Banning words won’t make the world more just • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 9:57 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #121

dragonwriter wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

> 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.

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

#182

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 10:34 PM UTC

RichEO wrote: post #176

blahblah1234567 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 lite…

You’ve commented a number of times on this post, and every time you relate equity language to communism/Marxism. I’m struggling to follow your reasoning. What does communism have to do with anything?

[deleted]

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

#183

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 10:48 PM UTC

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…

How about mentality retarded -> special so that now "special" is the cruelest taunt on the schoolyard?

As for "defund the police" I think I'm the only one who remembers the Reaganite "defund the left" slogan

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/11/opinion/defund-the-left.h...

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.

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

#184

Post by hprotagonist » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 10:49 PM UTC

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.

"Authority and American Usage"

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

#185

Post by hprotagonist » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 10:50 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #29

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…

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 people she's talking to thinks the whole thing is just stupid, and is a thing that only white people care about.

https://www.newsweek.com/call-latinx-what-it-lexical-imperia...

sorry, newsweek's a bit of rag these days, but it's where i happened to find the essay republished.

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

#186

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 10:58 PM UTC

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”.

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.

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

#187

Post by cassianoleal » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 11:25 PM UTC

blahblah1234567 wrote: post #148

hirvi74 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "LatinX" How is such a word pronounced? Is it "Latin" + "ex" or is it "La" + "tinx" (-inx like in Sphinx)?

X is pronounces EK-EES in Spanish. 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.

I don't think you understand the meaning of the word "communist".

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

#188

Post by feoren » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 11:27 PM UTC

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #158

feoren wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

TFA is about "equity language". Let's stay on topic.

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.

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

#189

Post by onecommentman » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 11:28 PM UTC

soiler wrote: post #66

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…

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…

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

https://www.asale.org/la-asociacion

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)

https://dle.rae.es/Latinx

Santiago!

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.

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

#190

Post by ilyt » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 11:37 PM UTC

convolvatron wrote: post #122

ilyt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could just call them asians as is widely accepted since forever.

There is nothing wrong with using more generic term if you don't know exact nationality of the person.