserving of sympathy and charity. Is that now suddenly offensive that people should want to help others that are less fortunate than themselves? If you are in a position where you need help, part of your responsibility is to humble yourself and let people help you (while not eradicating you're personal responsibility either). Someday you may be the one to give charity, and it's also just as insulting and disheartening when your charity is rejected out of pride.
In German the word for poor ("arm"), while there is some connection to pity like in English (one can be "arm dran", "poorly off"), can't be used to describe bad / undesirable quality.
It was still replaced with "sozial schwach" (literally "socially weak", but actually means financially weak, people who don't have much money) in many contexts, especially by politicians and journalists.
(Thankfully, there is a push against "sozial schwach", to use "arm" again - it's a horrible phrase)
Is not "equity language" just another form of neocolonialism? How can "rich educated people" rename entire ethnic group (latinx) without their consent? Also there is nothing offensive about being "poor"...
Equity language is just another tool to oppress people.
I love reading this stuff to figure out what new words elite white people have for me. Apparently I’m not a “minority” or a “naturalized citizen” anymore, and my kids aren’t “second generation Americans.”
I'm involved in local politics in Oak Park, IL, also known as the People's Republic of Oak Park, 85.5% Clinton in '16, 72% college educated, median income about $15k higher than Evanston, and I have never heard any of these words in the elite white conversations I am continually dragged into.
These guides get published to give The Groups something to do. Very few people in the real world --- yes, even the elite whites --- take them seriously. The only durable change I've noticed in the last few years is capitalizing Black, which is something our mutual fave John McWhorter has been advocating for some time.
I'm in academia, just underwent this sort of training this week. Not interested in risking self identifying so I'll only go so far as to say that the Sierra Club's language is fairly close to how we are expected to talk with students, faculty, and staff. It is of course a "learning process" and so there is room for "growth and critical conversations", but the die has been cast, so to speak.
The parent comment is referring to high schools. I'm not surprised, and don't think anyone else is either, that there might be a university that has gone fully up its own butt this way. I'm curious to hear stories about high schools that have formalized it in some way, though. Do you have a story like that?
Couldn't say, they don't let me near the schools any more, not since I argued that sometimes breaking into the school with thermite could be justified.
More seriously, as much of a bastion of progressivism as these hallowed halls are, I'm 100% certain we are behind the curve of most blue state schools when it comes to how up to date we are on the appropriate ritual goat sacrifices.
I'm sorry I can't point you to a public online source. My comment is anecdotal; relying on my own observations across family and friends with kids at the HS level. It is pretty obvious speaking to them that their advisors and administrators expect all written pieces to comply with DEI principles. I have asked if there is a formal style-book and no one has pointed me to one yet. But there is a powerful group think. Not complying is asking for censure or excommunication.
There's a sign in the assistant principles offices at my local high school which defines what critical race theory is, including the "critique of liberalism" part.
I would ban public high schools from encouraging a "critique of liberalism". Being a critic takes no skill and doesn't help the world. Critical theory, and critical thinking are extremely overrated skills. We need constructive thinking and constructive communication.
It is not in fact the case that you can work out what Critical Theory, Critical Legal Theory, and Critical Race Theory (3 distinct concepts originating at 3 different points in the 20th century) axiomatically from the the word "critic".
I know you were responding to the "elite white people" bit, but is there an age element at play with this? If there are people that have absorbed the idea that you unquestioningly adjust your speaking/writing to be a perfectly respectful person, I'd guess they were 20-30yo?
He started hedging when the NYT adopted it as their house style (understandably, because the NYT's rationale was silly, overreaching, and a little incoherent), but he's talked about this on Lexicon Valley before: it's proper noun describing a specific set of people for whom "African" is an imprecise descriptor.
they have no qualms in oppressing and showing intolerance towards cultures that won't play ball with those linguistic impositions, especially when they cannot just ignore them as foreign
they will impose actual systemic intolerance and litmus tests to force their cultural supremacy
the people who say disagreement is invalidating someone's existence will actually deny the existence of the culture they spun from, violently so if necessary
The term latinx didn't come out of "rich educated people" - certainly a lot of educated folk have been pushing it in the last decade (self-identifying grad students and recent college grads, for instance) - but there's a weird sort of prejudice going on in assuming everything can only come out of "rich educated [non-latino, based on your use of "their" there] people"
Where the term originated matters to some extent, but also where it comes from & is being used also matters. And the drive for 'Latinx' is coming from rich educated people.
1) anyone who studies in US university, is "rich educated" for South American standards
2) Quote from article bellow:
> a queer Latina ... mostly from white, right-wing Latino men.
> “When you’re a white Latino ... Black Latino ... transgender Latino, next to a queer Latino, next to an Indigenous Latino
> understand the diversity of our community
Those three paragraphs paint picture that "Latino" is some sort of community. And you can be in-group or out-group (by being right-wing-white-Latino). There is also somebody who speaks on behalf of "our community".
But that is simply not true. It is an ethnic group. Its name may change over a few decades, if new name gains use in South America. Not in a few years, because some US citizens said so, and decided to rename "their community"!
There's literally no one in the actual Latin American countries that call themselves Latinos outside the USA (and perhaps some other rich countries).
I would be called a Latino in the USA, being a Brazilian of brown skin. That amuses me as I have literally never thought of myself or my fellow Brazilians as Latinos... we're simply Brazilian (we may be region-specific, like carioca - from Rio, or Paulista, from Sao Paulo... but still Brazilian, obviously) and I am pretty sure Mexicans, Guatemalans, Peruvians, Colombians and others are the same... just like white Americans do the same: are you ever a white person when presenting yourself to another American, or e.g. Texan, Californian or whatever??
In the US there's two forces at work, the racist side calling all Spanish speakers Mexican (or various slurs) and the various communities attempting to get larger power by uniting on their commonality. The polite racist (government) side chose Hispanic and the grass roots represented by La Raza and others promulgated Latin American/Latino. Meanwhile I've come across younger non-activist second-generation people referring to themselves as Spanish.
It pays a lot to actually participate in the community to know what to do. I find that people don't like being labelled in any community, but that they may use terms of art to describe their membership in different groups.
People want to recognize inequities and lived experiences and choose to do something about it that is within their power, change their language. As the article embraces, this is a morally driven impulse that is unimpeachable in its intent, but in aggregate, fails and sometimes, even oppresses. Interesting article.
I wonder... what is the difference between an "experience" vs a "lived experience"?
If I have an experience-- such as walking through the park, this afternoon and picking a blackberry... What is a "lived experience" version of that same experience?
“lived experience” was generally first used to differentiate between a person saying “I have experience with x issue” who could be saying “I’ve studied it; I’ve worked with the population” but “lived experience” makes it specific to being an individual’s own life.
It's still used that way. I'm always confused why people criticize this one in particular. The distinction makes perfect sense. There's an enormous amount of stuff that I've read a bunch about or watched a lot of media about or talked about with people, but is nonetheless outside my lived experience.
The idea of having direct first-hand contact with a thing is part of the understanding of the word "experience." Second hand contact or learning is generally some other noun or verb, depending on what we're talking about.
My family members have experience with deafness. They've had direct first-hand contact with someone who is deaf in one ear, and have learned how to interact with that person successfully. They are familiar with the challenges of being deaf (in one ear, least), both from having interacted with the person, and because the person in question has explained the challenges they have faced.
I have lived experience with deafness. I've been deaf in one ear for decades now. However well I explain myself to my family members, there is a degree to which their experience will never be the same as mine, despite their first-hand contact with me.
We can either reserve the word "experience" for me, and try to police it so that nobody can say they have experience without being prepared to demonstrate the first-hand nature of their experience, or we can understand that people will use the word to mean "prolonged exposure" or similar, and add a qualifier when important to people like me: e.g. I have lived experience as a deaf person.
The word "experience" encompasses many kinds of contact, which is why it is often modified in various ways. It is not redundant to say "first-hand experience" or "direct experience". These are commonly used and broadly understood. There is no reason "lived experience" should be any different, and indeed I think it is more of an anti-woke shibboleth to make fun of this than it is a woke shibboleth to use it. Normal people with no skin on either side of that game understand it perfectly well.
No it isn't, it's just a different form of experience. People seem to want the word "experience" to have some narrow single-purpose definition that it just doesn't have in practice. Do you go around telling people saying "direct experience" or "first hand experience" that actually they're being redundant because that's the only kind of experience there is?
> I wonder... what is the difference between an "experience" vs a "lived experience"?
It's a shibboleth that indicates adherence to a certain world view. The speaker is communicating that they are a Good Person and thus you should give their experiences greater weight.
As our societies functional literacy has declined we have lost words that gave us nuanced shades of meaning.
"Experience with" meaning, "Have dealt with this personally, first hand" gradually became, "has been near or studied and feels comfortable claiming authority on that basis." So the new compound word "Lived experience" was created to allow us to still use the first definition reliably.
Many times people who have "experience with" a topic have really "studied" it.
> As our societies functional literacy has declined
[Citation badly needed]
Words change. That doesn't mean everyone is getting stupider. In fact the more literate people are, the faster words are likely to change, since the more situations they'll be put to use in.
Functional literacy means more than simply knowing specific vocabulary words. It includes the shared knowledge to use and understand idioms and cultural references.
Needing to coin a new expression to replace a word we already have a perfectly good word for seems to be a symptom of poor literacy. I suppose the chronic dishonesty and doublespeak involved in corporate jargon could be the source of this phenomenon instead.
It's the new prescriptivists who want to set the rules for the commoners to follow -reminds me of the apocryphal story about a Spanish king of some sort who had a lisp and in turn, the population not wanting to offend him began speaking with a lisp so Spanish ended up with a "th" sound where other romance languages did not.
>How can "rich educated people" rename entire ethnic group (latinx) without their consent
I mean someone named them in the first place. The people of Latin America didn't ask to be called Latinos, it was assigned to them, purportedly by a French man.
> The guide also rejects the disabled in favor of people living with disabilities, for the same reason that enslaved person has generally replaced slave : to affirm, by the tenets of what’s called “people-first language,” that “everyone is first and foremost a person, not their disability or other identity.”
The reason people first language fails is because there's some subjects of this language that find the original wording insulting and there's some subjects of this language that find the new words insulting.
I have back issues. Major ones that pinch my sciatic nerve due to a fractured column that healed improperly. They've gotten to the point a few times in my life where I could not walk much less feel (at all) my leg for prolonged periods of time. If someone called me a "person experiencing a disability" it sounds like you're trying to remove the hurdle that the disability puts in my life. I already had to grapple with the idea that I am not bound to that disability. I have found ways to climb small mountains, to hike, pack, move/lift heavy things, sit, and work out all with abundances of caution and very proper form.
That's to say, codifying this language just does what the first correction set out to correct: it institutionalized language some people don't like. In a world with a big variety of perspectives and experiences, the best resolution to these problems isn't some authoritarian document telling people how to talk. It's gracefully correcting people on the way that you'd like to be spoken about and people respecting that. Nobody needs to walk on eggshells around how I'd like to be referred, they just need to meet me where I am when I make a choice.
I had sort of a similar reaction to the piece — reading through it really clarified for me some impressions that had been sitting in the back of my mind.
Language at some level is really about the speaker, in terms of their background, knowledge or lack thereof, what they want to communicate and so forth. Sometimes I think what this equity language betrays is some desire to convey moral or intellectual status, or even some assertion of social power, but sometimes it reflects a genuine attempt to respect the wishes of the subjects of what they're saying.
The problem as you point out is different groups might see things in different ways, and maybe even want to be seen in different ways in different settings or at different moments. Maybe they want to be seen as strong or resilient in one setting, and maybe in another they want to discuss the injustices they have to be resilient against. I think this is only a natural part of human nature.
So it makes sense that these edicts about proper language aren't just morally problematic because they reflect some power motive on the part of the speaker, at the expense of the subject of the speech, but because in doing that, they deny some flexibility in how certain topics and persons can be portrayed or portray themselves.
The example of the passage from Behind the Beautiful Forevers is compelling in how it illustrates how equity language can be disenfranchising and therefore counter to its own stated purposes. The passage works because it is meant to convey something about the parents' perspective and to cause us to wrestle with that. The author is channeling the parents' language. In a different context, maybe the same situation might be described differently, more positively. It's not just that the language in the second version is intellectualized and distanced, it's that it denies choice of language from those who potentially are in the best position to say something about it.
I think it's much easier to just see it as in-group out-group signaling. You're in the in-group if you comply with the new arbitrary language and you're a slew of bad words if you're in the out-group using the old language. The stuff about being nice to low status people is fake, the purpose is to identify low status people (the people who don't know/use the new made up language).
The tenet assumes that people are in the large just dense. Following it, you have no airline pilots, mothers, mentors, judges, felons, idiots, and maybe not even proper names. Just "person who is female and has borne living children", "person who judges others in court", "person named Judy", etc.
There might be a worthwhile transition to a new framing that makes sense. I've heard people rip on using the metric system because supposedly its proponents wanted 10-hour days and 10 days a week, etc, which was taking tenets to ridiculous points. The problem now is trying to frame some changes in grander terms because you might well get ridiculous outcomes ( and in current society definitely will).
This is great advice for one-on-one groups and small discussions, but provides little help if you're writing for a broad audience and want to minimize blowback. Which is where I think that Stanford guide, and other such guides, come into play, whether I agree with them or not.
> but provides little help if you're writing for a broad audience and want to minimize blowback
Does writing a guide or policing language that causes blowback provide help? If you're speaking to a room full of people and half favor this language and half don't then you've only shifted the grievances from one side of the room to the other.
There's no easy answers here, but I don't think writing language guides or policing peoples language actually accomplishes much.
All it takes is one or two very angry people to start a mob online and destroy someone's entire career. I'm not surprised that authors, especially in a field as precarious as writing, are more than willing to follow what is deemed to be "safe" language, though it's definitely a loss for society as a whole and indirectly works to undermine writing as an art.
If it's truly 50-50, then no. But I don't see any way that a whole 50% of your audience is going to freak out if you change from "homeless" to "person experiencing homelessness," for example.
The guides are probably banking on most of the changes being accepted, however grudgingly. Of course, they may be wrong, and even if there's pushback, they may be convinced enough of the righteousness of their cause to press ahead anyway.
"Avoid metaphors, which can introduce unneeded baggage." This is my favorite one from UC Irvine's language guide. Nothing better encapsulates the irony and lack of self-awareness most of these guides display.
This is clearly not actually about morality - no one in their right mind would argue that someone is racist just because they didn't know the etymology of "cakewalk". And a complete racist could follow these rules easily enough.
This seems to me that these are a set of moral grounds to punish people for having a low EQ.
None of these rules or guides are even internally consistent. What it will and has always come down to is understanding how to read a room and follow imposed social etiquette (aka, EQ - something that we know is not equally distributed!)
Whether people promoting this stuff understand it or not (I think some of them are very aware), they are going to be roping of sections of society just on the grounds of being "too impolite".
>When Latinx began to be used in advanced milieus, a poll found that a large majority of Latinos and Hispanics continued to go by the familiar terms and hadn’t heard of the newly coined, nearly unpronounceable one.
There's also a practical case: these terms make you sound like a damn space alien. Unless your audience already agrees completely with you, you lose credibility by using this language. Posturing for your own team has become more important than relating your views to others and pursuading them to join your side.
> It's crazy that this label is still being pushed.
This is a great example of how intellectually bankrupt some of the social mis-movements towards redefinition truly are.
First they come up with a term that is clearly not a term used by the native speakers of that group. Then they utilize that term in order to collectively identify them. Then they push it across media, education, and many other avenues to make it "a thing".
This term which originates in English, and doesn't truly relate to Latin* derived cultures but instead to a smaller subset of cultures from a specific geography, and is difficult to speak for a native speaker, and violates the grammar, is then hoisted upon them like a label to which they'd actually subscribe. As many of these cultures self-identify as uniquely distinct from one another, and are competitive, this type of collectivist label is all the more rude.
My guess is an English speaker was forced to take French or Spanish in college and struggled to remember the gender for a word like “bicycle” and decided the whole notion of gendered language was silly and should be abolished.
People argue about how much of this comes from the internet/twitter; in the case of latinx it's clearly an internet phenomenon. The word is entirely unpronounceable, it could only have developed in writing.
I hope people realize The Atlantic is baiting us to outrage. For the clicks, of course.
No question, these language guides are pretty absurd (at least to someone my age) and have very doubtful moral value... but these are internal guides, for their own communications. It's the Sierra Club's job to figure that out what language their donors/members (potential or current) want to hear. I have no idea if they are getting it right here, but few of us do, because that's highly domain-specific knowledge and tricky to nail down.
It's downright dishonest and sensationalistic to apply one of these guides to a book like Behind the Beautiful Forevers. What does a communications guide have to do with book authorship?
The article is really just an extended straw man argument. BTW, the first sentence of the Sierra Club guide explains it's intended purpose:
> One of the most visible ways the Sierra Club can demonstrate our commitment
to equity, justice, and inclusion is by using respectful, thoughtful language in all of our communications.
But delving into that isn't going to drive a lot of click so they went another way.
A few years ago I quit a job at a large tech company after spending most of a year sanitizing text documents to use politically correct language. This isn't marginal.
Whaaaat? I thought so many lives were improved by making devteams replace all usages of "black/whitelist" with "block/allowlist".
</sarcasm>
Well, except for the lives of the users, on-call engineers, 1st and 2nd level tech support, the product owners, and everyone else who had to deal with sudden, unexpected, hard to track bugs resulting from such BS changes.
<sarcasm>
Oh, ofc I apologise for my use of the word "list", which may be historically charged, and also non-inclusive to people who prefer unordered data.
As a non-American, the dumbest change that affects me daily, is the renaming of the master branch. Master means teacher in romance languages and its variations are part of daily usage. In git there's no "slave" part so it always meant "main" and not "owner"
It affects me daily because "look on master" became "look on the main branch" for no advantage to absolutely anyone.
The strangest thing about the git branch controversy is that "master" was clearly used in a master/copy sense, just like you used to have a master music record that was then copied, but at the same time, basically every embedded communication protocol and many distributed computing systems still use terms like "bus master" and straight up "master-slave" configuration.
Sure, for many protocols it's a very accurate description, but if we're going to try and remove such language from tech, why not start with the places where the words actually mean the same thing, not just happen to be homographs.
(I do support the master-main change in git for other reasons tho: it's much easier to translate and more natural to say. "Master record" is a term that never got translated into many languages, or at least not in a way that still makes sense for git)
I believe these sort of 'word bans' are motivated by Whorfianism; basically the idea that the sort of language we use can influence (or even set the bounds of) the kind of thoughts people have. But scientific evidence for Whorfianism is weak at best, and starts to seem particularly absurd when you try to state plainly exactly what you're trying to accomplish in situations like this. In this case, the idea seems to be that we can denormalize the practice of slavery by eliminating metaphorical references to slavery.
If you think about this, it's obviously a complete farce. The sort of people who engage in slavery today are not enabled to do so by such metaphors. And those apathetic to the problem of modern slavery, who might otherwise be doing something about it, were not made apathetic by the metaphors. The premise of fighting slavery by eliminating metaphors to slavery is pure pseudoscience of the highest order.
> why not start with the places where the words actually mean the same thing
If a word describes a bad thing, that's a reason to get rid of the bad thing. It's not a reason to ban the word.
Because the latter doesn't help anyone with real problems. Wow, we banished "master" from git. Did that make the world a better place for the people described in these articles (see links)?
Did it positively impact any of these lives? Is it going to do so at any point in the future? If so, what specific outcomes can these people expect from it?
My point is, banishing words describing bad things, doesn't make the bad things go away.
Note how that sentence started with "but if we're going to try and remove such language from tech,". It wasn't a support of the idea, just of the execution. "If you're going to try and mug someone, why not do it somewhere with no CCTV?".
As for the reasoning, nobody thinks not having a "master" and "slave" chip in SPI is going to erase slavery and especially nobody (on the right side) is trying to erase the word altogether. The most common argument is that these terms should not be "watered down" by using them elsewhere - when you hear the word "slave", your immediate thought should be "human rights are being violated! who? where? how can we stop it?". It should bring up the thought of some of the worst human suffering in history, not some chips talking to each other.
(again, I'm not giving a judgement of the idea, just explaining the arguments for it the way I understand them)
1) Please show me an engineer who mistakes the meaning of the term "blacklist" in, say, an ACL system
2) The newspeak terms are no less ambiguous. Are the items on the list allowed exclusively or are they just granted special privilege like source IPs from which no authentication is required? Without context, which is provided by the surrounding system in any case, "block/allow" is just as nebulous as "black/white" Plus, it's one example among many. What ambiguity did "master" branches in repos confer?
3) Problems with ambiguity were not the reason given to introduce such changes. The reason given was that using the newspeak would someohow improve the lives of people experiencing racism, a claim for which I am still waiting for any concrete examples showcasing its validity
> Hey not all change is bad
As shown above, the change didn't solve any problems or provide tangible improvements, so it becomes change for changes sake, which is bad, always, under all circumstances, period.
Using inclusive language never bothered me. Never saw a bug related to inclusive language, and I worked on software I am confident everyone on HN uses.
Please tell me, what exactly makes this language "inclusive"? Whos lives got measurably better because of it, and in what way? What specific instances of racism were avoided because of it? Which bad political decisions that would have been reverted because of it?
> Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. They haven’t emerged organically from the shifting linguistic habits of large numbers of people.
Yes, that's sort of the point. The goal here is not only to force people to behave and even think in a certain way, but it is simultaneously a loyalty test and a flex. If it were to happen organically it wouldn't serve these purposes.
"Dad! We can't get rid of any of our Roald Dahl books. They're changing the words in them. My class talked about it and we all think it's stupid".
A few months back, my 16yo was telling me about a class conversation about their futures, and what everyone wanted most was a stable relationship, a job they enjoyed and to be able to afford a modest house.
It's reassuring that in a seemingly insane world, the kids who are coming up seem have their heads screwed on straight.
