Banning words won’t make the world more just
theatlantic.com
Banning words won’t make the world more just
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Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#2The 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?
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#3Is 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.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#4The 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…
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.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#5Is 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.
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.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#6"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.
It's all so tiresome.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#7Is 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.
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.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#8It can often depend on the purpose you're writing for. Do you want to be bland, professional, and as inoffensive as possible? Great.
In contrast, I think the highlighted excerpt really summed up the article well.
> Good writing—vivid imagery, strong statements—will hurt, because it’s bound to convey painful truths.
Writing poetry, songs, fiction, and impactfull writing with equity language will always feel hollow.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#9The 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.
Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just
#10Is 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.
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?