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Banning words won’t make the world more just

theatlantic.com

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Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#121

Post by lolinder »

dragonwriter wrote: post #115
lolinder wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 inserti…

> 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 a…

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".

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#122

Post by convolvatron »

ilyt wrote: post #74
convolvatron wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#123

Post by ryandrake »

scarmig wrote: post #9

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 o…

> The euphemism treadmill is a running joke,

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.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#124

Post by jredwards »

wonderwonder wrote: post #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…

Spanish people are not Latino (or Latina, or Latinx). Latino means from Latin-America (or descended from people who are).

Hispanic means from a Spanish-speaking country.

Spanish people are Hispanic, but not Latino.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#125

Post by 0xbadc0de5 »

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.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#126

Post by feoren »

Animats wrote: post #23

Is this going anywhere outside the US? 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 o…

> 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.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#127

Post by cwkoss »

bradleyjg wrote: post #20
wonderwonder wrote: post #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…

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.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#128

Post by dragonwriter »

throwawayapples wrote: post #100
JohnFen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" b…

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.

> No more "los gatos"!

Do you often use “cats” to describe a particular group of humans, whise gender identity you are concerned about including?

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#129

Post by feoren »

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #21

Let's just not create any new words / neologisms for "social justice" purposes. To be clear, no newspeak. Let's remain using the OED from circa 2006.

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!!

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#130

Post by cwkoss »

throwawayapples wrote: post #100
JohnFen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" b…

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.

There is an amusing and depressing irony to a colonizer's language being re-colonized by another colonizer.
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