> and what everyone wanted most was a stable relationship, a job they enjoyed and to be able to afford a modest house.
> It's reassuring that in a seemingly insane world, the kids who are coming up seem have their heads screwed on straight.
One might say that the reason is because this is seemingly becoming harder than ever in Western countries.
That's certainly part of it, but also I think that, in the face of infinite gender/relationship/careers possibilities, they're (rather sensibly) leaning on tradition for guidance.
But how can we logically separate "trying to offend" and "not trying to offend" stances here, on a social platform, by reading two or three sentences comment written by some anonymous?
Assume good intent and interpret as generously as possible. I believe some version of these common sense notions are even in the site guidelines for Hacker News.
These wholesale moves to prescribe new language in the interest of social justice are the reductio ad absurdum result of the whole menagerie of post-modern identity theories and movements, from critical race theory to post colonial theory to queer theory. It's all in service to the notion that you can create truth, particularly about identity, by modifying language and usage.
Ironically, it's also deeply counterproductive to the goals of identity theories, because it draws overt attention to language and sensitivity about language, in a way that makes identities appear, and to some extent actually become, fragile and dependent on the language. Where a word is owned and deployed by a group to suppress and control some other group (ni**, e.g.), taking the word away, anathematizing it, can indeed be of value. But most of the targets in modern social justice language correction have very little such power, and are not deployed as tools of suppression or oppression by most people. Take a broad enough run at them though, and you can give them that power, at lead in the mind of those to whom the refer.
The ever-changing euphemistic language seems to me like mostly just a new way to be a hipster. The new vocabulary is a shibboleth to distinguish people who got the right sort of education from the right sort of places. Your knowledge of all the proper euphemisms to use sets you apart from the uneducated rubes.
The problem is, it sets you apart from the people you're allegedly trying to help, given that the marginalized are rarely those who got an elite education at an elite institution. This is how Republicans, a coalition of rich tax-avoiders and poorer people resenting the contempt of the elites, stay in power. And their political program - slashing benefits, cutting social services - hurts marginalized people the most.
By creating a way to be a "good person" that only the most hip and educated people can follow, the language policers are creating a rift between themselves and the people they are trying to help, preventing a political coalition from forming that would be able to pass helpful policies.
Does this fundamentally disagree with anything I wrote? Before Tumblr became a place where some people showed off their inscrutable social justice terminology, it was mostly a place where hipsters showed off their inscrutably cool aesthetics.
Given time, “woke” will evolve into its own dialect completely incomprehensible to common language.
Every persons unique experience becomes new terms to be added to the lexicon. A burden of irrelevant knowledge for the rest of society to navigate in order to communicate.
ADnD called these kinds of dialects, "Alignment Languages." They're a larger form of Shibboleth that provide a filter of if someone is in a particular in-group, and the rulebook actually explicitly calls out speaking an Alignment Language in public as seen as very rude.
Being able to code switch between them, or simply avoid jargon from your own Alignment Language and understand the jargon from others is a critical communication skill when you need to work with people who have radically different values than your own.
These values didn't originate naturally. It is a side effect that creates division.
Cyberpunk RPG 1995 rule book NeoTribes ...
"It is now accepted among historical scholars that in the decades before the Collapse, America suffered from the sicknesses of racism and "cultural identity'.
Everyone wanted to be seen as special. Every group had to be "equal" to or preferably better than its neighbors, and fought to protect its "special" rights. If anyone had something that someone else wanted, they were painted as racist, sexist, elitist or worse.
This divisive "me first" attitude eventually tore the fabric of American culture apart and caused it to self-destruct in a fireball of competing ideologies, none of which truly recognized each other's validity. Diversity led inexorably to anarchy."
I am French so the wording part did not reach us yet (we still have one word for deaf and blind, and handicapped (disabled)).
What unfortunately is present is the way disabled people are perceived, intellect-wise. I can talk of two examples: a wheel-chaired guy in my team, and my wife who got progressively disabled due to MS.
The way they are addressed is different from the way others are addressed; It seems that people will be less inclined to argue with them (because god knows what can happen to these feeble people, who should also be shielded from this because of their physical disability that also affects their intellect), but also treat them more child-like.
This is infuriating because they are progressively pushed away from the normal interactions in life (for their own good, poor beings) and there is not much they can do to avoid this.
My wife still has the character she had but somehow cannot express it anymore because her interactions get so washed down that it is disturbing to watch. Her disability is not that visible yet so she still has some time, but the guy in my team is really fed up with that.
> I am French so the wording part did not reach us yet
This is not true at all. The absolute trainwreck that is "écriture inclusive" is spearheading those inclusivity initiatives, and we have also incorporated a lot of the other words mentioned here in the language.
écriture inclusive is basically non-existent in France, whee did you see it except on some university pages that wanted to be "ahead of their time"? It is BTW forbidden by the ministry of education.
Which other words have we incorporated? Un handicapé is a disabled person. We do not have any "mobility challenged" words. Aveugle is blind, malvoyant is vision impaired (which is not the same, one being an extreme of the other).
There was an attempt to use iel as il+elle (he+she). The only places you can read it is in articles that debate whether it is a good thing on not. It is completely absent elsewhere.
Now - my comment was about everything except that intro line.
Guess you never heard the joke about the Education Nationale using the term "Référentiel Bondissant" to designate balloons/balls...
Quick search indicates it was used by the Grenoble academy at one point in the 2000s XD
This said there has always been some insanities here and there in the administration - but they remain funny. I know "outil scripteur" for instance (this is a pen)
The semantic turn of the Left is one of the worst signs of intellectual decay. There's approximately zero evidence that linguistic changes influence thought: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is rejected by linguists except perhaps in some very narrow situations. The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, from negro, to black, to African American, to Black, to person of color. And none of them are better or worse than the other (though the 2020 innovation "bodies of color" managed to find a way to be more degrading than the worst that Stormfront could come up with).
Why? We feel powerless to fix the problems that plague our society, so instead we turn to things we have agency over. Maybe we can't prevent group X from suffering from social discrimination, but if everything is just a matter of what words we use, we can just choose to use those words, stridently denounce everyone who hasn't gotten with the program, and pat ourselves on the back and call it a day.
It feels more like a minefield than a joke. A minefield that gets new mines added every so often just to keep everyone on their toes. When I was younger, I used to feel like I could keep up with all the new taboo words, but it seems like it is happening faster and faster these days.
You can unintentionally say something that turns out to be taboo, and you're done for. Some years ago, I causally used the "r-word" and didn't even think anything of it, and blam! big mistake. We used to toss that one around all the time back in the 80s and 90s, felt kind of like a jerk when you used it in the early 2000s, but in the 2010s it's become totally lingua-non-grata. We learn the hard way from these experiences, but it does feel like a growing minefield.
Worse, when something innocent we write/say today becomes a slur in 2040, future people will dig back in time and judge us by the words we wrote in 2020. Do you know what will be a slur in 20 years? I don't.
> Some years ago, I causally used the "r-word" and didn't even think anything of it, and blam! big mistake.
Doug Stanhope has a great skit in which he explains that the word "retarded" was originally the sensitive way to refer to this group, because at the time they were called directly derogatory terms.
But, like with every such attempt it was quickly adopted as an insult.
My not particularly original take is that policing language addresses only the effect, not the cause. Question remains: should the world learn of our peaceful ways by force?
Yeah, there's no word to describe something negative that can't be turned into an insult. Whatever words we use to describe people on the fringes of society will be turn against those we don't like to treat them as if they are on the fringes of society.
If it somehow became popular to describe people of a certain type using the phrase "people on the fringes of society," then within a generation or two kids would taunt each other in schoolyards with "No, you're on the fringes of society," and "No, you are!"
Just like Special Education students in schools, students who require one-on-one teaching from trained teachers. It was abbreviated as sp.ed., and where I grew up, "sped" was a common insult, as in "you're such a sped", or "that sped is so retarded".
I once got into a debate with someone on Reddit where they claimed "Middle East" is an offensive term, which was news to me. They preferred "West Asia and Northern Africa", or something. I claimed that this is just taking the same path that "oriental" took, which is now taboo in some countries, even though it literally means "from the east" and is the opposite of "occidental".
> I causally used the "r-word" and didn't even think anything of it
You casually called someone a "retard" (I assume that's the word) and someone took that wrongly? Of course they did! Even when "retard" was an acceptable put-down, it was still a put-down.
Maybe the way to avoid the "minefield" you speak of is to not put others down? Even deservedly! Just try to be nicer to everyone, even if they are not, themselves, nice.
I've never thought of retarded as a putdown, it was just the sound used to describe a certain group of people. Be careful assuming you are in possession of the one true way.
>in the 2010s it's become totally lingua-non-grata*
I thought it was the 2020s.
But it's too good not to use, and it's the last good insult we have. Mental ableism is the last bastion. I make my stand here.
The slippery slope we're being forced down on leads to "don't be mean to anyone ever", and I, as a product of the era of https://youtu.be/C4dnCZSYmbY, fundamentally refuse to accept that.
> It feels more like a minefield than a joke. A minefield that gets new mines added every so often just to keep everyone on their toes.
It gets new mines because when a word becomes a widely used derogatory term for a group of people we need a non-derogatory word to use instead when when we are trying to talk about people in that group and aren't trying to be derogatory.
So when a word that starts out as a neutral term to describe some condition or collection of people gets adopted over time by the general public as a slur or derogatory term, and that's how it is used 99.9% of the time, we should assume when we hear it out of context it is the 0.1% case?
Also for many of these words most the general public has complete forgotten the non-slur/non-derogatory meaning (or has never known it). No amount of tone will fix that.
Imagine an unmarried couple with a child who gets a copy of the child's medical records from their pediatrician and see the child described as a "retarded bastard". The chances that they will know that "retarded" was once a medical term for someone who is behind on mental development and that "bastard" means a person born out of wedlock are pretty low. At best they are going to be greatly puzzled by the doctor using those words.
Negative words can change meaning or severity over time, in both directions, but if you aim for clear expression and avoid insults, it is unlikely anything you say or write will be judged badly in the future.
It's pretty simple: you have freedom to say whatever you want, but if you're worried about how you'll be judged, now or in the future, then you will curtail your worst impulses. Alternatively, you can lean into your freedom, say whatever you want, and then deal with the fallout when it eventually comes.
Look at the comment to which I replied, and then tell me my reply doesn't fit.
Can you provide sources for "the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is more or less rejected by linguists"? I took a university course in "Philosophy of Language" around 2008 and I was taught in no uncertain terms that language structures thought.
The wikipedia article for Linguistic Relativity[0] states:
> Research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting linguistic relativity, and this hypothesis is provisionally accepted by many modern linguists.
That quote is a relatively recent addition (17 Jan 2023) and isn't well-cited. A longer standing and more objective statement from the article:
> Many different, often contradictory variations of the hypothesis have existed throughout its history.[4] The strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity, now referred to as linguistic determinism, says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. This hypothesis was held by some of the early linguists before World War II.[3] This version is generally agreed to be false by modern linguists.[2]
The project of the guides is utopian, but they’re a symptom of deep pessimism. They belong to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions, argument is no longer desirable, each viewpoint has its own impenetrable dialect, and only the most fluent insiders possess the power to say what is real.
Though I wonder if this diagnosis is actually too optimistic, in that it assumes people are 1) aware and care about the real problems and 2) willing to put in effort to enact meaningful change. Perhaps this is too cynical, but I think most people who adopt this sort of symbolic gesturing are pretty detached from the root issues of power and wealth inequality. "Virtue signaling" is a product of vanity, not pessimism/powerlessness.
This what people do to distract from the fact that they don't want to give up housing as a lucrative investment if it means more housing, as that would infringe upon their lifestyle.
You say it's both "intellectual decay" and "feeling powerless" but I see no reason that the two are connected, causal, or both happening. Hand people victimized by the past few centuries of American history the ability to fix, say, the generational wealth gap that resulted from denied opportunities and seizure of property, and see if they still only focus on words.
I welcome "The semantic turn of the Left". It shows the emperor has no clothes.
By increasing the silliness, more and more people observe "Wow these folks are ignorant lunatics, unaware that they're driving the perception of themselves as immature, ignorant hypocrites whose identity is built upon political trends."
It's meant a lot of different things in the past. The initial version (the "strong" hypothesis) has been roundly rejected. Claims associated with it are what people usually think of ("the Ancient Greeks couldn't see the color blue!") when they think of Sapir-Whorf.
Weaker versions with much more narrow claims are debated and controversial, but even for those, it's the most flashy (and least supported) claims that get the most popular press.
It's a shame. Many people who call themselves left instead have views similar to violent communism (as opposed to social democracy or Marxism) and fascism of the hard right in terms of inflexibility, harsh punishment, mercilessness, and aggressive intellectual and social domination. Gen X and older tend to have more of an idea of the spirit of left liberalism and what it means socially, life outlook, and pragmatically.
Furthermore, there are nonzero people in groups who object to victim monikers like Latinx and over-sensitive terminology as demeaning. If it were me, since I can only speak for myself, I would want to be treated as equal without ceremony, pity, or unfair advantages. Alterations of language where there is little or no offense (asking the targets rather than the busy bodies) seem like token thoughts and prayers and inconvenience to the many rather than direct, positive help to anyone. Solve real concerns rather than pearl clutch the next unfashionable word.
Alternatively, there’s a theory of change at play here that follows a relatively long path of inquiry through politics, sociology, and neuroscience to identify in-group/out-group dynamics and mental shortcuts as central blockers to attempts to increase cross-group empathy and drive social change.
I don't dispute that there's a theory of change here: "if we explore the linguistic landscape, we can discover a set of signifiers that will help us to destroy racism/sexism/etc."
I just reject that. We don't live in a Harry Potter book where the correct series of incantations affect the material world.
I can say that right now, and nothing happens. The words aren't the causal elements here changing the world; it's the referants and power hierarchies that do.
The proper analogy would be thinking that requiring saying "Officer, detain-in-an-official-capacity that man!" instead would somehow fix police violence.
> I can say that right now, and nothing happens. The words aren't the causal elements here changing the world; it's the referants and power hierarchies that do.
And you think this is something that’s not understood among those pushing for linguistics changes?
Even if that were true, I'd still not put any faith in the empathy skills of people who use e.g. "incel" as a slur, who claim "it's okay to be white" is hate speech and who call arson, vandalism and looting "mostly peaceful protests" because the in-group did it.
It's not a caricature if it's taught at supposedly elite institutions of education, into which admission is contingent on a declaration of adherence to said ways of thinking.
I received a letter in the mail from official sources, ordering me to use:
"skin appropriating mammals & pseudo-mammals of complexions including greyscale shades from #FFFFFE to #000000"
(pseudo-mammals is important so as not to exclude platypus & echidna identifying peoples)
It's ok though-- I will let it slide this time.
Next time though, it will be reported to the Commissar. And they will listen to me-- Because I am half skin appropriating mammals & pseudo-mammals of complexions including greyscale shades from #FFFFFE to #000000 (anything more than a quarter is considered full validated and verified via the official channels)
Including it would distract from the main point (though IIRC there was no point at which it wasn't a slur; replacing non-slurs with novel non-slurs is a different category).
That said, I think it supports my point. How effective has tabooing that slur been at eliminating racism in the USA?
I'm the furthest thing from N-word apologist, but it's pronounced the same as the Latin word meaning "black" (modulo vowel pronunciation shifts), and spelled nearly the same. It's clearly derived from a word which did not originally have any meaning as a slur, and I bet you could find early usages in English which were merely descriptive.
There's no reason to use it now, but understanding the fact that was originally a descriptive word is useful for the history of it.
There have been a few kerfuffles in soccer where a Spanish speaking person used the Spanish word for black person in an English speaking country…and were charged with making a racial slur.
Why does a taboo have to "eliminate racism" to be considered useful or effective instead of just "reduce the amount of times people have to put up with hearing others call them that"?
Do you have an estimate for how much tabooing that word decreased the racial wealth gap or increased the number of black children with access to healthcare?
Well it's american site and people get itchy when you mention it, because apparently having voldemort words that are simultaneously used by people supposedely offended by it in their culture is "good" thing to do
It's "theirsxn of sholor". Please respect this and stop the violation and violence against theirsxns of sholor which is incurred when you use othering phrases.
(not thereson-- because it has the word "son" in it, which is offensive to non-sons. sholor because it's closer to shalom which means peace.)
I acknowledge that language shapes the way people think. But the replacement of cost-benefit analysis and evidence-based debate with arguments regarding the connotations that different words pull in has been a huge mistake in my view.
There might have been a point at which language policing was done in good faith. But I strongly suspect that the replacement of the word felon with the term justice-involved person is essentially attempting a fait accompli on a debate regarding the extent to which convicted criminals should be considered culpable for their crimes. The problem with this mode of debating is that winning correlates with the ability to wield social power, not with having facts on your side.
The pendulum is swinging back because equity language censors took this way way too far.
People-first language ("enslaved people" not "slaves") makes complete sense to me, but making a big fuss about how common English idioms like being "blind to a problem" is somehow offensive is going to earn you nothing but eyerolls from nearly everyone. Some of these, like "grandfathering", cannot even be understood without deep diving on etymology to discover the racist origins. People are so far up their own asses on victimhood culture that the people of high education and privilege driving these initiatives are looking for literally any reason to feign offense on behalf of other peoples' identities and disabilities.
With the prioritization of equity also comes erasure of identity. For example, it seems like we can't say "mother" anymore in medical settings. For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" because of some tiny number of trans men that exist and also want to give birth. I support trans people living however they want, but my mother was a mother, goddammit, not a "birthing person", and I don't appreciate anyone implying that this word and identity are somehow offensive. At work, a "women in engineering" group got renamed to something bland like "gender minorities in tech".
The recently reported bowdlerization of Roald Dahl by 'sensitivity readers' is another symptom of this illness. The whole equity language sterilization process forgets that words which are synonyms are not interchangeable because to the writer each word is chosen with intention for the flavor it provides, its connotations and rhythm, the image it creates in the mind. People should be able to communicate using whatever words they wish. Otherwise we're just deleting colors from the artists' palette.
> For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people"
Calling my wife a "birthing person" just made her feel like some gross vessel for having a baby. We purposefully chose providers that didn't use that language.
"Chestfeeding" is another one that's cropping up and makes zero sense. Men have breasts, so breastfeeding is already gender-neutral. But it's seen as female-centric so out the door it goes.
There seems to be this weird erasure of women taking place at the moment. To the extent that it's now controversial to ask "what is a woman?"
> There seems to be this weird erasure of women taking place at the moment.
This is the crazy thing. After a century of legitimate struggle for equality, women are having the language of feminism turned on them to deny the existence of femininity. Honestly, I thought the lines would have been drawn with sport, but that fact that it's leaking into medicine is pure insanity.
I've been somewhat worried about there not being much of place in the world for my sons when they grow up. Now I'm imagining needing to explain to my daughter that there's no point having any sporting aspirations unless they are in a sport where biological women have an advantage.
Edit: on reflection, perhaps it was completely foreseeable. Modern feminism spent a lot of time dismantling masculinity; it makes some sense that femininity would be next against the wall.
I sometimes feel this is some nefarious plan to reconstruct a new masculinity. It won't be as "toxic" as the old version, but we'll be back on top.
I've heard "menstruators", "birthing persons", "chest feeding", "vulva havers". I've heard lots of debate about letting trans women compete. Debate about allowing trans women into women's toilets. Or arguing the sincerity of men who claim to identify as women as they are about to be sentenced to jail time.
But men are largely still men. I've never heard "penis havers", or "vertical urinators". Perhaps I would if I hung about in certain circles. No one is worried in the slightest about letting trans men compete in men's sport. Or letting trans men into men's toilets or spaces ...
> No one is worried in the slightest about letting trans men compete in men's sport.
By and large for most disciplines, there's no separate men's leagues or men's competitions. So women and trans-men and everyone else is mostly already allowed to compete in men's sports.
> Traditionally, chess had been a male-dominated activity, and women were often seen as weaker players, thus advancing the idea of a Women's World Champion.[16] However, from the beginning, László was against the idea that his daughters had to participate in female-only events. "Women are able to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to that of men," he wrote. "Chess is a form of intellectual activity, so this applies to chess. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect."[17] This put the Polgárs in conflict with the Hungarian Chess Federation of the day, whose policy was for women to play in women-only tournaments. Polgár's older sister, Susan, first fought the bureaucracy by playing in men's tournaments and refusing to play in women's tournaments. In 1985, when she was a 15-year-old International Master, Susan said that it was due to this conflict that she had not been awarded the Grandmaster title despite having made the norm eleven times.[18]
> Or letting trans men into men's toilets or spaces ...
That one is interesting, because women's toilets are usually all cubicles, and men's toilets is the only place where you could actually see anything.. Btw, it's not just trans-men that get a free pass here, but cis-women also often go to men's toilets when the queue for the women's toilets is too long, and nobody bats an eyelid.
There's just very few sports in which the male body is not at an intrinsic mechanical advantage.
When you come from the extreme tail of the bell curve that elite sportspeople come from, that small advantage becomes a large advantage. When you move the mean a little, the tails move a lot.
This doesn't just affect trans women but also intersex women. There's a definite tension in sport insofar as we expect elite sportspeople to be abnormal humans far from the mean. For males this is unproblematic: an abnormally strong male like Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt is still clearly a male.
But for females nature does not provide for us a clear line but rather a smooth gradient between female and male. The difference between an abnormally strong female and an abnormally weak male is not a line that nature always provides for us, it's a line that has to be drawn artificially and is therefore open to debate and challenge.
One plausible explanation I've heard for this is that while men and women have the same average mental capabilities, men have a higher standard deviation than women. There there are more outliers in both directions. Champions are found at the upper extreme.
Regarding toilets, it is because women's toilets have also traditionally served as a 'safe space' (i.e. without men). It is somewhere they can go without being subject to (for example) what is colloquially termed the 'male gaze'. Hence the disquiet over trans-women using such spaces, and the lack of disquiet over the reverse.
