Some of these seem like legitimate improvements. A lot are inconsequential (e.g. "homeless person" vs "a person without a home"). But some are genuinely degrading our ability to communicate. E.g. "paraplegic" and "quadriplegic" should both be replaced with: "person with a spinal cord injury, person who is paralyzed" But this lacks the old term that distinguished paralysis below the waist with paralysis below the neck. A non-powered wheelchair is only going to help the former. Not to mention "person with a spinal cord injury severing the nerves to their legs, but not their arms" is a bit of a mouthful. If only there were a pair of words, perhaps using the roots to denote 2 and 4, that could convey these two things more concisely...
Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
271–280 of 1001 posts
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#272The inclusion of "Hispanic => Latinx" is staggering because: - The vast majority of Hispanic people don't like "Latinx" - "Latinx" was invented to avoid gendered words like "Latino", and "Hispanic" isn't gendered - It's listed under "imprecise language", but "Latinx" isn't any more precise. It's so ironic that "colonialism" has now come to mean anything progressive academics don't like, but telling a minority group w…
New Hispanic rule: you can't use "LatinX" unless you agree to be called "GringX". You can try to impose something if you accept another random imposition in return, equivalent exchange style.
BTW, GringX is pronounced as GriguEquis.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#273The inclusion of "Hispanic => Latinx" is staggering because: - The vast majority of Hispanic people don't like "Latinx" - "Latinx" was invented to avoid gendered words like "Latino", and "Hispanic" isn't gendered - It's listed under "imprecise language", but "Latinx" isn't any more precise. It's so ironic that "colonialism" has now come to mean anything progressive academics don't like, but telling a minority group w…
Anecdotally, the vast majority of Latinos I know hate the term as a virtue signal purity test invented by academics expressing guilt for their whiteness.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#274I don’t think I had seen those before: tarball [use instead: tar archive] While the term refers to an archive that has been created with the tar command, it can be negatively associated with the pejorative term tarbaby. whitespace [use instead: empty space] Assigns value connotations based on color (white = good), an act which is subconsciously racialized. Some of the “solutions” are funny: Hispanic [use instead: Lat…
Wut?
They jumped the shark(tm) on tarball.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#275They apparently spider and scan their own websites for "harmful" language: I just find this wild. How and when did language itself become so dangerous to this degree? Along with most adults in my social circle, I care and think about my health, my family, my friends, my work, my dog, my environment, my community, etc. I could not give a flying fuck about language policing. Language isn't going to protect me on my bik…
Fashions will change and fade, and find fault with every word like grasping at straws to find something to be offended over.
I'm sorry, that term is now racist: grasping at threads.
I'm sorry, that term is now sexist: grasping at leaves.
Ad infinium.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#276Some of these are very strange to me - is really preferable (or even appropriate) to say that someone is devoted to heroin instead of addicted?
Many of the examples appear to be ignorant and even outright offensive-- but in that case I believe it's suggesting an alternative usage for non-addiction contexts. E.g. Don't say that you're addicted to CheezePuffs(tm) say you're ... devoted. Uh well not the best but you get my point. The motivation for that one is to avoid conflating something someone likes a lot with heroin like addiction.
thanks for explaining, that actually makes some sense (if you accept the premise that we should change words that people might be offended by).. but then don't you immediately run into the problem of deciding which addictions are real and which are trivial?
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#277Taking issue with any word with the word "man" in it is pretty dumb. Specifically "mankind" they suggest using the word "humankind". So if everyone starts using this word eventually slang will shorten it to "mankind" which means the same exact thing anyway...
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#278Died by suicide? Suicide is a self-inflicted act; committed suicide is correct - and I say this as a man living on the edge. To diminish that is to refuse to accept the underlying cause, which is a bad fucking way to stop it from happening again (or at least to someone else). This whole damned list is retarded. Most of the elements aren't even accurate; they're euphemisms. Someone with OCD isn't 'detail-oriented' the…
I think you have a point, but on the other hand consider “stand-up meeting.” If my team included a person who used a wheelchair, I am highly confident that my team and I would not call our daily scrum a daily stand-up.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#279You know a society maybe unraveling when a duopoly of unreason competes for mindshare.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#280Yeah, don’t use ‘he’ or ‘she’ in case someone takes offense.
Orwell wrote that this politispeak was used to make palatable the most disturbing actions. We see it more and more every day.