251–260 of 1001 posts
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…
A pregnant person is a woman.
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, i…
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…
> 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 origina…
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 eve…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 taun…
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 Afric…
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…
A pregnant person is a woman.
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 fashi…
It’s generally better to avoid taking the bait when someone is trying to pick a fight with you.
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.
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.
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).