Of course in a fully enlightened society arguably women should not need such safe spaces, but I'm not sure we are quite there yet.
Sporting aspirations at the elite level is generally an illusion unless the parents are also at elite level. Last time I looked at studies, the average sport is around 75-99% determined by genetics when it comes to the top elite in those sports. World champions has to first win the genetic lottery, and then do the hard work to even have a chance to win. This is why its fairly common to see top elite sport players having parents, siblings or children that is also at similar elite level.
The big difference with gender is that we can easily those genetics. It is much harder to look at two women or two men and measure their blood oxygen maximums. It is generally trivial to get an idea of blood oxygen maximum if one person is a man and the other is a woman.
Feminism has always been about eradicating gender roles, and that's usually fine because the gender stereotypes that existed were almost all factually incorrect. It's definitely going in directions people never expected though.
>Some states that introduced trans sports bans couldn't even cite a single person the bill would affect. Tenesee introduced their bill to ban a single person. Who wasn't even close to the top of her discipline. It's all political posturing.
This argument works in reverse as well though. People don't want to throw out the idea of gender to appease a select few.
There is a multitude of things that are simply unfair accidents of birth and there isn't a solid line where it's obvious something should be done. With gender issues there seems to be a lot of people with no dog in the fight who have extremely strong opinions but accomodations aren't always made on stuff like this because a few people are experiencing something unfair which they have no control over. It's not "hate", as many people would say, to want to have a conversation about it.
"Throw out the idea is gender" sounds like you have a very specific view of trans people as gender abolitionists. That's misreading gender as social construction. Social construction doesn't automatically advocate for abolishment, it merely points out that these things are not universal constants. Money is such a construct too, and I don't even have to be anticapitalist to point that out.
Also, I get your argument, but the entire premise of trans women stealing college sports trophies is false. It's a bit dependent on specific discipline and how well you manage to retain muscle (it's much harder, and once you lost it, it's gone for good), but generally HRT levels the playing field enough that the olympic comittee, who I trust much more on this than the local republican, does not object to participation.
Also, I'd like to point out that the major parts in high end athlete performance are already down to "unfair accidents of birth", even if you don't introduce gender to the issue. A tall person will always have an edge playing basketball.
I find it entirely unconvincing that a trans person would solely transition to cheat at sports. The GDR tried something comparable to this hypothetical and the female athletes unknowingly exposed to androgens seemed pretty unhappy about the outcome. So I don't see why you don't see any theoretical advantage on the same spectrum of "unfair accidents of birth". These supposed advantages certainly aren't severe enough that trans women beat cis women consistently.
>"Throw out the idea is gender" sounds like you have a very specific view of trans people as gender abolitionists.
I am not describing myself. I just understand the position of people that feel that way and don't like to just dismiss them as bigots as most seem to.
These people are definitely making a slippery slope argument but they also feel like they're already halfway down the slope. They aren't out there seeing an A and concerned about B, they see it as A, B, C, D, E then F and wonder when G will come.
The trans sports thing is F. They're more worried about G, H and I.
>Also, I'd like to point out that the major parts in high end athlete performance are already down to "unfair accidents of birth", even if you don't introduce gender to the issue. A tall person will always have an edge playing basketball.
That's my point. If all I ever wanted to do was play basketball but I can't because of [accident of birth], which accidents require accomodations?
You're talking about making exclusion an intervention, not a result of circumstances. Not disallowing trans people to compete is not an accomodation, it's the opposite. These are not actions of equal value.
It would be like banning everyone over 2m from basketball so more people down the height distribution curve can compete at the higher levels. That would be, with the same logic as the exclusion of trans people, equitable. But we kind of instinctively know it's wrong.
The reason we have women's sports in the first place is essentially a different form of "you have to be below 2m" in order to promote diversity in sports, so disallowing trans people doesn't seem like a much bigger step than disallowing 50% of the population.
Personally I don't have a strong opinion on this, especially since trans women taking over women's sports is not a problem yet anyway.
> Personally I don't have a strong opinion on this, especially since trans women taking over women's sports is not a problem yet anyway.
It is a problem - see https://shewon.org for an increasingly long list of actual women who have been pushed out of winning spots in their sports by men who identify as women.
> You're talking about making exclusion an intervention, not a result of circumstances.
That's a matter of perspective, a perspective that is the core of this issue. Everything you've said after that is all true if you agree with your priors but people aren't asking you to defend that part, they're asking you to defend your priors, that gender identity is what's important in the segregation of sports and not biological sex.
An enormous part of this discussion has to do with Title IX, generally considered a positive thing among women's rights advocates. It's language deals with sex, the biological term, of male and female (as do many laws).
> No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
Behind all the people on both sides of this argument about what's a man and what's a woman there's the legal issue that it likely (I'm being generous is not saying definitely) violates Title IX to allow males into female sports (in the areas where T9 has authority).
> It would be like banning everyone over 2m from basketball...
This is another framing situation. I'd argue that the better analogy would be weight classes in wrestling. Classes work really well in individual sports to sort people into competitive groups and it works because it's an objective measure.
Unfortunately, team sports like basketball don't have enough players to form a different team for every "height class" so biological females, who tend to be shorter for the majority of the distribution curve, are basically guaranteed excluded by accident of birth. So team sports are segregated by biology because almost an entire sex, 50% of the population, is excluded by the distribution curves of their biology so we now have "sex classes" in most sports to serve the two major distribution curves of humans. Getting rid of sex segregation in basketball and doing so by height instead would make a lot of sense if height was the only factor but there's an equivalent set of distribution curves for things like strength, weight, speed, et al. that it's much simpler to take the thing that those curves have in common, sex, and segregate by them. And back to the previous paragraph, that's why wrestling is still also sex segregated.
I understand that argument and, I think, the sex segregation is a logical solution to the sexual dimorphism of humanity.
I also understand the argument that the social issue of a male/female sexes not being neatly segregated into gender identities, that people generally (also not always) want to segregate themselves, socially, with those people who share a common identity and that includes sports, especially lower levels, that are generally much more social functions than athletic. What I don't see coming from this side of the argument is a defined set of rules that can replace the language of Title IX. Which is totally understandable because gender is exponentially more complicated and diverse than sex. I'm onboard with doing something about this but I've yet to see an understandable replacement for something like Title IX that uses gender over sex.
I have a bit of curiosity about the idea of "identity" being something worthy of segregation considering that gender identity isn't the only type of identity categorization.
> That's a lot of moral panic about a very small group of people that don't generally win more often (and even your typical examples like Lia Thomas also regularly get beaten by cis women, so the advantage could not be that extradordinary) and mostly compete in college-level sports.
I'm not sure why you think permission to compete should be the default position over denial until we have more robust studies for competitive advantage. We already know testosterone and male puberty conveys inherent advantage, so the default should be to prove no advantage exists before permitting competition.
Only recently has it become clear that about 2 years of HRT eliminates competitive advantage for endurance sports, but that no amount of HRT seems to erase the competitive advantage in power sports of trans women who have gone through male puberty (MMA, power lifting, etc.).
> I'm not sure why you think permission to compete should be the default position over denial until we have more robust studies for competitive advantage. We already know testosterone and male puberty conveys inherent advantage, so the default should be to prove no advantage exists before permitting competition.
There are a lot of genetic factors that convey an inherent advantage. Do we control for all of them or is this one special? I think this video does a good job of highlighting the contradictions inherent in framing this as an issue of fairness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ9YAFYIBOU
> There are a lot of genetic factors that convey an inherent advantage. Do we control for all of them or is this one special?
Yes, testosterone is special because it's a huge advantage. Like, the next closest factor doesn't even come close across most sports. Some women who were born female have naturally high testosterone levels and are barred from competing in women's categories.
Yes, I've seen it, and it does do a good job. Notice the argument being made:
1. Sports is entertainment.
2. Sports is entertaining to the extent that the outcome is unpredictable.
3. We keep it unpredictable by establishing fairness so no one has privileged knowledge of the outcome.
The extreme examples she cites of unfairness were not entertaining exactly because the outcome was predictable. Given sports is to be entertaining due to unpredictability, preserving fairness is critical.
That's a lot of moral panic about a very small group of people that don't generally win more often
Do you have numbers on that? Specifically, that the average transwoman athlete moves neither up nor down in her rankings compared to when she was a man? My personal exposure is purely anecdotal, but I have never heard of someone performing worse against women than they did against men unless they also changed their preferred sport at the same time.
Even if you had this data point, transitioning usually comes with higher functioning. I'm not sure how you'd quantify this data.
What I will say is that I know some trans athletes who are extremely average in their fields, and the focus on a few high performers is mostly driven by those that can gain political capital from it.
I know some trans athletes who are extremely average in their fields, and the focus on a few high performers
If we can look at the data and say that transitioning and playing against women doesn't result in a relative performance increase vs the average athlete in the field, that's a strong argument that it's not unfair to let trans athletes compete against women. If we look at the data and see that "men who perform at the 60th percentile level among men perform after their transition at the 80th percentile among women" that's an indicator there remains an unfair advantage and our medical technology for transition needs to improve before trans athletes can fairly compete against women.
I disagree, because I do not consider being trans a factor that is usually malleable and the relative increase in performance would not displace anyone with a shot at winning.
You wouldn't make this point about most other unchanging factors (i.e. genetics) that affect performance either. "Fairness" in high end sports is extremely subjective, and hard work is only a small part of how successful you can be, with time (which usually equals to wealth; poor people can't afford to not work) and genetics being the most important. It's simply not a meritocracy in the first place.
There is no reason to selectively care about it being unfair. The controversy only exists in the first place because it is a great way for republicans and right wing figureheads to have queer people turned into an existential threat to rally support and perhaps distract from issues more materially relevant to voters. Voters that would never care about fairness in women's sports if it didn't involve queer people to hate. You simply have to acknowledge this. Even if you were not the intended audience and now have an interest in the theoretical question through proximity, the number of people that are actually personally impacted by this is near zero and all the attention originates in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
I refuse to acknowledge this as controvercy that requires this kind of addressing.
Voters that would never care about fairness in women's sports if it didn't involve queer people to hate.
That's certainly a large percentage of the motivation, granted. I do think a salient point is that there's nobody lobbying to make it unfair in some other way. If there were groups successfully lobbying to, say, abolish weight classes or allow the use of some expensive performance enhancement like a heads-up display, people would also oppose it.
I am still opposed to them because they're driving a moral panic that hurts trans people in other ways, because it's part of a wider drive / overton window shift to making life as a trans person impossible in these states (including declaring our existence as "sexual", banning us from most public places children could be), because there are still some trans people affected (or their ambitions are quelled) and, here's a reason you, who has given me no indication of asking in good faith, should care about: Because cis girls that anyone suspects of being trans are subjected to actual, and i can't believe i'm writing these words, genital inspections. What a stupid question to ask.
And please, stop pretending like trans women and cis men are a 1:1 comparison. We have trans athletes. Use them - in aggregate and not with an anecdote - to make your comparisons and you'll see it's pretty much a normal distribution of performance. In fact, you're making my point for me, because even the most salient of examples still get beaten by cis women. That wouldn't happen if we had this immense disparity.
It's not just muscle mass. Men have thicker bones and in general are obviously larger. Lia Thomas is 6'1".
Laurel Hubbard (MtF) was on New Zealand's Olympic weightlifting team. An Indigenous Maori girl missed out because of that.
There's countless examples of athletes who were totally uncompetitive as males, suddenly becoming elite-level after transitioning. If that doesn't say male advantage I don't know what does.
But it's not just the competitive aspect. It may be offensive to say, I know, but some women actually feel uncomfortable in a change room with large 6'1" men and their penises.
>But it's not just the competitive aspect. It may be offensive to say, I know, but some women actually feel uncomfortable in a change room with large 6'1" men and their penises.
Ah yes, the penises and their unashamed wielders, large 6'1" men, exposing their meat to the elements. It reminds me of homophobes being uncomfortable sharing the looker room with an openly gay person.
Should we also concern ourselves with the women still uncomfortable sharing a changing room with "colored" people?
If there are so many countless examples, why don't you name a single one of them. Or even better, anything that's not an anecdote.
(You named two, but you forgot to mention Lia is still very regularly beaten and Laurel placed last in her group at those Olympics, in a weight class that had most countries not even send a competitor.)
These people have higher than baseline testosterone in their system. Trans women usually have close to none. This is not comparing the same, or even similar situations.
>The single biggest genetic difference among humans is the presence of a Y chromosome.
That is actually incorrect. You can be born with a Y chromosome and zero functional testosterone[1]. There are a lot of moving parts in between having a Y chromosome and getting testosterone expression. The later of which is a much better discriminator.
And also, these deviations aren't rare. Though they are usually unknown, when they don't cause obvious developmental deviation (and thus labeled DSDs). They also are more common in some populations.
Indeed this seems like a refutation of the whole thesis that trans athletes are somehow cheating. Intersex conditions are natural (as in no surgery of hormone treatments are involved), yet they confer a competitive advantage - just like genes for bigger lungs or longer limbs confer an advantage to some athletes - so why should a trans person be treated as uniquely advantaged?
The claim isn't that trans athletes are cheating. The claim is they should not be allowed to participate in women's sports.
The intersex athletes support this claim because, although their condition is "natural" in your sense, they are in fact being banned from participation in women's sports. For example, the various individuals mentioned above are restricted from participating in distances from 400m to a mile, including in particular 800m! (Thus they have switched to other distances, but the bans are likely to extend there too.)
You do realize that the terminology is meant for transmen right? It's weird you're complaining about terminology used for transmen, and then linking it to transwomen in sports.
It's ironic because the entire concept of online language policing was invented by arch rivals the radical feminists in the 2010s (anyone remember donglegate?), but the pendulum has swung so far back in the other direction that now the very concept of women is being erased. Geez!
Of course offline language policing is as old as time, but until the late 20th century it was the domain of religions or regimes - those with actual power.
It was only in the ~90s that people realised that you don't need a power structure backing your language policing, you can just apply it anyway, taking advantage of existing status-structured organisations such as universities. In any sizeable population there's enough authoritarians who will gleefully police your linguistic regulations, simply to have power over others.
However, without a serious religious movement backing any of this, the elites will eventually tire of the current linguistic fashion and move onto another cause celebre.
> Gender suffixes have always had a gender connotation, because it is plainly what they mean.
no, it isn't what they mean. you might say it's "equally" sexist, but "man" meant "mankind", it meant "person", and woman comes from "wifeman", person who is a wife. So mailman is "person who delivers mail". A good way to think of it is that language is actually neutral. Cultures have ideas and values, and those ideas and values suffuse communication, but the language is just a transport mechanism and will be bent and altered to communicate what people are thinking. But the language, always neutral.
it's similar to the names of native american tribes. There are so many examples of "the Sioux didn't call themselves the Sioux, they called themselves Lakota, their enemies called them the Sioux." What did Lakota mean in Lakotan? It means "the people". Everybody else? they weren't even people. Every native american tribe did that, and probably our own hunter gatherer ancestors did that too.
None of this is cause for concern, it's actually really interesting.
I think that one of my favorite jokes, "linguists like ambiguity more than most people." applies to your use of "language" here. The ambiguity is that some people say "language" to refer to the intended meaning of groups of words rather than the composition of words each with individual meanings. One can be neutral and the other can be highly biased. Furthermore, overall meaning is more than what is denoted, it is derived from culture and experience far more than it is from distant roots. eg: ask most people where "deadlines" come from and they will probably say "their boss."
Yeah, it's like a competition between the worst of two groups of people as to who can change them more and skew the language, or lack of it, in their ideological direction.
I would be pissed if anyone referred to my wife as some kind of breeding vessel. These DEI bureaucrats have lost their minds, and companies have lost their minds for allowing this layer to grow so large.
This is the idea behind TERFs, right? How can women have equal rights if “women” don’t even exist? I’m honestly surprised more feminists don’t have strong anti-transgender sentiment.
It can’t be that complex if virtually every human society came up with two distinct words to express the concepts.
It’s only complicated if you start from the premise that language must accord the same importance to the experience of small minorities as to the experience of the overwhelming majority.
The person I was replying to said "every human society came up with two distinct words to express the concepts". I of expressed doubt about such a statement.
Then you popped into with a completely different reason. I'm still working on the original argument. We came up with more than two words to express the concept.
The claim you made: "there is no simple definition if you want to define man and woman."
Rayiner's response: "It can’t be that complex if virtually every human society came up with two distinct words to express the concepts."
"Two distinct words" plainly refers to the two sexes. Virtually every human society ("most of us") hit upon classifying humans into these two categories, with very rare exceptions that I'm sure you're itching to point out right now. You have tried to perform a sleigh-of-hand "gotcha" by pointing out that there are many words for women and many words for men, but you're barking up the wrong tree if you think you can gaslight a dog like me into believing that is a rebuttal of Rayiner's point.
Woman isn't a sex, it's a gender. Female and Male are sexes. OH MY. We have Male, Female, Man, and Woman? I though virtually every human society came up with two distinct words to express the concepts, not 4.
Isn't that mostly a result of how much you want to focus on the outliers? XX male syndrome is estimated to exists in 1:20000 - 1:30000 people. It's so rare that we have a name for it. Somewhat like rebutting to what a car is by arguing that a handful of cars through history actually had two wheels. And yes, I'm aware that XX syndrome isn't the only outlier but the point still stands.
If there are outliers you don't get to change the definition of the established binary and force the outliers into them. The outliers are just that, outliers, a 3rd, 4th, etc option.
If you argument is that there are more than 2 genders, that's fine, Man, Woman and whatever else.
They are outliers that have their own names.
Certain things are constant though
Man: Adult Human with XY sex Chromosomes
Woman: Adult Human with XX sex Chromosomes
Everything else and I mean no disrespect with this term, are mutations that fall outside of the norm.
Surgery and hormones though do not change your sex chromosomes. You are still sex you were born as. You can be a trans woman, but sex wise you are still a man and vice versa for trans men.
I wish trans people all the happiness in the world but if you paint stripes on a horse its still a horse, not a zebra.
Eventually you'll realise that all labels have exceptions. Unless you come to terms with that, every definition will just be diluted to the extend that it loses all meaning.
OK so the definition is that a human has 2 arms. What happens when they don't have two arms? Are they a new thing? Or are they still a human that we should treat with the same respect we grant to everyone?
They are still human, just missing (or have extra) arms. We should treat them with the same respect and dignity as anyone else that have 2 arms. What we don't say is we don't know how many arms humans have just because some people have more or less than 2.
The distinction between sex and gender wasn’t really made until the 1940s and 1950s in parts of academia. The idea of them as separate ideas is sort of a modern invention.
Maybe in a general sense, but not in the way we use the word “gender” today. This distinction was made by academics studying this in the 1940s and 1950s, really becoming widespread in academia in the 1960s.
These words are fractals, simultaneously simple and complex. It’s alarming that we’re unable, as a matter of discourse, to accept this useful ambiguity anymore.
At its simplest, a woman is a person who identifies as such. At among its most complex, it’s an empowered expression of femininity. That there isn’t a single definition doesn’t make the word bad, it makes it human.
This is circular an so, not a deninition. Not a problem as long as this is part of an internal personal model. It is a problem when reasoning about social structures.
It’s Cartesian, not circular. There’s a difference. We don’t need it rigorously defined for it to have meaning—that’s the point. (This does make it a word incompatible with precise endeavours like lawmaking.)
You did not define, rigorously or otherwise. As to needs, when we turn to conversations on how to structure a society, subjective meaning is not sufficent - definitions are required.
> subjective meaning is not sufficent - definitions are required
This is the flaw. It isn’t. It is required if we will write rules with respect to it. But there is another way. Forcing everything into an objective definition is the source of our divides, not a solution to anything.
Statesmen, from Cicero to Hamilton to Obama, understood this. But there is an emerging tendency to treat every system as technical, and that is destructive.
Just came back from my son's Judo competition. The children are paired by age and weight - girls separately from the boys. What is your take on this arrangement?
> girls separately from the boys. What is your take on this arrangement?
That it’s irrelevant to the definition of a woman. That’s the strength of fuzzy definitions.
When separating the kids, did anyone formally define what a girl or a boy is? Did every parent in that room need to resolve every edge case to their implied definitions ex ante? Could you guarantee conflict by forcing a formal definition on that group, even if it results in the same practical outcome the implied, unsaid definition yielded and which was peacefully accepted by the group? No, no and, of course, yes.
Please stop calling "a woman is a person who identifies as such" a fuzzy definition. It is to definition what "alternative fact" is to a fact.
Now, you are right that for the purposes of this event no one defined what a girl or a boy is. The reason it is so (as is the case with many other social conventions) is because neither the participants nor the organizers challenge the classification.
There is no doubt that had it been challenged strongly and frequently enough, the implicit definitions would become explicit and formal.
> stop calling "a woman is a person who identifies as such" a fuzzy definition
I didn’t. I called it a simple definition. It’s not generally correct because it’s too precise.
> had it been challenged strongly and frequently enough, the implicit definitions would become explicit and formal
For people without any civics background, yes. That we lack leaders who push back against overspecification, or people raising needless challenges out of, I don’t know, maladjustment, is a cultural failure, collectively, and an individual failing among those who don’t understand nuance.
But I'm OK with this. One of the original people demanding "define a woman" was a law maker. If we're making laws that use the word woman we need to have a stringent definition.
> One of the original people demanding “define a woman” was a law maker. If we’re making laws that use the word woman we need to have a stringent definition.
We don’t (and, contrary to a sibling comment, this is not particular to common law, it applies in civil law jurisdictions as well, though it may be more true in the common law). If every word in law needed a “stringent definition”, the law would be so full of definitions you’d never be able to find the rules that actually apply them to the real world. Laws sometimes need stringent definitions, and they sometimes need disambiguation between plausible alternatives that don’t actually require a stringent definition, and sometimes they get by just fine with no definition at all.
> we're making laws that use the word woman we need to have a stringent definition
Not ex ante. That’s the strength of common law. If you have a problem with this, consider why we need laws which define womanhood. (Yes, I am an ERA proponent.)
> The fact that 1 in a million people is neither a man or a women
the number you are looking for here (ie only ..
conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female
) is 180 in a million, or some 4,625 or so in a country such as Australia - which does have some real bearing on things such as national passports and why Australia has a three value gender field there ( M | F | X ).
Less strictly, the prevalence of "nondimorphic sexual development" might be as high as 1.7% or 17,000 in a million.
Like a “race”, a “gender” is a social grouping of either identity or ascribed membership that is distinguished by being viewed as being exclusive with (though, in some models, admitting mixtures as their own unique possibilities), others in the same named group.
> By that definition, isn’t “emo” — or literally any other social category — a gender
No, “emo” is a social category that is not exclusive with genders, its in a different bucket.
But, yes, the distinction of social categories into groups like “gender”, “race”, etc., is, like the categories themselves, fundamentally an arbitrary social construct.
> Do you believe that segregated services — sports, bathrooms, locker rooms, etc — were intended to be segregated by gender, as opposed to sex?
Binary “sex” is just ascribed gender on the basis of a subset of sex traits. To the extent there is a valid basis for segregating services, it varies from service to service. Similarly, the motivations vary from service to service (and, generally differ from the legitimate justifications, if any.)
The previous definition was Adult Human Female, dropping the adult is weird because you wouldn't consider an 11 year old experiencing their menarche to be a woman right? I think the tropey phrase would be "becoming a woman".
But okay you would like to define a woman as a human female, "an organism that in sexual maturity produces ova (large gametes (reproductive cells))", if a prepubescent takes hormone blockers for their entire life does that interrupt your definition of woman? What about if an XY Swyer Syndrone individual has a functional uterus and ovaries? What if a female with hypogonadism takes hormone therapy to prevent infertility?
Well, the word "woman" can mean both "human adult female" and "human female", but I think anyone accepting one of these definitions would accept both, so that's not controversial IMO.
Probably we should look at potential over one's life, likely at (or even before) birth, otherwise the same could be argued for "what if a child dies before they're fertile"?
An adult human is a fully mature member of the species Homo sapien.
An adult human female is a fully mature member of the species Homo sapien who belongs to the reproductive class that produces large, immobile gametes. The reproductive system of an individual may be actual, potential, historic or broken.
I'll play ball here. What do you classify intersex people as? Especially those born with either completely mixed gonadal representation or genitalia? Are they neither male nor female? These things are bimodal in distribution, but they are not perfectly binary.
People keep trotting out this etymology, but it's always been entirely speculative and there's no attested premodern usage of anything resembling the phrase with that meaning. What there is attested usage of is a Cicero argument of the form "if there's an exception that makes it illegal, then the general rule must be that it's legal outside of the exception".
Its been a while but I seem to remember that its adoption as a maxim outside of law is itself fairly modern, and coincides with that usage, but, in any case, even if that were not the traditional meaning outside of law, the maxim is (outside of its use as a maxim of legal analysis) simply false and illogical in any other sense. Exceptions disprove rules, they don’t prove them.
The legal maxim only makes sense in its domain because it rests on the idea that law is written by people, and that calling out a specific case for one treatment reveals a pre-existing understanding that outside of that case, that treatment would not apply.
But what do you classify an intersex person as when you see them, assuming you don't know this detail? Our social lens is focused to a binary, even if there isn't a definitive binary.
This is rapidly getting into "justified true belief" territory.
Let's say you have concrete definitions of man and woman (and as many additional categories as you please). You see a person and believe they fall into one category. As it turns out, you are wrong, and they are actually in another category.
That you miscategorized someone has no bearing on the validity (or lack thereof) of your definitions.
There are only two types of gametes, and two reproductive classes capable of producing them. Everyone — even rare intersex individuals — can only belong to one reproduction class or the other. There is no documented case of a true hermaphrodite capable of reproducing as both male and female.
> Everyone — even rare intersex individuals — can only belong to one reproduction class or the other.
In principle, this is not necessarily true in Ovotesticular DSD (formerly “True Hermaphroditism”), which is generally a symptom of tetragametic chimerism, though for both health and gender reasons it is apparently not uncommon for people who naturally have both functional ovarian and testicular tissue to have hormone therapy and/or surgery to align more with the sex traits stereotypical of a single preferred gender.
That taxonomy was developed approximately 140 years ago, before the development of modern genetics and endocrinology, is based on the existence of mere gonad tissue, is scientifically specious, and has fallen out of favor.
So-called “true hermaphrodites” do not have functional male and female reproductive systems.
The utterly hilarious defense by the left for a movement that - above all others - is deeply patriarchal in its attempt to overwhelm and wipe out the very concept of "woman".
I was kind of with you, birthing person does sound pretty obstruse. But then you threw in the (self-described!) theocratic fascist dogwhistle.
There are some uses radfems get super upset about that I find useful, though. Like "people with cervixes" if you are asking for cervical cancer screenings. Because increasingly, that affects people who do not feel spoken to if you use the word woman and this adds clarity to who the audience is.
It absolutely does not add clarity. Enough people do not even know what a cervix is, or whether they have one, that it's an obfuscation. One which harms women disproportionately, like most other things radfems get upset about.
Go measure the prevalence of "people with prostates" and compare. The word "man" is, strangely, not subject to this erasure.
But... that's absolutely a thing? Is this the same selective perception that brings radfems to proclaim that trans lesbians don't date each other?
(That being said, the likelyhood of getting prostate cancer on HRT is pretty low. Not quite the level of cis men getting breast cancer, but it's down there. It's a very androgen dependent cancer.)
> But then you threw in the (self-described!) theocratic fascist dogwhistle.
Huh? What fascist dog whistle? Sounds like the person was just describing their opinion and experience. The whole idea of dogwhistling sounds like a weird conspiracy theory. I’m sure it’s happened more than 0 times, but thinking dogwhistling is everywhere sounds just as unhinged to me as any of the wacky right wing conspiracies.
It's amazing that some are seemingly convinced a conservative man came up with a problem that feminists (so-called "radfems") have highlighted for years. Goes to show how little attention many pay to women's issues.
And since nobody has asked that question before that well known rhetorical work we know everyone who mentions the same question is just dog whistling a reference to it.
to Matt Walsh is pretty clear. The entire documentenary is based on the premise that it's now controversial to ask this, because the answer must inevitably be "adult human female". It's treated as if these are magic words that dispel gender ideology instantly. Meanwhile in reality, nobody finds this question controversial, only that Matt Walsh puports to know the one and only, extremely obvious answer. That many people disagree with.
What do you mean that nobody finds the question controversial? I remember it being a huge controversy when the US congress asked it during Kentanji Brown Jackson's interview.
You got the order of events wrong. That was after it became a dogwhistle for bioessentialism. As a consequence of Matt Walsh.
I guess if you want to be exact, I will correct to "nobody found this question controversial before it became a dogwhistle". But the question itself is still not controversial, it's all context.
If you explain to me the purpose of the question - that not being invoking the dogwhistle - I'll let you know. Otherwise I'm not interested in playing this game with a bad faith actor.
The purpose is that in the law we have clearly determined concepts such as Women's Rights. Thus, the justice system needs to be able to determine who is or not a woman in order to do its job properly. For instance, in the UK wolf-whistling can be considered a hate-crime if and only if the receiver is a woman.
Why not just make wolf-whistling a hate crime regardless of the receiver's identity? From the responses I've gotten around here a woman is an adult. Now we're legally OK with young girls being wolf-whistled at?
Aside that we are in agreement that laws should not be gendered if we want equality (not examining whether wolf-whistling should be a hate-crime - imho it’s ridiculous it is in any context) since we live in reality and there ARE gendered laws I’ll reply to the second part of your comment.
It does exactly make the point, you are somehow trying to define what a woman is, and asking if the definition only encompasses adult human females or underage as well.
"What is a woman" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask a legislator who refuses to acknowledge that women exist. I certainly would never vote for someone who believes that women are defined as "whatever I feel right now." I'm disappointed you think it's the people demanding acknowledgement which should be labelled "theocratic fascists" rather than the misogynists refusing to acknowledge women exist.
I didn't label anyone a theocratic fascist. That's just Matt Walsh's twitter bio. Though radfems seem not too uncomfortable with Walsh, considering JKR praised the man for his "documentary" and received little backlash from her loyal following.
If it only takes a simple sentence to set you off. You should be careful how much you’re reading into peoples language. The worlds not filled with facists in disguise. Look at people that way and you’ll see it everywhere. It will drive you mad.
It seems to me that one of the issues is that the (more extreme) woke culture has put the entire burden of communication on the speakers rather than the listeners. Is not enough that you intend to offend, or that you say something that offends someone, is whether something that you say could possibly offend someone, even if you didn't have the slightest intentions. On the other say the listeners are free to interpret the message in the most uncharitable way possible, and blame you for it.
I describe these scenarios to my young children as concentric circles. One person can be acting reasonably (small circle around them) or very badly (larger circle). A person nearby can be very resilient (small circle) or fragile (larger circle). Where the circles overlap, is when there is tension and there are fights, tears or anything else that requires me to intervene.
Obviously very bad behaviour (large circle) is going to overlap with a nearby resilient child. Or a very tired and fractious child is going to sulk by their sibling doing just about anything. But the more resilient and better behaved the combinations, the better.
If the children are fighting, I've taken to just calling out "Circles!"
Unfortunately, a polarised society and social media seem to make everyone treat interaction as war, which is pretty tedious.
But interpreting someone's words in the most uncharitable way possible is an ancient sport, intended to slight and annoy the opponent, when finding reasonable, material objections fails. It's just an ancient hold of wresting in the (verbal) mud. It sort of gives the party who successfully pulled it an upper hand.
Now that these wrestlers found out that they can persuade the public that the most uncharitable interpretation is actually harmful to some third party (nobody from the audience usually says that they personally are offended), this approach became immensely popular.
Since simple reason would usually dispel much of the effect, leaving only the small and easily correctable issue, it is common to excite a large amount of reason-eclipsing emotions over such issues, preferably the righteous rage.
But it may feel fun to express a strong and righteous emotion, especially in a crowd of other people doing the same. It does not take thinking, it does not take making a difficult decision (because everybody around can't be wrong), so it feels good. A big echo chamber like a popular Twitter thread make it feel epic in scale.
This makes that kind of righteous rage a very convenient tool of manipulation, for fun, profit, and any other purposes.
And to be clear, these uncharitable interpretations go far beyond word policing.
The one that actually annoys me the most is “analogy policing”. If I say “would you be ok if i stole your bike”. And then your response is “now you’re equating me to a bike thief!” Or “ you’re trivializing This to bike theft?!”
We can’t have discussions because every phrase is taken as a way to win an argument. IMO this is far worse than language policing as there is not even the intention of trying to protect a disadvantaged group.
I personally believe that 2 things have greatly affected P2P communications. Anonymity and attempting to hold meaningful conversation strictly through text. When we communicate with text we cut off non-verbal communications that are a major source of interpreting the intent of the speaker and the receptiveness of the listener. In-person conversations are constantly adjusting what and how things are said depending on non-verbal cues. This becomes impossible in text only communications so the words have to convey everything and word choice the dominant replacement for non-verbal cues. The fact that we are communicating primarily via text these days has spilled over into in person communication. IMHO
Eh, that’s just internet discourse in general. Once you put down Twitter this stops being an issue. I would love for someone to deconstruct what about social media, regardless of leaning of the platform, the people, or the subject being discussed causes these bad faith takes.
The issue is when you didn't say it on twitter, or even intend it for public consumption and it's posted as receipts on twitter as examples of your badness - often out of context. Then there are some knock on second and third order effects on your life.
It's one thing if communities on twitter would like to define their own use of the language - it's another when it's imposed on others without their consent.
This is an academic issue, ”a solution in search of a problem” as almost all the rest of academia is. As such, it never stops at a reasonable, meaningful equilibrium; it has to be kept pacing, moving forward towards more and more ridiculous extremes.
An academic, in order to stay relevant, needs to keep pushing the invisible and mostly inexistent boundaries that they perceive in whatever field they are involved in. If they’re faced with a set vocabulary today, then tomorrow they’ll have to come up with an ”aha! Found a new offensive word” to position themselves as a relevant, meaningful part of this strange, ethereal movement. It’ll never end, because the movement itself needs its members to keep also pacing forward and motivated in order for itself to remain existing.
The exact same could be said of any academic movement; the difference is that, in most cases, it mostly does not spill into reality. Other than a bit of research funding money, meaningless academic ideas don’t hurt society much. In this case, however, the academic movement is dead set on spilling all over everything, using the most aggressive possible strategies of shaming and reputation murder in order to push down its opposition.
This phenomenon is known as a purity spiral, and here's a great story about one tearing an online knitting community to shreds.
In game theory terms, objecting to something was now always a dominant strategy, and rejecting an allegation of racism was always a losing strategy. Inevitably, a ratchet effect took hold in which those with the most strident vision of what ‘diversity’ meant were effectively handed the keys to the castle. That is — until someone with a more strident vision turned up behind them…
I’m going to start using this terminology. It’s good to have simple phrases for this. It’s so much easier to say “I’m not going to engage in perpetuating a purity spiral” or “your not helping anyone by continuing the purity spiral long past the point of helping anyone who was genuinely affected by this”
It’s short and pithy, and it can sort of cover the core concept without needing deep academic understanding of the social dynamics involved.
I came to realize that this is the case with advocacy groups. These groups will never want to say, "Hey, things aren't that bad anymore. We're working on some small problems, but honestly, we solved most of the stuff we were concerned about." Everything always needs to be in perpetual crisis. Wikipedia always needs to be in danger of shutting down. Political enemies are always supposed to be one step away from destroying the country forever. That's what drives the donations and prestige that keeps these groups going.
As groups become more successful, they're more likely to shift from reasonable goals to extreme goals.
Organizations tend to be self-perpetuating. People whose power is derived from the organization and people who make money from the organization will want to keep the racket going.
Yeah. Over time this has killed my interest in charitable organizations, sad to say. I just don't trust them anymore because I think if I donate to an apparently well defined cause it'll actually just be embezzled and put to use hiring hard left activists who spend all their time harassing normal people in pursuit of their deranged ideology. The prevalence of dumb language purity guides amongst these organizations just reinforces that feeling. Nowadays I'm much now likely to donate to crowdfunders for the victims legal fees.
The fact that you can only name a handful of people who survived full frontal attacks (for now) indicates that this is more than merely annoying. The ranks of the cancelled far outnumber them and we should recognize the disturbing historical parallels too. This type of language editing was a key plot point in 1984 because it is the habit of extremely dangerous far left regimes. I feel like the west is in danger of experiencing a communist revolution at some point.
Now a lot of readers will feel like that's absurd, extreme, maybe even trolling. But it was only a handful of years ago that I was posting here warning people that they should refuse to rename git master branches to main because accepting this for short term convenience or out of ideological sympathy would lead to an endless spiral of power games, used to purge anyone not on the far left. And here we are, not so long after, with lists of banned words so long nobody even bothers enumerating them all, any one of which can be used to build a case for getting rid of you.
There's a clear pattern here in which people are repeatedly not taking wokeness seriously enough. This isn't a game and they spend every waking hour taking over every institution. A communist revolution doesn't require capturing the seat of government permanently, if you can capture every institution that surrounds it and essentially eliminate all ability for a non revolutionary government to operate.
The fix is simple enough though: do a DHH and get rid of all woke people in your organisation. It's quite easy as given a hostile environment they tend to leave en masse and they weren't doing much work for the organisation anyway. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
There’s a cute story I read the other day about an “Offensiveness consultant” who teaches companies how to be just offensive enough on Twitter to make sure woke people don’t want to work at your company. The story is written for comedy - but the more I think about it, the more I wonder might be something people actively do, for all the reasons you’re talking about.
You don't even have to be offensive. Just give an all hands where the leadership publicly commits to merit-based promotion/hiring, tell people the org is now "mission focussed", stick a few rugs around the place that say "Meritocracy" on them and then get rid of anyone who complains. No offense will be taken by anyone who you don't want to be offended.
Beliefs, yes. But which part of the Inquisition was specifically about banning long lists of specific words, replacing them with semantically identical equivalents? Perhaps they did it, my history isn't that good, but the wiki page doesn't seem to discuss it much if so.
> Or JK Rowling, who has been cancelled over and over again, but the latest video game based on her IP is incredibly popular.
I think to some extent this is largely because Rowling was kept at arm's length. If Rowling was the mouthpiece for the game's story, showing up in interviews, etc., then I think more of the backlash against Rowling's personal actions would be impacting the game.
See also how Disney happily sells Pirates of the Carribean while maintaining they will never work with Johnny Depp again.
I certainly agree with you, and I do believe this is a very active fight where both sides are going strong. I'm not sure yet that they are losing, but it does feel like it's a worth fight. Of course, whoever is fighting against must also be sharply aware of not letting the fight itself get completely derailed by the opportunist bigots on the other side.
It's not just academia, it's the modern "meritocracy" more broadly. When getting into a campus club at a top college requires four rounds of interviews, you look for easy ways to signal your eliteness and being hip to the new verbal trends is a great way for the well-heeled to extend their advantage over the less-enlightened.
This also applies to jobs whose occupants need to justify their own existence, which they can do so be seeking to remake language in an organization and launch a few fun purges to boot. These new terms are basically a new form of arcane knowledge that allows those who chant these magical new incantations social and professional prestige in the modern meritocracy rat race.
All social structures survive through their self-perpetuation...it's a general critique with a lot of explanatory power that I've had on my mind.
Any kind of senseless decorum or self-defeating policy comes down to the intersection of self-perpetuating framings of reality with actors who either promote it out of self-interest, or take it upon themselves to become footsoldiers on faithful behalf of that idea, extending it to unreasonable, totalizing lengths in the process of protecting it like a child.
And that can manifest as "my way is right behavior and that is wrong behavior", or "we are good because they are bad", or any number of other illogical defenses. It's just automatic once you decide some thought has to be defended, and when it forms a really persistent, robust structure you end up with a religion, national mythos, economic norm etc. The structure is looking out for itself first, and the current elites hold the most gravity in deciding whether to further perpetuate or not. But elites aren't immune to being true believers either - they have to be able to let go and examine what they want to accomplish, and if the belief they have is too firmly tied to their immediate self-interest, they can't do it.
My reading here is derived somewhat from Heather Marsh's writings, but with different focus and phrasing.
> This is an academic issue, ”a solution in search of a problem” as almost all the rest of academia is. As such, it never stops at a reasonable, meaningful equilibrium; it has to be kept pacing, moving forward towards more and more ridiculous extremes.
Not at all. Academia is about the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment. What you are describing is happening in academia, but that is not its purpose or its main role. Academia is as much about the mating habits of the spotted fizzbuzz up in the Andes or the design of advanced composite materials or developing vaccines for malaria than the understanding of how humans behave in society.
The ridiculous extremes are not confined to academia, this is just an anti-intellectual talking point. Nobody is running around panicking that the purpose of elections is to produce fascists.
> An academic, in order to stay relevant, needs to keep pushing the invisible and mostly inexistent boundaries that they perceive in whatever field they are involved in. If they’re faced with a set vocabulary today, then tomorrow they’ll have to come up with an ”aha! Found a new offensive word” to position themselves as a relevant, meaningful part of this strange, ethereal movement.
Again this weird focus on academia. Journalists, politicians, and random blokes on the internet do it. Most of academics don’t. The problem is humans in general, your scapegoat is meaningless. By ascribing your issues to an immaterial Other entity out to get you, you absolve the rest of society, which is really where the problem lies.
I will concede to you that I was too general in my comment. As an academic myself (with nearly a decade on the senior circles of higher education in a highly developed country), I absolutely agree with you that the main goal of academic work is the pursuit of knowledge. To be honest, I wanted to use the term "academic issue" more as a way to express that the issue is disconnected from the more practical issues of the real world, rather than to mean only the formal, academic world. I was inaccurate in that. You can pursue academic interests and discuss academic issues outside of the university; I think of it as an interchangeable term with "philosophical", for example.
I also agree with you that these issues happen outside of academia. It just so happens that I perceive this specific problem as being academic. The fact that I argue that this is an academic problem does not imply that this only happens in academia (one example does not necessarily generalize to the whole).
And yes, obviously, running towards extremes is not confined to academia; however, my point was that it is more-or-less ok to do it in academic work as long as you do not try to force your extreme views back down to the rest of society (which most academics don't, or if they do, fail). Actually, I'd argue that there is no better way to do it. Research often means pushing things to extreme, and most of its results die gracefully and are replaced with something else that is more reasonable for the current times (or simply gets forgotten). Don't take this wrong, as if I believe that research is useless. In the same way that a startup dies (and must die) if it cannot offer a feasible, interesting, useful product, research also dies (and must die) if its results make sense but are not applicable. No problem there.
The problem begins when the academic issues (whether they are discussed in the university or not) which are being pushed to the extreme in order to test the waters are then being pushed down society's throat aggressively like this, without regards to whoever they trample over on the way. These academic issues are being forcefully, steadily introduced into public and private institutions that have a very real, concrete power over how many people act, behave, work, and communicate. These are (in one way or another) governing agencies that, while they are not the police so to speak, still have under their belt lots of different means and tools to enforce certain things over large groups of people. This is extremely irresponsible of those who think of themselves as drivers in this movement.
> As such, it never stops at a reasonable, meaningful equilibrium; it has to be kept pacing, moving for
In fact, proponents can’t even define this equilibrium, despite stating that it is the end goal. This proves that the goal is a lie.
It’s pure power seeking, and that shouldn’t be a surprise, because that is precisely what they assert determines truth and shapew society. Not some natural order, but people who held power over others. They complain about it but if you watch, it’s exactly what they’re doing themselves. Pure projection.
I think the “people-first language” is actually kind of dumb in a lot of cases. Because the idea behind it is not really sound.
Shall I now say I have to call a “person who performs plumbing work” to fix my drain because calling them a plumber indicates that they have no worth outside their job? No, that’s not how language has ever worked.
Basically for “people-first language” to exist, you have to create a problem that didn’t exist before to come up with it as a solution.
I'm trans myself and this language policing game is insane. The most surreal part about it is it's rarely anyone allegedly impacted by it who is actually asking for these things.
How do you deal with it? The trans people I know tend to grit their teeth at risk of making an already awkward social interaction worse. But that surely must result in a lot of bottled up resentment.
Yep, same with disabilities, or children playing/costuming as cowboy and indian, or cultural appropriation where certain people are now not allowed wear a rasta haircut, or, or, or... Most ""affected"" people actually don't give a shit AND don't want this shit. But sjws can scapegoat any doubt to this holy mission and make one look like a Nazi.
Usually never is also the intention or context taken into account.. You will always find someone who will say he feels insulted for anything, but we won't find a common denominator if we need to account for every salty person on earth. True respect, equality and no discrimination for everybody is what should count... but it feels today more and more that this is actually alienating, and also excluding people more than what it helps, the contrary! How to stop? Intention is good, but taken to the extreme, this is todays discrimination and exclusion..
Realistically I think what has happened is the puritanical culture has donned new clothes. Blind subservience and self-flagellations to ever increasing standards of a sacrificial victim sky man who never asked for these things in the words they twisted, replaced with blind subservience to sacrificial victims in the present who one again, never asked for these things in the words they twisted.
It makes me feel like a pawn in their own self-actualization, not someone they remotely ever gave a thought or care about.
I agree - it's basically a new strain of puritan thinking. The problem is that unlike established religions - where you can step away and say "I don't recognise your moralising" with pretty much no repercussions, the line between "progressive left" ideology and wider society is much less clear - and so fighting this type of thinking can have real repercussions for your career or social life. It's not really worth rocking the boat.
> People-first language ("enslaved people" not "slaves") makes complete sense to me
Why is that? I’m genuinely curious. Who should be offended by the word slave? Is it I, the Slav? The etymology of the word concerns my heritage, and yet I’m not offended. It’s not as though people toying with language today is going to bring back my relatives who died as slaves, nor will it undo the suffering they endured.
I agree, and personally found it upsetting once when someone who was from a relatively well off family tried shaming me for using the term slave in my code. I'm of Ukrainian descent, and my grandfather was separated from his family at the age of 12 and sent to a forced labor camp, never to see them again. No human should ever have to experience that, and we must remember that even now there are still humans being treated like literal tools, as our computers are also nothing but tools. If seeing the word slave makes you uncomfortable, then good, it should make you uncomfortable that there are humans who have been treated no better than your computer, potentially even in the supply chain of making it.
I doubt slaves care so much about being called slaves or enslaved people, but having their freedom and autonomy stripped from them and treated horribly with no avenue for recompense.
Slavery doesn’t imply any particular race. Some people hold the belief that it does, or that one needs to be of a particular race to take a position on or claim victimhood of slavery, but this, quite frankly, is racist.
>For example, it seems like we can't say "mother" anymore in medical settings. For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" because of some tiny number of trans men that exist and also want to give birth.
The troll argument here is: now that we're saying "birthing people" instead of "women", it's time to acknowledge that abortion is not actually a "women's issue".
> now that we're saying "birthing people" instead of "women", it's time to acknowledge that abortion is not actually a "women's issue".
Which is partly right, to be fair. It’s a fundamental human right issue about who can force things on your body. The consequences also affect whole families, not all men are arseholes who vanish when their girlfriend gets pregnant. Framing this as only women’s issue is part of a dangerous tribal war.
It is also part of a pattern of subjugation of a social group on religious grounds, and as such part of a broader attack on secular, liberal societies.
1. the embryo/fetus inside the mother's body is not the mother's body.
2. it is not the mother's body, but it's completely dependent on it to live.
3. parents have and have to have natural responsibility over their offspring.
4. the society establishment (both secular and religious) are there to protect society's norm.
5. not killing innocent humans is a social norm.
6. the embryo/fetus is a human.
7. saying that someones on "religious grounds" want to subjugate "secular, liberal societies" by opposing to killing innocent humans is no more that projecting USA's domestic radicated bipolar politics to the global level.
8. "religious grounds" are nothing mystical, nothing like "things which only unreasonalbe superstitious are afraid of", but a core attribute of the human nature: just »don't kill humans who are annoying to you even if they don't have social security ID yet, even if they don't pay taxes yet, even if they are your own children«
9. "abortion rights" group also stands on religious grounds, except it worships Moloch.
10. "abortion rights" people often comes from the pre-assumption that they are entitled to enjoy sex without consequences and without any responsibility. gain without pain.
11. "abortion rights" is an other level of productionalization of people. our life is already mostly a product of soulless companies. now they are turning babies into commodity which you can return if you changed your mind or not satisfied with it. wondering how much does it differ from the menacing "slavery".
I'd say 9 is more fun to pick apart. Looks like there's only two kinds of religions in the world, those that worship the Right Deity and those that worship Moloch.
needless to go on theology grounds to argue against unborn killing. you don't need to accept any particular theology to come to the conclusion.
btw it is sorted in a list not because of any argumentation structure.
i don't think (and don't see what indicated it to you) that there are only these 2 options in terms of worship targets. but phrasing the other option the "only" "right" one, paints me an intolerant blind-faithed, which i reject.
yea, i thought that referring to a supernatural being by a name which is also found in books associated with religion may indeed turn the reader dismissive. however i hoped a slight chance to draw maybe a few reader's attention to the point that fetus-killing arguments often are as religion-based as the oppotent is represented to be. the difference which hides this similarity is that religions which are not public, visible, inquireable, are not called "religion".
This angle works in the other direction as well: Is a newborn a human? If yes, is a baby in the process of being born a human? If yes, is a baby who will be born in a week a human?
My understanding is that opinion polls show most people have a moderate opinion on abortion, which seems pretty reasonable given that "becoming human" is something that happens in a continuous manner over a 9-month period.
most of the times they don't argue about killing single cells, but an undisputedly multicellular fetus with human DNA.
the conceived egg cell is already a new member of the given species. why? has it to be of a species? if yes, which one other than human? if no, when this "growing clump of cells" become an organization separate from its host? i don't know other event of a pregnancy which more clearly shows that here is something new which was not there before.
"Can a human be a single cell?" can it be 2? or 3? …
> the conceived egg cell is already a new member of the given species. why? has it to be of a species? if yes, which one other than human?
A cell being of a species does not make it an instance of that species, in the same way that a skin cell is a human cell but is not itself a human.
> "Can a human be a single cell?" can it be 2? or 3? …
If a single cell is not an instance of a human, it follows that there is some point during pregnancy where an instance of a human exists where one did not previously. Mostly the disagreement is about where this line is.
> in the same way that a skin cell is a human cell but is not itself a human.
IMO, there is a substantial difference between a conceived egg and any other cells: an egg turns into a human being over time (provided it's left doing its businnes normally), other kind of cells don't operate this way AFAIK.
> there is some point during pregnancy where an instance of a human exists where one did not previously
completely agree. IMO we can even extend it by omitting the "If a single cell is not an instance of a human" condition: even if we qualify a specific single cell to be a human, there must be a point when it became a human.
yes, miscarriage is a real death of a human. is it killing? yes, it can be a result of an intentional act. can it be caused by neglect? yes, then it's the unintentional taking of a human life.
why we usually threat neglecting the born and unborn differently? because they need different level and kind of care: eg. smoking hurts unborn differently than born. did the mother eat honey which happened to be infected and caused her embryo to die? it was not considered neglect until this honey-effect was discovered.
> Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually easier to say people with limited financial resources than the poor. The first rolls off your tongue without interruption, leaves no aftertaste, arouses no emotion.
Compare with Orwell's "Politics and the English Language":
> Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. [...] A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
Further: Literally everyone has limited financial resources.
If you want to specifically talk about a problem relating to being actually poor, it’s probably better to use language that communicates that than language that spans being poor, being in the top 5% of US households, and having to sell $TSLA stock and borrow money to buy Twitter.
The "justice-involved person" one is especially gross and disingenuous depending on context: Through repetition it strengthens the assertion that a conviction is justice, and it erases the power imbalance between convict and court employees/cops. Plus, it's a transparent euphemism - Nobody will refer to a judge as a JAP for example
> Some of these, like "grandfathering", cannot even be understood without deep diving on etymology to discover the racist origins.
That one in particular, I was almost offended when I learnt during a DEI training that it could be construed as insensitive/racist of me to use that idiom.
English is not my native language, and is not an official language of my country. I work for a local branch of a large US tech company, and the working language is English, which I'm perfectly fine with. But when we get subjected to DEI training material which was very obviously made for an American audience, even though nobody in this office is a native English speaker, I think it goes too far and ironically becomes slightly insensitive in its own way.
I briefly worked for Facebook in Singapore. I felt a similar disconnect with their concern about African-Americans. (I think it might have been 'black history month' or perhaps the 'black lives matter' riots were ongoing. I can't remember.)
Singapore has its own problems and groups of people that aren't doing so well. A focus on African-Americans felt extremely tone-deaf to me. Almost like it was designed to mock the whole DEI enterprise.
I'm probably be downvoted to death for that but, while I have nothing against transgenderism - do whatever you want people, I don't care - it baffles me that the subject takes so much space in the political discourse. It's like 1.6% of the population by applying the broadest critieria available.
Sometimes I wonder if some interests are not all too happy to see people fight about who they might have to share a public bathroom one day in their entire life rather than issues actually affecting them.
I largely agree with your first paragraph, but I do think the term “birthing parent” is important in contexts such as parental leave policies.
“Mother” could be inadequately specific in situations involving same-sex relationships, surrogacies, and/or adoption. For example, Washington state offers up to 6 weeks of medical leave to the birthing parent, in addition to the 12 weeks of bonding leave that are offered to both parents.
Policy language needs to be specific and able to accommodate minority or edge cases.
Part of the reason rule based language processing failed, is because language does not fall into hard and fast categories with no exceptions.
Normal people instinctively understand this, and “woman” and “mother” are completely understandable and useful terms, even if there are a handful of exceptions out of millions are exceptions to the strict definition.
Thank you, I swear half the time I can’t figure out if people are genuinely confused by inclusive language or if they confuse it on purpose just to get riled up.
It’s the same with people who menstruate — not only for trans men but for post menopausal women, women who’ve had hysterectomies, or are otherwise have amenorrhea.
No — people are just aware that humans are sexually dimorphic and don’t appreciate people demanding they not use language that accurately describes the peaks of a bimodal distribution because there’s a small percentage of outliers. Mammals in general are sexually dimorphic.
Particularly when that language control is transparently used for power seeking.
We don’t need to shape every utterance around outliers — that’s pathological and stifles discussion.
Girl you gotta get off the internet. No one is demanding you use this language. It’s actually the opposite where people have a visceral reaction to someone voluntarily choosing to use inclusive language. Style guides like these are for awareness, everyone has had the moment where they discover a word they picked up is actually offensive. One that happened for me was “gypped.” A lot of the guides do contain silly substitutions but that’s because they’re wrong about the history of the words and their usage not because the idea or intent is bad.
I am almost certain the person who told you that was offensive was not someone from the group allegedly being offended, but by some person from a highly educated privileged background deciding to be offended on that group’s behalf.
“Hey by the way that word is offensive” isn’t really the same as being offended. It was a 5 second interaction where they were like “that word is like jewed or welshed but for the Roma” and I was like, “my bad didn’t know that.” That was it. Despite what the internet told me I wasn’t immediately canceled. Like what is the point you’re trying to make, that it’s not offensive or that someone who isn’t Roma isn’t allowed to recognize that using an ethnicity’s name as a verb in a disparaging way is offensive?
I think that highlight my main gripe about what I'd call excessive inclusion. Sure there are some people who identify as male, who will go on to become pregnant, but they have to understand that they are not representative of anything. The number of trans-men who also become pregnant is so tiny that it's beyond an edge case, it's not something that needs to be accounted for everywhere. That's not to say that they shouldn't have the same rights as everyone else, or that we should tolerate actions taken against them. It's just that some groups are so tiny that having special language or accommodation for them makes little sense.
If they are successful in have a pregnant trans-woman in Unicode, you just know that, depending on the depiction, it will be used as "The fat guy"-icon.
Personally I use it for "I ate too much" too. Half the fun of emojis is the new unofficial uses that evolve (I wonder what the fruit peach folks' thoughts are).
I don't see the problem of including small groups - they are the ones who are most invisible and marginalized and therefore in need of recognition. You say it makes little sense, but to me it not only makes sense but is self-evident. Even if you're right, I can scroll through my emoji map and see many that are even more niche, yet none of them receive the angry flak GNC emoji do. (Not to even mention the even more obscure items in the rest of Unicode.)
Can we not use the word car because motorcycles only have two wheels? Why do we need to change language for a few hundred people worldwide? Why do trans men get pregnant since it is the least masculine thing possible?
That is fake news from a convicted fraudster. It was claimed but never supported by evidence [0].
"Fertility clinician Cecil Jacobson claimed to have transplanted a fertilized egg from a female baboon to the omentum in the abdominal cavity of a male baboon in the mid-1960s, which then carried the fetus for four months; however, Jacobson did not publish his claims in a scientific journal, and was subsequently convicted on several unrelated counts of fraud for ethical misconduct."
> your statement is incorrect because trans men exist and they can get pregnant
So that’s an edge case. They can call themselves a mother or father or birthing person or pink elephant. That shouldn’t mean someone else can’t identify as a mother or father or whatnot.
This isn’t even a novel delineation; adoption and surrogacy have long dealt with the separation of parenting and reproductive roles. Besides, history’s foremost feminists would cringe at womanhood and motherhood being reduced to a biological function.
The person you replied to (shrimp_emoji) was responding to the statement "a pregnant person is a woman".
"A pregnant person is a woman" doesn't say anything about what people are allowed to call themselves, but rather makes an absolute statement that all pregnant people can be called "women". It doesn't take into account the edge cases you mentioned, and that's what shrimp_emoji took offense to.
Should everyone take care to account for the most improbable interpretations, even unintended ones? Thanks for providing a good sample of equity language. Feels like being dictated by an elite to the masses.
> For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" because of some tiny number of trans men that exist and also want to give birth.
I completely understand the “gender is social and not biological” concept, and I believe it is true to a large degree. But this is not the case: if you are able to bear a child, then by definition you are female and a woman in the biological sense.
Why does it become purely biological and not social in this case? Applying this definition strictly means woman who aren't able to bear children are not women.
No. What GP is saying is merely that being capable of childbearing obviously requires female biological sex. But the implication doesn't have to go in the opposite direction for it to be true.
Another example: the only vertebrates that can fly are birds(ignoring squirrels and weird fish). That's not equivalent to saying that the ostrich is not a bird.
> Applying this definition strictly means woman who aren't able to bear children are not women.
Not quite sure what the commentor you are replying to means by the social part but they didn't state that giving birth => woman is a 2 way implication.
> equity language censors took this way way too far.
In fact, they took it so far that it is now in the realm of fan fiction.
Language cannot be legislated, and meaningful change requires more than a new literay style of expression.
Social progress in real, measurable ways is possible and important. Workers' rights, pay equity, access to education, public health-care, affordable living, good care for our elderly... These are good things that measurably grow happiness in community.
Hurt-Feelings Fan Fiction is a section of the book store that I will never visit.
I take any equity language guides with a grain of salt, but how people respond to them speaks volumes about who they are. Obviously there are problems with it. It's largely performative, it can distract from bigger advocacy work, and it's often a lazy attempt by a large organization or corporation to avoid having to make meaningful changes. The thing is, when you add terms like "victimhood culture" to your response, it makes it extremely clear that you're not taking issue with awkward terminology, but with the entire concept of equity itself.
A lot of people do take issue with the concept of equity itself. Because it's unattainable, a fantasy to keep the "movement" going. No amount of language puritanism will ever be enough for the kinds of people that write these guides, because no human society will ever exist - or has ever existed - where everyone is some sterile, "equitable" copy of each other.
It’s an exercise of power by a wealthy ($30k/yr is rich in most world), western, educated, native English speaking elite over the unprivileged. Someone who studied English in high school in rural India does not have access to the latest equity terminology nor the western cultural context to understand it.
Changing language is a great tool to privilege the non working academic class with access and time to study the latest fad over the global working class who build the consumer products these elites type their screeds on.
Hell, most of it originates in the US, where we practice our cultural imperialism and force everyone else to bow to our ever evolving norms and sensibilities based upon our own country's fucked up history.
> but how people respond to them speaks volumes about who they are
Does that mean they are bad, immoral people? I think equity is faulty concept. Seems like an attempt to create equality of outcome by policing language. But I'll defer to arguments made by the likes of Sam Harris, Julia Galef and Coleman Hughes. Or the Atlantic author of this article.
> People-first language (“enslaved people” not “slaves”)
“enslaved people” is not people/person-first language.
“People who are enslaved” is people-first language.
“enslaved people” is “situation first” (more commonly “identity first” or “disability first”, but neither strictly applies to “being enslaved”) language, just as “slaves” is. (In the disability context, “the disabled” and “disabled people” are textbook examples of “disability first” language, to which “people first” or “person first” language is contrasted.)
EDIT: Yes, I realize that this is an example of "people-first" language given near the opening of this opinion piece. It says something that in this rant about "equity language", the example given of the application of a particular form ("people-first language") of equity language is basically a textbook example of what that form seeks to avoid rather than what it prescribes.
> For example, it seems like we can’t say “mother” anymore in medical settings.
You can absolutely use “mother” to describe a specific person who, in fact, is a mother in medical settings. Because people of non-feminine gender identity can give birth, it is sub-optimal and exclusionary as a generic term for a person giving, or who has given, birth.
> I support trans people living however they want, but my mother was a mother
Literally no one has a problem with your mother being described as a mother.
> At work, a “women in engineering” group got renamed to something bland like “gender minorities in tech”.
Presumably, it got renamed that because whoever made decisions for it decided the mission was broader than women. “Gender minorities” isn’t a bland alternative to “women”, it has a broader scope.
Close to a disability, I don't give a shit, and reading that I don't even understand til now what is better, for what reason... disability first, person first, what first, wtf?? Can we just communicate?
> can give birth, it is sub-optimal and exclusionary as a generic term for a person giving, or who has given, birth
Realize that smartassing someone with that excourse is alienating andor insulting andor exclusionary to other people the same, for whatever reason, may it be a different level of education or just disagreement.
> the mission was broader
It is good that you call it like that what it is, a mission for the new missionaries, almost just a religion of a strange minority that usually even is not affected at all. Please also try to understand a little the other side.
While some of the things referenced are ridiculous, the author is really misinterpreting many of the guides here, to a point where it feels like willful misinterpretation. For instance.
> If we don’t know how to end racism, we can at least call it structural. The guides want to make the ugliness of our society disappear by linguistic fiat.
If anything, using the term “structural” helps associate much more context about racism, its causes, and its ugliness, not less.
Also, these guides aren’t targeting literature. They mostly meant for situations where you don’t want to evoke emotion in your writing.
Considering the news that Roald Dahl's books are now being altered in precisely some of the ways described, we are very, very clearly seeing literature start to be targeted.
This seems like pretty on point: "The whole tendency of equity language is to blur the contours of hard, often unpleasant facts. This aversion to reality is its main appeal."
Language can and should be provocative at times, because reality can be messy. Sterilizing language like this besides being completely untenable also removes the power of language, both as a positive and negative force.
Only tangentially related but I think it's interesting that just as we popularized the word "Ms.", and I think it makes perfect sense not to refer to women primarily by their marital status, we sort of worked around the issue by... largely just not using title/last name anymore. Right? I don't think I've referred to anyone by a title since my grade school teachers, and at least in my industry and corner of society, it's a complete non-issue.
Was there a time when adults referred to each other by Mr. and Mrs. in regular spoken conversation? Like if you were asking a work colleague where another colleague was, it was normal to say "Where is Mr. Smith?" rather than "Where is Mark?"
Since in my lifetime I've only known calling everyone by their first name (except, like you say, teachers in childhood), I'm curious when the change occurred and how.
Yes. The rules were complicated, too. Children referring to adults and teachers with Mr./Ms. is a relic from what was once a more complicated set of rules about social hierarchy. Relative age, familiarity, and social status, both of the audience/listener and of the speaker relative to the referred person, were the main factors that determined the choice in how to refer to someone. The older, more socially distant, and socially superior they were to you, and the more formal the situation, the more likely you used the title. If the listener was socially distant or inferior to the party, you were more likely to refer to the party with a title. Using simply a last name without a title was also an option for a superior to an inferior. Given names were considered intimate to use alone, and reserved in private between family and close friends and sometimes close colleagues.
The change started in the '70s and it's not quite complete. More progressed in some regions than others. A couple decades ago, the manager at my first job was addressed as Mr. and it seemed quite natural to me at the time.
For some the use of the first name assumes a familiarity which probably does not exist. The universal rule is that appropriate levels of interaction are both accepted and used in common parlance by everyone. Thus it's rare for a speaker at a press conference to be addressed by their first name though the speaker might well respond using a first name if they know the journalist. 'Anthony, how did your chat with Sergey (Lavrov) go?' is not something we're likely to hear. Of course it's down to preferences with ordinary conversations as in 'please call me Joe' or whatever.
First name informality has been a feature of American culture since before its founding. We use a more formal protocol for official business. It seems controlling to insist against common practice that normal persons treat one with this kind of formality.
It's an exception but latest names are still somewhat common in the army, in sports teams (even at the lowest level), and doctors. No Mr before though but rather last name as a nickname. Maybe the common denominator is a disciplined authoritative environment.
> I think it makes perfect sense not to refer to women primarily by their marital status
Not in isolation, but in full context there may be some practical merit. In the earlier age where these titles were used, women adopted their husband's entire name. A woman who married Mr. Robert Smith would become Mrs. Robert Smith. This provides feedback that her given name isn't Robert. Ms. Robert Smith would be ambiguous. Is her given name actually Robert or is she married to Robert? Who knows?
But, indeed, in the modern age nobody cares about titles. We have heavily curated Instagram feeds, or whatever it is the cool kids are into these days, to serve as a status indicator instead. That's the thing about status indicators: They only serve to display status for so long until it becomes commonplace and those with status have to move on to new indicators to stand out.
This has got to be one of the most over-anxiated, one side arguing with itself sociological phenomena since the white slaver panic that afflicted upper-class ladies in the late 19th century.
There is some magazine wash lib, crucifying themselves on this hill on the HN front page every other day. Yet there is practically no one arguing back.
Except of course on Twitter. Which apparently some large set of journalists believe reflects some significant portion of public opinion and influence.
>Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. The American Cancer Society has one. So do the American Heart Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Recreation and Park Association, the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and the University of Washington.
>....
>Public criticism led Stanford to abolish outright its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative—not for being ridiculous, but, the university announced, for being “broadly viewed as counter to inclusivity.”
Even if no one is arguing back, it seems like the language police are winning.
Fair point, but on the other hand, if language policing leads the American Medical Association to make decisions which decrease the quality of medical care, I'm not enthusiastic about that. The relative importance of the opinions of everyday people vs these associations is not obvious.
Re: "the edifices from which actual powers spring" -- if you want a high-paying job as a doctor, maybe you'll be best served by adopting their language guidelines. I could see the trend spreading through the general population because playing the language game becomes the best way to achieve "actual powers".
I think the thing much more likely to shorten people's lives than their doctor not being able to speak frankly because of woke vocabulary, is not having a house. I'm not even talking about the homeless here.
The Atlantic should be running an article every day extolling the virtues of home building and questioning the morals of a country which fails to shelter even working people. Rather than pouring over the editorial policy of wonkish publications, they should be lambasting every state legislature that so far has done nothing to ensure there are enough houses.
I think that far worse for democracy than woke grammarians ratioing you on Twitter, is the rise of a surveillance state which previously couldn't exist but is now totally enabled because of AI automation. Obama firmly planted mass surveillance into and "acceptable" "legal" framework. We have learned little of what this apparatus can do operationally since the Snowden leaks which were before the deep learning stuff really exploded. The Atlantic should be questioning every day the moral fiber of a supposedly open and democratic society which has a shadow supreme court and an entire secret apparatus.
What I'm willing to bet has a far greater impact on people's ability to control their employment future and therefore their own autonomy far more than the possibility of getting fired for accidentally saying "gimp" during the next inclusivity training? The breakdown of organized labor and growing inequality. The Atlantic should be railing every day about the fact that sub-living wages and make workers desperately dependant upon their employer and less able to exercise their democratic rights.
But if you write for the Atlantic, you have friends in CIA. Your kids go to daycare with the kids of several corporate VPs. You don't know anyone that cleans rooms 10 hours a day and lives in a Super 8 for lack of permanent affordable housing. Writing about those things is actually controversial. It's actually risky. So instead, you turn inward.
This country's elite media appear to me to have totally lost any grip on reality. There is some fantastical disconnect from what actually impacts people. Instead they only see and obsess about what impacts them. They have gazed so far into their own naval that they are instead playing this Alternate Reality Game, chasing phantoms and navigating mind mazes.
My critique is not that this topic has shown up "a time or two" on the HN frontpage. And to be perfectly frank, I think you know that. My critique is that this topic shows up constantly on the HN frontpage. And more broadly, it claims a level of coverage far out of proportion to its impact on almost anything.
I can't tell if you're referring to the phenomenon of banning words, or the phenomenon of criticizing banning words. The first sentence makes it seem like you're referring to the word-banning, but the second sentence is about magazines, which makes it seem like you're referring to The Atlantic (which is criticizing the word-banning).
The free speech panic. I'm all for free speech but we are like defcon 100 from anything resembling an actual clampdown on speech and it's extremely tiresome to watch people with editorial boards and national readerships act as if they are being brave for saying what pretty much everyone already believes.
Yes everything is fine. Norms around language change. 50 years ago you could lose your job for impugning most major religious, governmental or other "respectable" institutions in writing. You probably weren't going to jail for it but you just didn't talk that way about the Catholic church.
At the turn of the century, the same kind of uber-libs who are so jealous of their speech today were getting anyone who even tangentially endorsed labor organization kicked out of college econ departments and black-balled. One econ professor had some good things to say of The Knights of Labor which was the most ubiquitous and one of the most moderate labor organizations in the country, The Nation called into question his economics chair. Godkin himself tried to have the man fired from Johns Hopkins. Many economists who didn't tow the classically liberal line found themselves dealing with unhappy boards of trustees.
Two wrongs obviously don't make a right. But this is not new. The people claiming it is just have very little familiarity with history. And they take for granted that they have just never been on the wrong side of language norms.
Have the woke language grammar police gone too far? Probably. Does it warrant these interminable sanctimonious soap boxes from the Atlantic and their like? No.
A constutional amendment that had a snowball's chance in hell of passing which banned the use of the word "mother" would start to bother me. A handful of largely out of touch institutions believing that they are doing Rosa Parks type activism by banning the word "mother" from their meeting minutes shouldn't be mentioned in an article on any media site with a readership above 5,000.
That was addressed in the article, I think: Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above.
You reference slow, natural evolution of norms. Those happen everywhere, not just in language, but they happen organically. People change and then they change what they tolerate, how they speak etc. It's not that someone decides "people now have to speak like this, so that they then change to become like me". That's the "creating a new man" approach that lead to endless suffering under the socialists/communists, though I guess now it would be "creating a new person".
> Two wrongs obviously don't make a right. But this is not new.
"Everything is fine, because we've seen bad things happen before, so this isn't new, and only new things can be a problem"?
> You reference slow, natural evolution of norms. Those happen everywhere, not just in language, but they happen organically. People change and then they change what they tolerate, how they speak etc. It's not that someone decides "people now have to speak like this, so that they then change to become like me". That's the "creating a new man" approach that lead to endless suffering under the socialists/communists, though I guess now it would be "creating a new person".
That hasn't been true since the printing press and particularly the invention of the nation state.
> Everything is fine, because we've seen bad things happen before, so this isn't new, and only new things can be a problem"?
That's disingenuous. You know that if these authors were writing these articles in the spirit that these kinds of editorial limitations were a long standing problem that needed to be addressed, they wouldn't be on the front page and commented ad-nauseum. The entire selling point of this kind of article is that it is attacking some novel and dangerous schorge which menaces our very rights. They are broadly in the genre of panic-mongering.
What we consider "free speech" has existed since about the 70s. If you considered that paradigm to be free speech, in which there was virtually nothing you could say which would get you arrested but there were things you could say which could get your fired, then you must concede that what is happening now is a roughly equivalent level of free speech. If you find these new limits on your speech onerous but not the old ones, then your gripe is with the flavor of the speech which might get you fired not the fact that speech exists which might get you fired.
These articles are generally written by people who just happened to live lives and held values which were highly compatible with the rules of the institutions. So they are by and large, blissfully unaware of the previously extant limitation and how they biased the discourse.
> That hasn't been true since the printing press and particularly the invention of the nation state.
I disagree. There's not much success in the state forming its citizens, nor with the media. Take Germany for example. Germany's public broadcaster is deeply progressive on all social issues, and has a funding of €8bn per year. Most of Germany's private print media is similarly progressive. They've been pushing hard on genderized speech for years, yet the population rejects it continuously. If a primary objective isn't fulfilled with near-endless budgets, the tool seems to just not work for the task at hand.
> If you find these new limits on your speech onerous but not the old ones, then your gripe is with the flavor of the speech which might get you fired not the fact that speech exists which might get you fired.
These new speech rules are strongly being pushed, from state/quasi-state institutions (e.g. universities), are being pushed into legislation and aren't based on the population's norms (or there wouldn't be any opposition).
There's a difference between going into a room, behaving a certain way and the group rejecting your behavior, and going into a room, behaving a certain way and having one person pull a gun and forcing the group to reject you. The former is an organic group-response based on their shared values, it can change over time. The latter is what the speech-crusaders are trying to do.
I recently had a comment on another site flagged by a bot for using ableist language when I used the world "insane".
It was a first for me as well. Will go with "batshit" next time.
It's insane there's backroom string-pullers trying to take out words like insane.
Rick from Pawn Stars uses the word, so it's good enough for me! He often describes certain amazing facts or objects as insane. Because he likes those things. It can be positive.
Is the motivation to onboard "use this list or be on wrong side of ethics and get nasty reviews"? there's an element of that.
Microsoft 360, all that new stuff, surprised to find shiny new morality-checker sitting alongside the spellchecker. Watching over my every word. I unchecked 5000 checkboxes to disable it all. Auto-nicer-word enforcer is not for me.
Came here to say that as a veteran, I promise you that we're not too stupid to differentiate figurative use of these words from the literal.
The US Army uses the word "battle" so flippantly that it barely has any meaning: battle rhythm, Battle Staff, battle desk, Battle NCO, Battle Captain, Battle Command Systems, battle rattle, and on and on.
Seriously, fuck off.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be crawling across the earth, meticulously probing a buried-explosive-practicum with a plastic stick.
This language got popular not because people thought really hard and all arrived at it independently, through cold-blooded analysis, but because they heard it was what the better class of people did now, and there was peer pressure around it. Because it never had a firm foundation, never really made sense when you thought hard about it, it can easily change to something else. In other words, it's a fashion, and fashions change.
The case of swearing discredits this whole article. It’s banned from places, and it’s still used widely. There are people who don’t like it, there are people who use them constantly. Just like the topic of this article.
Another thing is that this topic is a discussion in law in the past 100 years in different forms. Just because the public didn’t care until now it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t discussion. There were a lot.
I'm currently in a non-English speaking country and listening to the radio - and the lack of censorship regarding 'bleeps' is hilarious - and somewhat sad, too.
Frankly, I don't care as long as government isn't involved. Companies (and other organizations owned by individuals) should have every right to hire/fire people based on the language they use, no matter what language that is. Same with companies that decide who they want to sell to and who they don't want to sell to.
I'm very much against the idea of governments limiting speech or forcing behavior on private individuals, with some exceptions in the case of the tragedy of the commons (like with environmental protections, overextraction of renewable resources, etc).
They are "putting the woke away" now. Alienating your population isn't a winning strategy for the regime, especially if you're going to need their kids to fight your wars.
Notice how Black History Month was dialed right back this year.
The woke will go away, but none of the equally and speech laws that lead to this mess are going anywhere.
The use of Sierra Club as the lead example is a good one because of the racialist motivations in the founding of the club.
The change of usage to “enslaved people” is an important one because of the lack of agency in being enslaved (!). It’s easy for the brain to make the connection that a term like “slave” is an inherent property of the person so described, like “brown-haired” rather than something imposed upon them.
But as a non-American who’s lived in the US a long time, seeing the term “American” used generally doesn’t bother me: it’s trivial and automatic to see when it’s simply synecdoche for “resident”, “taxpayer”, or, yes, “US citizen, so not applicable to me”. I am not offended when I see a headline, as I did this morning, saying “your passport will be delayed so apply early”. Just doesn’t apply to me so who cares?
The problem with ”slave” (as an example) for me is, how do we know this is actually a problem for enslaved people? How do we know this isn’t just a ”white man burden” thing? Yes, it makes sense, but just because something makes sense doesn’t mean it’s inherently good or applicable. Lots of things make sense from a theoretical, conceptual perspective, but are not feasible in practice.
It seems to me that enslaved people have much bigger problems than to worry about this, and if they don’t anymore, then the wording doesn’t matter. They are either ”former slaves”, which emphasizes the severity of the situation they were put through, or they are still slaves, which again——emphasis. I could argue that the new wording diminishes the seriousness of the predicament (but I won’t as I don’t believe that, given the horrors of slavery, the word matters at all here).
I don't get this, at all. It makes at least one fallacy, namely assuming that people are born free. They are not. Every newborn is restricted by parents, society, environment, etc. We must accept that: we can't think, act or sustain ourselves until much older. Thus, we loose our restrictions slowly, and we don't loose them all. Some people were actually born as slaves. That's the horror of it: to be born as property.
Agency has nothing to do with it: suggesting that it does implies the possibility to avoid it, and ipso facto that staying enslaved is the slave's problem. The appeal to a made-up brain process doesn't improve your case.
But the word is not about agency: it expresses a state. How that state was achieved, doesn't matter. Are we going to say "enprisoned people", "people who somehow and totally against their will caught COVID", "people who accidentally experience permanent, fully reduced hearing"? Do you still call people who once were, but not longer are, slaves, enslaved?
The assumption behind it all is that if someone can make a inference about your thoughts, no matter how far-fetched, those thoughts must contribute to an undesirable state, hence you are a bad person.
> seeing the term “American” used generally doesn’t bother me: it’s trivial and automatic to see when it’s simply synecdoche for “resident”, “taxpayer”
Nitpick: synecdoche would be if someone called you "America". You can imagine a teasing "Hey America, get out of the way" toward a tourist who encapsulated their views of Americans. "American" is just a regular adjective.
It's like they want to abolish metaphors and want to become language prescriptive --which people and grammarians wanted to get away from in the 60s and later (not that that ever persuaded the French against prescriptive language). And I guess English lends itself to more demands like this because its vocabulary-rich. Other languages have to re-use and recycle words for different meanings a lot more and are not able to accommodate these demands.
> Other languages have to re-use and recycle words for different meanings a lot more
A rather extraordinary and unlikely claim. Not to mention that words in languages like Arabic have much deeper semantic ramification compared to a Germanic language like English.
Urban, in the sense of urban or inner city youth, might be a reference to black children. (Or it might not. And one might actually be referencing urban things in the sense of not suburban or rural.)
Vibrant: makes, ahem, people living with color blindness feel marginalized.
Hardworking: I’m struggling to come up with something even as credible as the last two. Maybe it’s ableist: some people can’t work hard.
Brown bag: I’m guessing this is in a similar category to “tarball” from the rather regrettable list out of Stanford recently: it has nothing whatsoever to do with equity or inequity, but one might imagine an alternative etymology in which it has an inequitable meaning, connotation or origin. So brown bag could somehow be about brown people, even though as far as I can tell, neither the origin of the phrase nor any common uses are at all related to skin color.
At this rate, we risk running out of English words. Fortunately, English has a lot of words :)
> Hardworking: I’m struggling to come up with something even as credible as the last two. Maybe it’s ableist: some people can’t work hard.
I'm guessing the logic is something similar the absolutely ridiculous (IMO) graphic I've linked below from the National Museum of African American History & Culture which lists a lot of aspects of white culture in the United States. One of the many items on their list was the "Protestant Work Ethic" and a few bullet points about how hard work equals success.
The first time I saw that I was convinced it was a 4chan troll. I was so sure it was an elaborate 4chan ruse that when shared by someone else at work I instinctively told them it's a racist 4chan meme and they shouldn't be sharing that at work. It took some back and forth with links from the actual museum before it hit me that it was real. I was speechless.
Since when are “white people” a monolithic group with all these privileges? There are many different groups of people who would be generally considered white, and they have very diverse stories, privileges, and disadvantages. There are plenty of so-called white people who do not feel they have all these privileges. Just to pick on an easy one:
> I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed
Many “white” women would disagree with this, although the extent might depend on where they go shopping.
There are clearly many forms of discrimination that happen due to the ability of some groups to be easily recognized at a quick glance (regardless of whether that recognition is accurate), but that is far from the only form of social injustice in the US.
They're right to drop "American" but not for the reasons outlined.
An "American" is by definition is someone from the American continents (North and South America). Further a "North American" is someone from Mexico, USA, and Canada.
It gets worse when people have "Black Americans", "Italian Americans", "Asian Americans" because that means that "Americans" is only referring to one group of people from the USA.
It makes sense though, cause it's the United States of America. It's usually obvious from the context. Mexico and Canada are already single word countries, so you can easily say Asian Canadian or whatever.
South Africa would pose a similar conundrum, where people are called South Africans, but they aren't the only people living in Southern Africa.
Particularly because I'm not sure I've ever come across a case in my life when a speaker or writer wanted to include people from both continents as a single group. It's just not a label that's useful for much of anything.
"North or South American" isn't a particularly meaningful or relevant concept at all. In contrast with e.g. "Latin American" which is very useful/meaningful.
And if people from the United Mexican States are Mexican for short, it's an easy shorthand to similarly call people from the United States of America, well, American.
> Particularly because I'm not sure I've ever come across a case in my life when a speaker or writer wanted to include people from both continents as a single group.
That's the thing: for many people, it's a single continent, called just "America", which can be further subdivided into "North America", "Central America", and "South America" (but these three are not continents, they're subdivisions within a single continent; another common subdivision is "Latin America", which corresponds to the countries colonized by Spain or Portugal).
That's fine, but it still doesn't change the fact that there isn't really a need for a word to refer to its inhabitants collectively.
The same way Oceania is often considered a continent, but nobody ever refers to people there as "Oceanians" in a way that includes both modern Australians and Polynesians, for example.
I'm just saying that calling people in the USA "Americans" isn't taking away from an otherwise useful/important modern-day usage. Regardless of whether you consider it to be two continents or one.
> Do these people also believe in a single continent called “Eurasia”?
It's the traditional six-continent model (America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, Antarctica), which according to https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continente is the model taught in school in many places, including Italy, Spain, Portugal, and all over Latin America. So no, "these people" (which includes nearly all of America outside the USA and Canada) have learned about Europe and Asia as two separate continents.
On the other hand, the seven‐continent model is dominant in the Anglosphere. So it seems the sensible thing to do is what in fact is already normally done: in Spanish and other such languages, use “América” to refer to North and South America, and in English, use “America” to refer to the USA and “the Americas” to refer to North and South America.
” But the people in Behind the Beautiful Forevers know they’re poor; they can’t afford to wrap themselves in soft sheets of euphemism. Equity language doesn’t fool anyone who lives with real afflictions. It’s meant to spare only the feelings of those who use it.”
While we're getting rid of words we consider offensive, let's get rid of "consumer." I find it particularly offensive when politicians refer to the public as consumers.
While I think a lot of these efforts are over-zealous, so is the response overblown. Take one example, the term felon. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors apparently recommended using the term "justice-involved person" instead. In response, the author writes:
"When the San Francisco Board of Supervisors replaces felon with justice-involved person, it is making an ideological claim—that there is something illegitimate about laws, courts, and prisons."
Huh? That's a huge leap. I think it's a lot more likely that the intent was simply to separate the person's state (having been convicted of a crime) from their identity as a human being. Labels like "felon" imply an essential, unchanging quality rather than a transitory state. Lots of people convicted of felonies later go on to live exemplary lives. I agree with the idea of not painting them all with the same brush. There are probably better substitutes than "justice-involved person", granted. But saying that term illegitimizes the court system is hyperbolic.
By your logic, then, we are all children, because at one time we all experienced childhood.
While "felon" may be useful in some cases, like describing someone who is currently serving time for a felony, it's a lot less useful as time goes on. And this goes for a lot of language that is used to describe a transitory state but ends up labeling the individual and making a separate class of them. This is why you see the shift from "the homeless" to "people experiencing homelessness." It may seem unfamiliar and cumbersome, but it's also more accurate and humane.
The argument has nothing to do with the definitions, but whether the term should be used. The N-word had a definition, too, but that doesn't mean it should have continued in common usage.
I understand the reluctance to make these changes---if you have the habit of using a word for a something all your life, it's going to seem irritating to change it if you have no idea why, or if you see the benefit for others but don't care since it doesn't benefit you personally.
So why is "felon" a label for life, and not "child"? Simply giving the definitions doesn't answer that question.
Child specifically describes a person actively in childhood.
Just like prisoner describes someone actively in prison.
Felon has a legal definition, and it means someone who has been convicted of a felony.
The desire to sanitize language 1984 style is baffling... If you were to change the definition of "felon" the way you want to, or ban its use to prevent thoughtcrime, a new equivalent word would be invented with the same definition: a person who has committed a felony. Because that is a useful word.
>The desire to sanitize language 1984 style is baffling...
If you go back to my original comment, you'll see that I wasn't making a judgement on whether such sanitization was a good idea, but described the perfectly rational reason someone might promote it (no 1984 Orwellian motives required).
>Because that is a useful word.
Now you're getting to the actual point. Is it always a useful word? If there were an exemplary employee at your business, who had worked there for 20 years and was professional and productive, would you describe him to someone else as a felon or would you (assuming the subject came up), merely note that he had committed a felony? And do you see the difference between the two in the way a third party would interpret your comment?
What I've learned from history is that every utopian dream realized is a dystopia. "In theory, theory is no different from in practice..." as the saying goes.
These may sound funny white north american people's problems, but imagine when your AI app is is trying to explain european history to your children without referencing slavery racism or war.
What pisses me off is that bullshit like this drives just enough people to vote Republican, and then we can't get proper healthcare or energy legislation.
> Public criticism led Stanford to abolish outright its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative—not for being ridiculous, but, the university announced, for being “broadly viewed as counter to inclusivity.”
Ha, that's a great point. The language meant to broaden inclusivity actually erects barriers to inclusivity by excluding those who have never heard the words or the arguments justifying them, and the people excluded are largely marginalized groups to begin with (poor, uneducated, etc.). So basically, inclusive language is classist at the very least.
I also think a lot of equity language is a barrier to communication, and that's its biggest problem. Possible offense should not be an impediment to clarity, as long as we're all being charitable. The loss of the default assumption of charity is the real problem here.
if people don't want certain words associated with them, i'll do my best not to do that. I may not know, or i may fail, but i will attempt to do that which is asked of me. Because it's not a problem for me to try.
That's the thing, most of the people described by these changes are not requesting them. Small self appointed experts are coming up with the rules and attempting to force them on society.
None of society wanted most of this. They were convinced it was necessary for promotion of moral good. Essentially an elite language of virtue signaling making it easier to identify with others in the club.
I'm happy to read these things, as it exposes me to ideas that i might not have thought about. It will make me more sensitive to situations where words may affect people in ways i didn't see, but should have. It is no offense to me to take these ideas on board. It costs me nothing, and potentially makes other people feel more included. So win-win, from my point of view.
I'm actually a bit torn on this.
On the one hand it does seem to be very silly but also ironically enough excluding certain groups (religious and social outcasts).
On the other I think there is a valid point in looking over how language is used and what implications it has.
But to try and over correct it with new words is like trying to add another layer of paper to make the boat not leak.
Since instead of saying you are a retard, now you just say: person with mental challenges.
It has the same result when used as an insult, it stigmatizes people with "retardation" and it still insults the other person.
The obsession with language directly relates to the fact that it doesn't matter. They want a safe, meaningless, issue.
Real problems are difficult and scary. No one wants to deal with homelessness, drug use, gang violence, or whatever else.
If you're willing to engage in a little self deception, why not "solve" a pretend issue instead? Go home feeling like a hero because you told people to stop using the word blind as a metaphor. Safe, easy, fulfilling.
I've mentioned this in a previous comment, but I see these policies about language control as fundamentally misguided because they assume that changing words can change the way we think to a significant extent. This is known as the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and is long considered false by linguists. If you want to change how people think, you must directly convince or teach them to do so. For example, "Mentally retarded" was introduced as a kinder term, and it led to the plain "retarded" that people use as an insult. "Special" went the same way.
The "pronouns" thing went nowhere in France. It was considered damaging to the French language.
> The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, from negro, to black, to African American, to Black, to person of color.
Also, the shift from moron to mentally defective to retarded to whatever.
This is such a sideshow. First, conservatism lost its way. Then liberalism lost its way. If only we had a center with a clue. Nobody wants to tackle the hard but solveable problems. We get "defund the police", rather than "fire the bottom 10% of cops".
> We get "defund the police", rather than "fire the bottom 10% of cops".
That's because we can't fire the bottom 10% of cops. Who gets to decide who the bottom 10% are? There are deeply engrained cultural issues, systemic perverse incentives, in most police departments in the country. If you ask them to fire 10% of their forces, it's more likely to be the people who speak out against the Clan Police than it is the "bad apples" you're thinking of.
Besides, while maybe only a small minority would brutally murder a man by kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and 43 seconds while he cries for his mother, almost every single police officer on the force would stand there next to him and protect him while he did it. If you ran up and pushed the murderer off the man he's killing, trying to save his life, the other cops would beat you, possibly to death. Not 10% of them. 90% of them. You would be beaten and arrested. It's 90%. At least.
Whereas we can reduce funding to police departments; that is within the power of elected officials that the "defund" movement can help get elected.
> We get “defund the police”, rather than “fire the bottom 10% of cops”.
Even if there was an objective way to measure the bottom 10% of cops that wasn’t subject to the same structural/institutional biases that are the main problem that “defund” is about, that would be a temporary solution that wouldn’t address the fundamental problems.
As it is, the structural problems means that any “Fire the bottom 10%” initiative in practice would reinforce, rather than mitigate, the problems, since the structural biases would factor into the evaluation.
which "defund the police" seems to be modeled after. Thatcherism (the British strain of Reaganism that was just a bit meaner) became so ingrained that the fish who swim in it can't even recognize it. Today there is such a poverty of the imagination that the left can't imagine anything else.
"Defund Planned Parenthood" has been a Republican rallying cry for abolishing PP for almost two decades and is but one of many "Defund" bills they've introduced going back years:
• Defund EcoHealth Alliance Act (2023)
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2023
• Defund Cities that Defund the Police Act of 2021
• Defund Federal Vaccine Mandates Act (2021)
• Defund National Endowment for the Humanities Act of 2021
• Defund Davos Act (2022)
• Defund Putin Act (2022)
• Defund the Ministry of Truth Act of 2022
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act (2021)
• Defund de Blasio’s Injection Sites Act of 2021
• Defunding Abortion Transportation Act (2022)
• Defund the People’s Liberation Army Act
• Defund the Wuhan Institute of Virology Act
• Defund Cities that Defund the Police Act of 2020
• Defund National Endowment for the Humanities Act of 2019
• Defund Executive Orders that Suppress Free Speech Act
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2019
• Defunding United Nations Act of 2017
• Defund National Endowment for the Humanities Act of 2018
• Defunding the Corrupt and Incompetent United Nations Act
(2017)
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2017
• Defund the Syrian Refugee Resettlement Program Act of 2015
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015
• Defund Amnesty Act of 2015
• Defund Obamacare Act of 2013
• Defund United States Assistance to Pakistan Act of 2011
In my language there are three wordforms: masculine, feminitive and middle. If you want to harass someone you can just missplace a letter in any verb about some person and he will be insulted! English is enough good by not having such a word formation, why does somebody need to insist of euphemisms?
Contemporary word fixation is a distraction. People should get off the social media hamster wheel, take a walk, and dream up a more meaningful way to help their fellow man (human / hxmxn / whatever).
It's blown up to the extent that we must now write essays about it, but it would have been better if we had never gone there in the first place.
This stuff is very not new. George Carlin did a rant about it over 30 years ago [1]. Seems like the only real effect is class signaling; those who invest in staying "with it" signal their willingness to pay lip service to the latest ideological fads.
> The guide also rejects the disabled in favor of people living with disabilities
FWIW, as someone with a disability, I just don't care about this - your intent and actions matter so much more, as I've commented before[1]:
> I've had people who've obviously been trained to use person-first language be actively unpleasant (often the classic "you don't look disabled" and questioning the authenticity of my documents), and people who've used clumsy, borderline-offensive language go miles out of their way to help me (and the other way around). [...] I will say "disabled person" stands out to me less, as "person with disabilities" can come across as a little forced[, though it's probably because I've heard the former more often].
Notably, however, the Sierra Club guide doesn't seem to actually call for that as far as I can see - it directs you to refer to the National Center on Disability and Journalism’s Disability Language Style Guide[2], which currently states:
> In the past, we have encouraged journalists and others to use person-first language (such as, "a person who has Down syndrome" rather than "a Down syndrome person") as a default. Even with the caveat that this does not apply to all, we have heard from many people with disabilities who take issue with that advice. For us, this really emphasizes the fact that no two people are the same — either with regard to disabilities or language preferences. And so we are no longer offering advice regarding a default.
The one part of the Sierra club guide I would strongly agree with though is:
> Similarly, we should avoid making light of things like PTSD, anxiety or OCD, by using real medical diagnoses as a metaphor for everyday emotional experiences.
It's frustrating to hear people cry "My OCD!" when, for example, they can't tidy something up even though it clearly doesn't bother them a few seconds later, as it feels like it is trivialising the problems this condition can cause, and doesn't even match up with many manifestations of the disorder (my own irrational obsessions cause me to be way _less_ tidy than the average person).
Language is fluid and dictionaries aren't that old historically. I wish more people thought about this. Go with what you feel is useful and respectful. Brevity is useful, rephrasing of those words in common use will trigger people, and getting angry at someone's desire to be respectful is going to trigger someone. Don't like it, come up with your own words. Shakespeare did.
when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time
- is bs when used to preclude the ideas of change and compassion, or shut down communication. I'm guessing that likely wasn't its original intent, language is fluid.
This reminds me of a scene in my favorite movie, "The Big lebowski". IIRC, the dude is complaining about a 'chinaman' peeing on his rug. Walter goes on one of his rants and ends with "By the way, Asian-American is the preferred term". It always struck me as curious that the peeing guy, that Walter is presumably advocating for wasn't even present in the scene.
All this hullabaloo and most times, the affected person isn't even there. Indeed, pronouns are instructions for how people must refer to you when you are not present!
The large majority of reasonable people seem to agree that intention is important when determining whether language use might be abuse, or not.
Intention is fuzzy and unprovable. People can sometimes lie, evade and troll.
Unlike intention, words are black and white, so words can be subject to restriction by motivated people.
My question to the HN community is whether it would be feasible to create an effective classifier for intention? For instance if this sentence contained not "N-Word", but the signifier of that euphemism, it should pass the classifier, since my intention was benign.
If we continue like this, a child born 10 years from now won't understand a book published 10 years ago. We would need to translate "Old English" to "Woke English".
`Equity language doesn’t fool anyone who lives with real afflictions. It’s meant to spare only the feelings of those who use it.`
This perfectly describes what's going on. Rather than working on the actual problem, the people gunning for purifying language are yak shaving. I think we all recognise the good intentions, but how do we convince the people with good intentions that they're solving the wrong problem? Sounds like the classic case of a startup not talking to their customers :)
Lol seems like a reductio ad absurdum long game on trying to make people be nice to each other. I might use the 'wrong' word or an offensive one but I sure as hell don't mean it to be and that is easy to spot.
Interestingly the people who push these crazy (lol) agendas are normally nowhere near the intended 'offendees' of the terminology.
Words can have significant weight in some cultures, especially when used historically as hate speech. When that word disappears from the culture because of a ban it can have a very positive effect. Note that I'm specifically talking about hate speech, and not any word you don't happen to like.
>When the San Francisco Board of Supervisors replaces felon with justice-involved person, it is making an ideological claim—that there is something illegitimate about laws, courts, and prisons.
Wouldn't it be more appropriate, thoughtful and sensible to use the term "justice oppressed person instead"?
I'm going to guess this wasn't done for the benefit of felons, who would probably laugh and roll there eyes, or get pissed at the thought that changing a word to a phrase helps their situation in any sort of way. In general with this sort of thing, how is a phrase preferable to a word? You're increasing the cognitive load and time to write it out.
Counter-point: we used to call lousy things gay, and made up a whole sexuality for men who took care of their appearance (metrosexual). Perhaps it wasn't as bad as the Nazis' "useless mouths", but it certainly wasn't great.
Nowadays we call white immigrants "expats" and other immigrants "immigrants".
Words have power.
The problem is when people start using words to create a sort of password game. It keeps some people busy, makes them feel better than others for knowing the passwords, and does little for anyone else.
People start using the "new" words as a derogatory slur.
For example, to belittle people, you don't call them retarded. You call them mentally challenged. Now being "mentally challenged" has the same politically incorrectness about it as being retarded.
The funny thing to me is that it felt like this whole field of pronouns, over-sensitivity, not wanting to call things straightforwardly, was propagated by white female journalists and HR directors.
Of course, banning words doesn’t work. You can’t ban speech. As in you literally can’t make humans not say certain words. It’s like banning certain thinking. Just won’t work.
Writers always see the perceived misuse of words in apocalyptic terms, and The Atlantic is itself invested in a kind of elite moral panic over "woke culture," so I tend to look at articles like this with some skepticism.
One thing is that Packer himself fails to analyze the language under consideration with precision; the examples he lays out all fall, roughly, under a few different categories, which should be considered separately:
- Branding and inclusivity: Much of what he proffers as examples are not unfamiliar to anyone who's had to work with corporate style guides, where terms are favored or disfavored partially in relation to branding tone and voice, and partially to maximize clarity (idiosyncratic style being a frequent source of confusion). No one's harmed by a press release avoiding terms like "blind to" in favor of "refusing to see what's happening;" as a personal matter I prefer the concision of the former, but the latter is more plainspoken if also somewhat dull. Plodding and dull is often exactly what you're looking for in official communiques.
- Specificity and Precision: Again, while using "Americans" to refer to US residents is reasonable in casual contexts, or where American citizens are under discussion (e.g., political contexts), it's also reasonable to refer to "US residents" or the like. The biggest problem is that there isn't a concise term that covers "US citizens and legal permanent residents" that doesn't make you sound like a DHS circular or a legal opinion. (An additional complication is when you're working with Mexican and LATAM entities, where "American" is strongly disfavored unless you're literally talking about the Americas broadly. Same problem when people use "North American" to refer to US-Candada exclusively.) Slicing your terms finely to clearly delineate what you're discussing, and what you're not discussing, is again a perfectly reasonable goal in organizational communications, if anathema to a talented writer who is used to bending words to the context, rather than straightjacketing terms within specific contexts.
Both inclusivity and specificity are goals of most guides, particularly in journalism. (I'm not sure what style guide The Atlantic hews to, but rest assured their editors adhere to something.) Packer can argue that the Sierra Club's guide tends towards creating uninspired, workmanlike prose, but making a moral panic of that seems unwarranted.
- Instrumentalism: Instrumental terms are the ones that do have a real-world impact, because they're designed to either defuse or infuse a term with emotional valence. Instrumental terms contain arguments within themselves: using the term "slave" robs the person in question of their agency, which distances policy or analytic questions from those very people; "enslaved person" changes the context to slavery as an imposition on an agentive person; likewise, my preferred term (for Black slaves in US history), "enslaved American" goes evern further, being a deliberate and implicit argument against the legality of slavery even prior to the 13th Amendment. The term "justice-involved person" instead of "felon" is risible even to me, but the negative emotional valence of the latter term has a real effect on policy and the perception of policy, which is why terms like "ex-offender" are becoming more commonly used. Instrumentalist terms can be used for good or for evil; to make arguments, defuse emotional responses, or to invoke high dudgeon (Gingrich's famed GOPAC memo is a masterclass on using instrumentalist terms to whip up public emotion).
Whereas the worst you can say about branding and precision terms is that they're frequently clumsy and bland, instrumentalist language can affect the real world in often direct ways, and it's well worth interrogating the use of those terms to make their impact clear. Unfortunately, Packer fails to distinguish between the context of different kinds of language (it should be unsurprising that a policy paper uses clear if clumsy language, while a literary nonfiction book uses poetic and impactful imagery), and lumps all kinds of language style requirements under a general "equity language" heading, which is unhelpful and arguably misleading.
On a related note, I feel certain that mandating new words (or capitalization of existing words) does not make the world more just or the lives of its inhabitants more harmonious.
When I first read this post and commented on it, it had the same title as the underlying article. Why was it changed to something else that is not in the article at all?
Besides the fact that equity language makes your writing "mushy", my biggest problem is that it alienates part of your audience, including potential allies.
In the mid 2010's America tried to become "too woke, too fast" and the backlash inflicted trump and proud boys and a whole lot of socio-political conflict upon the country.
Equity language has the same polarizing effect. There are good smart decent honest people who are immediately turned off when they get bombarded with these semantic shenanigans.
Look into the entomology of the word "retarded." They keep changing the word, but whatever they replace it with becomes a pejorative, because the thing it's describing is intuitively understood to be negative. Preying upon people's sense of justice to promote censorship in the name of justice is... oh what's the word...
"The American Cancer Society advises that Latinx, along with the equally gender-neutral Latine, Latin@, and Latinu, “may or may not be fully embraced by older generations and may need additional explanation.”
Cool cool, I look forward as a white guy to explaining to a group of Spanish people why they are wrong and are really LatinX and I'm doing it for their protection.
Imagine being an immigrant and having to learn both English and then a made up filter created by well paid academics on top of it.
Just don't be racist, we don't need all these made up rules created by our betters.
A good friend of mine is a Spanish translator for a social services agency. She was telling me that the "latinx" thing is a real problem, because for people -- particularly older people -- who are not strong on their reading in the first place, they hit "LatinX" and genuinely have zero idea what that's supposed to mean.
So then time, energy, and goodwill gets wasted by having to explain to people what they "should" be calling themselves. The people she's talking to thinks the whole thing is just stupid, and is a thing that only white people care about.
But she also mentions that the younger generation of LatinX people do care, and often prefer the term. It's all a big mess and makes compassionate communication more difficult.
There's an extra layer of post-colonialism in this situation, but it's otherwise almost identical to the discussion happening in English about gendered pronouns. I think the following can both be true:
1. It's bad to tell people that they're using their native language badly if you're not a native speaker (especially in a scenario where there's a social power dynamic at play, like Spanish speakers trying to navigate discrimination in the US). People making things harder for immigrants without compassion for their challenges are probably making a mistake.
2. It's bad to say "this whole thing is just stupid" about a radical shift in language that's being deliberately embraced by younger people to break down discriminatory gender traditions, just because it's new and you're mildly confused about it. People making things harder for gender-nonconforming people are probably making a mistake.
Replace “younger people” with “a few younger people from a particular socioeconomic class” to be more accurate.
The eternal outraged youth will always find a few hobby horses to ride. Sometimes they lead to good things. This is a particularly smelly one, unfortunately.
It’s not bad to say “this whole thing is just stupid”. It’s just incomplete to say…it’s also musically ugly (language is a song of sorts) and culturally insulting. The intent is understandable, the linguistic implementation ridiculous. How about actual younger people developing another, more beautiful, culturally acceptable, word to achieve the same objective? Why continue to ride this malodorous hobby horse their elders forced between their legs? (I think that image is acceptably gender-nonconforming, and oddly appropriate.)
Anyway, according to la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española
the body responsible for the preservation of the Spanish language across the Spanish-speaking world, it isn’t a Spanish word (not acknowledged in the official dictionary)
BTW your phrase “mildly confused” is demeaning and insulting to readers who would genuinely struggle with incorporating this in their normal Spanish speech after decades of surviving without it. Bit ironic for someone concerned with “sensitivity” to write.
> The eternal outraged youth will always find a few hobby horses to ride. Sometimes they lead to good things. This is a particularly smelly one, unfortunately.
Nonbinary people face real discrimination, including but not limited to the dismissal of that fight as pointless outrage.
> it’s also musically ugly (language is a song of sorts)
This is ridiculous. Ugly-sounding words will always exist.
> and culturally insulting ... How about actual younger people developing another, more beautiful, culturally acceptable, word to achieve the same objective
What does any of this even mean? Real Spanish-speaking nonbinary young people did come up with a working solution. If you think it's too ugly sounding, fine, you get to have an opinion. If you think it shouldn't exist because it's too ugly sounding to you, honestly, fuck off. That's not a valid complaint.
I am aware of La Asociación. I understand that they literally make the rules. I need you to understand that they do not actually make the rules. Language is how people communicate. New words happen.
So on the one hand:
1. You don't like the sound of the word
2. An intrinsically conservative body hasn't yet recognized the word
On the other hand:
1. Nonbinary would simply like a word to refer to themselves because one doesn't exist.
But, I will concede that it was pretty rude of me to write "mildly confused". I shouldn't have been so uncharitable.
Nonbinary claim to exist, but no human to date has been able to produce viable sperm and eggs simultaneously.
There is a gender spectrum, agreed, but that doesn't mean we can't classify people into a singular description, and it surely doesn't mean we need to change entire languages to appease made up oppression.
Gay? Makes sense and no issues. No demand for language changes.
Nonbinary,trans? Totally made up because they want to 1. Signal their oppression status and therefore be part of the proletariat, or 2. A true mental issue is at foot. Neither are justifications for removing gendered language, and plastic surgery doesn't remove the biological differences between men and women.
The way I see it, this is going to have to go up to the Supreme Court, where it will be determined that either there is no difference between men and women for legal purposes, and therefore any separation is discrimination (goodbye gendered bathrooms, women's sports, women in engineering clubs, etc.), or we will in fact determine there are biological differences which justify separation in specific circumstances (sports, locker rooms), and no amount of plastic surgery will allow one to change their classification. Of course, that is only insofar as anyone else in those environments could tell (aka having your penis out in a women's locker room would be the tell).
The most amusing part about this is that literally the entire Spanish language is gendered, so we should probably change all words to 'x' replacements as well.
No more "los gatos"!
Lxs gatxs has so much more of a latin ring to it. (/s)
Spanish is being obliterated by lXs que lo hablan peor.
I think you have finally hit upon the solution to the pronoun problem.
In almost no case till I care about the express sexuality of the person for whom I am using a pronoun and I resent having to be forced to care about their self-centered nature, being self-centered myself.
However, instead of saying "he is wearing a weird hat", I can say "that cat is wearing a weird hat"
> But she also mentions that the younger generation of LatinX people do care, and often prefer the term. It's all a big mess and makes compassionate communication more difficult.
As someone who's interacted extensively with the Hispanic community in the United States, I just want to point out that the younger generation generally are not completely fluent in Spanish. They often can understand their parents perfectly well but have trouble actually speaking the language.
With that in mind, I'm still suspicious that preferring LatinX correlates primarily with fluency in Spanish rather than age.
This word is also an issue for screen readers that some visually impaired people rely on. The use of "x" in the end of words to signal gender neutering is a very debated topic in Portuguese-speaking forums and nowadays, most people tend to agree that it's not optimal because it's not universally intelligible.
Latin person, person from a Latin-heritage background, and such, although more verbose, are preferred.
so its "LA-TEEN-EK-EES" if we are respecting the Spanish language.
but in reality such silly butchering of a language isnt respecting the Spanish language in the first place. its merely more communism attempts to disrupt tradition & reform societies towards some immature high school wanna-be communist ends by people who've never lived in communist society.
> Imagine being an immigrant and having to learn both English and then a made up filter created by well paid academics on top of it.
Latine and LatinX both originate in (different geographical parts of) the spanish-first-language non-binary community, originally for use in Spanish, neither (AFAIK) by “well-paid academics”.
Latinu and Latin@ I’m less sure about, but wouldn’t be surprised if they are the same. While there’s legitimate debates about their use, the “created by white English-speaking academics and imposed on the people labelled by them” narrative is itself White-centering myth.
(OTOH, the anglicized, instead of mixed, pronunciation of LatinX is probably a White anglophone invention, the original is like latino/a with the final vowel removed, and with the english name of the letter “X” in its place.)
> Latine and LatinX both originate in (different geographical parts of) the spanish-first-language non-binary community, originally for use in Spanish, neither (AFAIK) by “well-paid academics”.
This is disputed, both sides have evidence for them and no one really knows.
I'm fluent in Spanish and have a hard time seeing a native Spanish speaker inventing LatinX. There's no good Spanish way to pronounce it, and inserting the English pronunciation of the letter 'x' is an odd choice for someone who's paying attention to identity politics—you would think they'd try to find an alternative that feels less anglo.
> I'm fluent in Spanish and have a hard time seeing a native Spanish speaker inventing LatinX. There's no good Spanish way to pronounce
There's no good English wsy to pronounce it either. Its a deliberate linguistic transgression. (Aesthetically, its why I personally like Latine better for the specific purpose of explicit inclusion of non-binary identities, but, being neither Latin nor non-binary, I don't weight my aesthetic preferences heavily on the issue.)
EDIT: Really, the problem of how to identify a group in a way inclusive of a subgroup to whose existence the broader group is at best, as s whole, ambivalent is the real issue, and the origin stories, and more to the point the attempt to impute malign motives based on particular origin stories, is a way to avoid reaching the issue.
It's still a deliberate linguistic transgression that borrows from English. Its English pronunciation ("Latin-eks") is awkward but not completely foreign.
It's a word designed to convey an inclusive Spanish-speaking identity. Why would a native Spanish speaker choose to invent a word that is far easier to pronounce in English than in Spanish?
> EDIT: Really, the problem of how to identify a group in a way inclusive of a subgroup to whose existence the broader group is at best, as s whole, ambivalent is the real issue, and the origin stories, and more to the point the attempt to impute malign motives based on particular origin stories, is a way to avoid reaching the issue.
No, the origin stories are very much part and parcel with the issue you're discussing. Either the Spanish community itself decided that it needed non-gendered words, or a bunch of white Americans decided the Spanish community needed non-gendered words.
If the drive to change Spanish did not originate with Spanish speakers, that is very much a concern, and grandstanding about including subgroups doesn't make it less of an imperialistic affair; it just comes off as "civilizing the savages".
> Either the Spanish community itself decided that it needed non-gendered words, or a bunch of white Americans decided the Spanish community needed non-gendered words.
Pretty sure that whatever identifier is right for the community of interest here, its not “the Spanish community”, and, irrespective of any debate about the origin of the terms, a subset of the community of interests has decided they need gender neutral terms and expressed preference for one or more of them. The question then is how to refer to the community as a whole, given the existence of a diversity of preferences.
>Latine and LatinX both originate in (different geographical parts of) the spanish-first-language
I doubt it. Having lived in Latin America, Latin American social norms are influenced by Catholicism and their societies are more conservative & traditionalist than the US and Europe.
The vast majority of people in Latin American countries (outside of Costa Rica & Chile) struggle with academic achievement (including literacy levels), adequate n utrition, enviornmental pollution.
To claim that they would put neo-marxist language changes before actual human needs (literacy, nutrition, environment) is a paltry claim and demonstrates a lack of experience with such societies.
> The vast majority of people in Latin American countries (outside of Costa Rica & Chile) struggle with academic achievement (including literacy levels), adequate n utrition, enviornmental pollution.
Do they?
• Literacy rate:
The average for 2020 based on 7 countries was 93.91 percent.The highest value was in Colombia: 95.64 percent and the lowest value was in El Salvador: 89.98 percent.
During 2019, 7.4% of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean lived with hunger
In 2019, almost a third of the population, 191 million people, were affected by moderate or severe food insecurity. Of these, 57.7 million, approximately 10% of the region's population, was severely food insecure
Between 2000 and 2018, higher education gross enrollment rates in the region more than doubled (increasing from 21 percent to 52 percent), making LAC the region with the third-highest average higher education enrollment rate in the world after North America with 86 percent, and Europe and Central Asia with 70 percent.
I was wondering... Have you lived in Latin America?
I've lived in Mexico, and visited Panama and Colombia.
I met very few educated citizens of those countries. The educated ones I did meet I felt were my equals, in terms of education. It was fantastic. The problem is that they're few and far between.
This article is from 2005, but may highlight the problem:
"Despite having three times the population of Argentina, Mexico produces about 2,000 fewer titles each year.
There are roughly 500 bookstores in Mexico, which translates into one for every 200,000 Mexicans, compared to a ratio of one to 35,000 in the US and one to 12,000 in Spain, according to the Mexican Booksellers Association.
A recent UNESCO study revealed that Mexicans read on average just over two books per year, while Swedes finish that many every month.""
These idiots should just use the word "Latin", which has been a normal word for centuries, instead of creating newspeak. Cultural Marxism doesn't even attempt to fix anything; it simply complicates and distorts pedestrian matters in the ivory towers it has penetrated, confusing the very people they're trying to "help".
So, this is a linguistic trojan horse. There's no proper use case for the term "LatinX" except to normalize the pronoun/trans agenda in the Spanish-speaking world.
I think the only sensible way to resist this is to poke fun at it. Humor did a great job at whittling away the absurdities of the Soviet Union, and it can do the same with this dystopian diversity nonsense.
It’s about class. Not in the usual American sense of how much money you make, but in the older sense of people thinking they are better sorts of people because they have the correct diction, education, religious views, professions, and so on.
I wonder how much if this is a result of corporate power fighting for ever-increasing economic inequality.
Class discussions about material wealth are excluded from the zeitgeist because they make the ultrarich people who control things uncomfortable and they don't want any discussion that could lead to change.
The war over language could perhaps be viewed as a way to enjoy the privileges of classism without the material requirements. It doesn't threaten capital, so it is amplified to drown out dissent.
> It doesn't threaten capital, so it is amplified to drown out dissent.
Wedge issues have been political footballs since the Reagan Era. Keep everyone riled up about something essentially trivial and no real economic changes happen.
A ~20 year old punk song goes "we are the queer / we are the whore / the ammunition / of the class war"
Indeed, and someone with money and a desire to prevent actual class conflict can get a lot of mileage out of encouraging tensions in the narrow, purely expressive sense you describe
That’s the Marxist analysis and there might be something to it, but I think the main driver is just human nature.
People like to feel superior. In one era that was “I’m a devout Christian from a good family unlike those other whores and sodomites,” in another it was “I’m a hard working industrialist unlike those lazy, old money playboys,” and now it’s “I’m a social worker dealing with the problems of BIPOC folx, unlike those finance bros that only care about money.”
Right, this is not a new phenomenon. Whether it's meaningful to pin it on human nature, I'm not sure; we consider ourselves unique as a species largely for our ability to recursively adapt the environment to ourselves, and then ourselves to the new state of affairs, and so on. We do generally prefer to think we're smart and good and well-informed and justified in our decisions, no doubt. We also usually prefer to keep what we have, which could be taken to support the traditional Marxist line.
All I'm saying is in an attention economy, one does well to reflect and ask who benefits from one's beliefs and their mode of expression. Substitute money for power, reputation, or any scarce social resource, and I think the analysis still tends to work, whether or not it echoes Marx.
There are new terms added to the lexicon every day for each persons individual experience. They can refer to themselves however they wish. Yet, it is not reasonable to think that unlimited possibilities can be assumed to be known and forced into the grammatical structure of language. It begins to drift into much broader domain of identify expression of simply how I wish to be known. Not every concept of how I want the world to see me could be expressed in a single grammatical construct of language and it is a futile effort to do so.
Spanish-speaking non-binary people are hopefully not so stupid as to conflate a lack of appetite to rewrite the entirety of Spanish grammar with a refusal to acknowledge someone's existence.
You will actually find that the vast majority of Spanish grammar is untouched by this change. The only change, actually, is that it will now be possible to acknowledge the existence of nonbinary people. Or do you think that binary gendered pronouns already do that job?
I can't tell if you're intentionally misconstruing here, but assuming you're not - you would not be in a position of explaining to Spanish people why they are wrong and are really one thing or another (Also I assume you mean hispanic people, or Spanish-speaking people?) You'd be explaining the reasoning behind the modern use of the term, and allowing them to decide for themselves how to engage with it.
The idea isn't to design a new armband that you require people of a particular group to wear each week - the idea is to ask those people what they want, and then respect them when they answer you.
If someone says they identify as Latinx, then you identify them as Latinx. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. It's not about the enforcement of identity, *it's about the deconstruction of traditionally enforced identities in the first place*, it's about exploring the creation of new identities outside of the bounds of conservative tradition.
“may or may not be fully embraced by older generations and may need additional explanation.”
I directly quoted the article that specifically said additional explanation had to be made.
"If someone says they identify as Latinx, then you identify them as Latinx" except that's not what the article says. It discussed how LatinX is often used as the default in progressive language.
As a Hispanic American, I very regularly tell people I am Latino and that Latinx is incredibly offensive to my heritage. I'm in my 30s and the younger people I know also find it offensive.
maybe instead of arguing about what non-gendered term we should call this group of people we should instead admit that 'latino' is a projection onto a wide variety of people that have different cultural backgrounds but roughly share a language and sometimes a skin tone.
Or maybe we should tell people who started latinx garbage and started the arguing to fuck off and
> we should instead admit that 'latino' is a projection onto a wide variety of people that have different cultural backgrounds but roughly share a language and sometimes a skin tone.
instead of inventing more names to divide people by, just... not ?
I guess I should go back to referring to all people from SE Asia as Chinese since my American friends are just too lazy and dismissive to bother with people's actual nationality and prefer broad and vague terms for the other.
If it's blissful ignorance where someone doesn't know the how gendered pronouns work, that's not a problem.
If it's someone who is intentionally adding an X to the end because of some perceived gender nonsense, then that's offensive.
Our language doesn't need fixing, that's just the way it is. This whole latinx is literal cultural imperialism. It's not about not understanding the meaning of using these terms, it's the fact that it suggests that our entire language should be changed to be more "inclusive".
You clearly don't understand how the language works. Let me give you an example. "The latinx" "La/El latinx", where La(F) -> '-a' and El(M) for '-o', how do you replace that? Everything is gendered and this is not restricted to just Spanish.
Americans can continue to use latinx, fine, but don't impose that onto natives because that just doesn't make sense in their native language. And saying, "we need to educate the older generation" is arrogant and disrespectful, we understand it quite well.
How would you feel if people of another race, especially one that has historically oppressed yours decided they knew better than you and decided to change the rules as to how you were referred and if you objected told you it was for your protection?
Latine and LatinX don't come from “people of a different race” than those it applies to (even without considering the artificial race/ethnicity distinction.)
But why is it so offensive? All I see is knee-jerk reactions giving supposed racist motives to the term, when it's been established that this term originated with native Spanish speakers!
I personally think that choosing 'x' was a poor choice, and it's basically unpronounceable by everyone in both Spanish and English. But making up supposed racist origins is a bit much.
> All I see is knee-jerk reactions giving supposed racist motives to the term, when it's been established that this term originated with native Spanish speakers!
Do you have a credible source for this claim? All I’ve ever seen are vague assertions it originated “organically” in the early 2000s.
Far from it, the term disregards the history and linguistic heritage of my mother tongue for the sensibilities of white people, who for whatever reason have problems accepting feminine and masculine word pronunciations.
Just because white people like rewriting their history and language doesn't mean they have a right to rewrite mine.
If you find that inflammatory or offensive, now you know how I feel.
> Far from it, the term disregards the history and linguistic heritage of my mother tongue for the sensibilities of white people
It was created by native apeakers of your mother tongue, as a conscious rejection of the way they saw it—their mother tongue—as erasing, or at least obstructing communication of, their gender identity.
> I swear you linguistic imperialists are insufferable.
The funny thing is that I haven’t even mentioned my preference for a label the group in question in this discussion.
> Leave your hands off of my language and butcher up your own mother tongue.
While at least some of the labels under discussion originate in your language and its community of speakers, the discussion is about use in English. So unless your mother tongue is English, no one's hands are, metaphorically, on it in this discussion.
So, I guess to be consistent, keep your “linguistic imperialism” to yourself...
[citation needed]
We have no idea where the term originated from. Stop lying and posting this BS because your incessent need to belabor your otherwise incorrect point proves otherwise.
> So, I guess to be consistent, keep your “linguistic imperialism” to yourself...
> Who said these people represented the general Spanish-speaking population?
That's a very good question. Since you appear to be arguing against that strawman, tell us, who said that?
EDIT: My point is, if we can acknowledge that, like Hispanic and Latino and Latino/Latina (each of which are strongly objected to by some in the community, preferred by others, and tolerated but neither preferred nor objected to by others when talking about the broader group inclusively) these are preferred identity labels of part of the community which is being addressed, we can then talk about how to address a community with internal divisions over preferred identity label, when one specifically wants to address the whole group and not just those who favor a particular label. But we can’t even get to that point as long as we pretend that this is just an external imposition unconnected to preferences expressed within the population described.
I'm asking because I genuinely don't know who decided that this group should make the call regarding how the general population is referred to, especially that the general population is disregarded in this matter in favour of the mentioned group?
EDIT: to elaborate: I take issue to the fact that this word is used to describe not just people who wanted to be referred to like that, but the general population.
> I take issue to the fact that this word is used to describe not just people who wanted to be referred to like that, but the general population.
This I agree with. This is a problem. And, in fact, we’ve been through and addressed almost this exact same problem with the inherently gendered nature (and default-male gender) of Spanish-derived demonyms and how that conflicts with some people’s gender identity before – and the problem of conflicts of preferred identity label for reasons other than gender – before. And mostly, what was done when addressing a group of mixed demonym preference with no single mutually-acceptable one was use multiple, joined with a slash (or, sometimes, here they differed only by a suffix, to separate the alternate suffixes with a slash.)
Actual, rather than performative, inclusion means not imposing a shared label just because you view the group as one for your purposes.
From what I've found there is no definite proof of it's origin. Saying whites or Latinos created it has equal validity. Can you provide your source? Not attempting a gotcha here, just curious
In that first paragraph, you can also read it as a society for the study of the American Cancer, and it also makes sense. Unfortunately, it metastasized and any connected tissue gets infected as well.
I guess most immigrants don't need to learn the shibboleths, unless they suddenly get into money and want to join the upper class. It's about discriminating between the commoners and the rulers, that's why it constantly evolves, too. Need to regularly release new ciphers if you're communicating in the open with a trivial cryptography.
I am so sorry if this pedantic, but I think it's an important distinction to make.
Both Hispanic and Latino are not races but rather an ethnic group. The race of people who belong to the Hispanic and Latino ethnic groups varies by country and even at the individual. One can have predominately African ancestry, predominately European ancestry, or predominately indigenous ancestry, while all belong to the same ethnic group of Hispanic or Latino.
I do not bring up this point to try and detract from the legitimate discrimination and oppression that many individuals and groups in the Hispanic and Latino community face.
People of Jewish heritage belong to what is known as an ethno-religious group. The idea that "Jews are a race" was either first proposed, or at least heavily perpetuated by the Nazis, and it is still considered offensive to refer to people of Jewish heritage as belonging to a different race.
Regardless, the idea of race is a social construct with absolutely zero biological or scientific basis behind it. There is only one "race", and it's the "Human Race."
In an ideal world, we would not even need to make these distinctions because we are all Homo Sapiens -- we have no subspecies. Maybe one day we can achieve this world if we stop the pathetic, needless, and disgusting hatred for our fellow man.
As I understand it, Middle Eastern (including Egypt). people are considered "white" by the US Census (for those unaware).
If natively from Morocco/Egypt/Perhaps more, would you not be considered Mizrahi or are you talking like European ancestory? Not like any of this matters in the absolute slightest at the end of the day.
I, myself, have 0% < x < 25% Sephardi with another 0% < x < 25% Ashkenazi heritage. My other half is pure Wonderbread levels of European whiteness.
Apparently, I'm a mutt because my ancestors liked to travel and liked to bang whatever population was there when they arrived (I am kidding, this goes for most people).
My great grandparents fled Russia to South Africa during the pogroms. Ancestry wise I'm 99% Ashkenazi Jew (not a lot of mixing going on in my background I guess) and 1% (I can't remember what the test said, it's been years since I looked but it was a couple different ones). I kind of ended that by marrying into an Irish family and having kids that look like leprechauns :)
>Traditionally, Prescriptivists tend to be political conservatives and Descriptivists tend to be liberals. But today’s most powerful influence on the norms of public English is actually a stern and exacting form of liberal Prescriptivism. I refer here to Politically Correct English (PCE), under whose conventions failing students become “high-potential” students and poor people “economically disadvantaged” and people in wheelchairs “differently abled” and a sentence like “White English and Black English are different, and you better learn White English or you’re not going to get good grades” is not blunt but “insensitive.” Although it’s common to make jokes about PCE (referring to ugly people as “aesthetically challenged” and so on), be advised that Politically Correct English’s various pre- and proscriptions are taken very seriously indeed by colleges and corporations and government agencies, whose institutional dialects now evolve under the beady scrutiny of a whole new kind of Language Police.
>From one perspective, the rise of PCE evinces a kind of Lenin-to-Stalinesque irony. That is, the same ideological principles that informed the original Descriptivist revolution — namely, the rejections of traditional authority (born of Vietnam) and of traditional inequality (born of the civil rights movement) — have now actually produced a far more inflexible Prescriptivism, one largely unencumbered by tradition or complexity and backed by the threat of real-world sanctions (termination, litigation) for those who fail to conform. This is funny in a dark way, maybe, and it’s true that most criticisms of PCE seem to consist in making fun of its trendiness or vapidity. This reviewer’s own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just silly but ideologically confused and harmful to its own cause.
- David Foster Wallace, Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage, 2001
English words rarely describe absolute facts: adjectives and adverbs especially. They are often ambiguous if not regionally- and personally-tinted with a history of meanings that vary between people by background and culture.
Yes, language should never change. All used languages have been continually changing for their entire hundreds- or thousands-of-years' lifespan, but they should STOP changing, right around the year I was in college. Music, too! What's with all this new awful music! In the entire history of all humanity, music was best right around when I was in college! I used to be with it, and I can still be with it, as long as they just stop trying to change everything! Everything has gone downhill since the exact specific year that exactly specifically I was in college! Change has been a constant for two hundred thousand years of human history, but I DEMAND it stop as of 2006!!
The topic is your comment, and my reply is quite on topic.
> Let's remain using the OED from circa 2006
You literally said the English language, which has been evolving for over a thousand years, should stop changing as of 2006. That's what you said. You don't like these new words because you don't want the world to change from how it was in your own personal golden years. It's fine, it happens to everyone; I'm just pointing out that that's the person you've become now. You're happy with all the "social justice movements" that happened from 100,000 BCE up to 2006 because those were either history, or your generation's causes. Now you're unhappy with "social justice" (your scare quotes) because it's all those liberal youths who are doing it. Since that covers the large majority of all backlash against "wokeism", I'd say it's quite on topic.
My takeaway from the article was that rather than spending lots of cognitive effort/ capital on language, we should invest in improving access for the disabledn and marginalized, actually stand up for the poor, etc.
For people like me that come to look at the discussion. Quick TL;DR - lots of "I agree, too much wokeness" from people that chose not to get the point. BUT also exciting conversations like "how can I start in trying to make my web material more accessible for the blind." HN community has some really great contributors.
Who's banning whom, though? If I decide to call a pregnant woman a "person with pregnancy" and someone jumps down my throat and screams, "she's a PREGNANT! WOMAN!!" who's doing the language policing here? If I've adopted some trendy equity lingo, that's on me. I'm not telling you what to call her, why are you insisting that I call her by the god-given American apple pie Christian traditional term? I mean, I can fairly guess why, because "person with pregancy" probably sounds icky, performative, and vaguely dehumanizing to you. But if you are a Defender of Free Speech, then you should be supporting my right to utter the terms I prefer from my own mouth, as long as I don't try to force those words into yours. And yes I know there are plenty of "progressive" types that will try to force people to use socially correct speech, but Packer's article is complaining about equity language guides being used by corporations, an entirely different phenomenon. Why is he bent out of shape about this? I don't have a problem with Sierra Club enforcing stylistic etiquette in their own writings, as long as I myself not being compelled to conform with their corporate judgment call. Polite language changes over time, and it's reasonable for companies to adapt to that. I'm old enough to have heard tales of when "pregnant" wasn't used in polite company at all, and people instead said, "she's with child."
Packer recognizes this on some level, stating, "The battle against euphemism and cliché is long-standing and, mostly, a losing one." But I think he's a bit off with his next assertion: "What’s new and perhaps more threatening about equity language is the special kind of pressure it brings to bear. The conformity it demands isn’t just bureaucratic; it’s moral." No, euphemism has always been moral. What's new now is that everyone's a publisher now thanks to social media. So it's not just Emily Post, The Hays Code, the US Congress, and other big gatekeepers determining by fiat what counts as offensive, and the rest of us passively falling into line. Now every loser gets to proclaim to the world how offended they are, and due to the nature of social media, the more controversial and theatrical their level of offense is, the more engagement they will receive. Couple that with modern tribalism where people have to prove their loyalty by completely accepting all tenets of their tribe and utterly rejecting all tenets of the opposing tribe.
Personal anecdote: I was raised to believe that "the n-word" was inherently offensive. It was never spoken in my house, and to this day I don't use it in casual conversation. But I also loved the work of John Lennon. He had an album which featured a song entitled "Woman is the N*** of the World." The word was spelled out on the album cover and sung in the lyrics. When I was young I would feel hot and embarrassed listening to that track, so I would generally skip it. But I understood and appreciated the sentiment behind it. Even at a young age I could separate his laudable intentions from the potential inappropriateness of his methods. Anyway, it would never have occurred to me to stop listening to Lennon entirely just because of one cringey song. Much less to call radio stations or whatever and try to get them to stop playing his music. It's not that I don't get highly offended over people saying the N-word. I do. I just believe that, although we should strive not to be needlessly offensive, in the hierarchy of things that are wrong with the world, "getting offended" is pretty far down. Thus I can't get behind hair trigger "social justice" warriors who want to destroy the lives of everyone who in their estimation holds shitty personal beliefs. But what's even worse are the "free speech" warriors who with no sense of irony will attempt to enact laws banning the speech and ideas of their opponents.
Banning words, burning books, shadowbanning, etc.. history shows us where it goes and what kind of people get behind it. The path to hell is paved with good intentions.
Could you help me, I have a question: who should define how group of persons should be called?
* Group that outside of the group
* Majority of the group
* Minority of the group
* Any of the above when they think its for inclusion
?
Seriously though, you are pressed about other people using a term you don't use even though you're free to say Latino or Hispanic as much as you want.
The context matters immensely: The Sierra Club, a lobbyist group, conducts their work with politicians and government officials who are not pressed by inclusive language.
