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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

#271

Post by crazygringo »

farnsworth wrote: post #230

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…

Was there a time when adults referred to each other by Mr. and Mrs. in regular spoken conversation? Like if you were asking a work colleague where another colleague was, it was normal to say "Where is Mr. Smith?" rather than "Where is Mark?"

Since in my lifetime I've only known calling everyone by their first name (except, like you say, teachers in childhood), I'm curious when the change occurred and how.

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

#272

Post by jrmg »

rayiner wrote: post #233

The Sierra Club guide is hilarious: https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/default/files/sce-authors/u... . > People of color” has in the past served as a collective term for people who are not white. A preferred term today is “BIPOC” referring to Black, Indigenous and people of color, which provides a unifying term for ease of use while still acknowledging the reality that Black and Indigenous people in the United States…

Are you aghast at the number of points?

It’s referring to two points from “The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation”, which is understandably (I hope), a large (and respected!) guide.

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

#273

Post by cassonmars »

jurassic wrote: post #54

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…

I'm trans myself and this language policing game is insane. The most surreal part about it is it's rarely anyone allegedly impacted by it who is actually asking for these things.

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

#274

Post by zmgsabst »

Spivak wrote: post #239
8note wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least, the person that birthed you is your mother. I'd question the association between mother and woman, rather than mother and birth

Thank you, I swear half the time I can’t figure out if people are genuinely confused by inclusive language or if they confuse it on purpose just to get riled up. It’s the same with people who menstruate — not only for trans men but for post menopausal women, women who’ve had hysterectomies, or are otherwise have amenorrhea.

No — people are just aware that humans are sexually dimorphic and don’t appreciate people demanding they not use language that accurately describes the peaks of a bimodal distribution because there’s a small percentage of outliers. Mammals in general are sexually dimorphic.

Particularly when that language control is transparently used for power seeking.

We don’t need to shape every utterance around outliers — that’s pathological and stifles discussion.

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

#275

Post by amluto »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #266

> Urban, vibrant, hardworking, and brown bag all crash to earth for subtle racism. I'm seriously trying to figure out the riddle of how any of these terms are remotely racial.

I’ll give it a try, not necessarily successfully:

Urban, in the sense of urban or inner city youth, might be a reference to black children. (Or it might not. And one might actually be referencing urban things in the sense of not suburban or rural.)

Vibrant: makes, ahem, people living with color blindness feel marginalized.

Hardworking: I’m struggling to come up with something even as credible as the last two. Maybe it’s ableist: some people can’t work hard.

Brown bag: I’m guessing this is in a similar category to “tarball” from the rather regrettable list out of Stanford recently: it has nothing whatsoever to do with equity or inequity, but one might imagine an alternative etymology in which it has an inequitable meaning, connotation or origin. So brown bag could somehow be about brown people, even though as far as I can tell, neither the origin of the phrase nor any common uses are at all related to skin color.

At this rate, we risk running out of English words. Fortunately, English has a lot of words :)

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

#276

Post by [deleted] »

jurassic wrote: post #54

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…

[deleted]

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

#277

Post by dimva »

The ever-changing euphemistic language seems to me like mostly just a new way to be a hipster. The new vocabulary is a shibboleth to distinguish people who got the right sort of education from the right sort of places. Your knowledge of all the proper euphemisms to use sets you apart from the uneducated rubes.

The problem is, it sets you apart from the people you're allegedly trying to help, given that the marginalized are rarely those who got an elite education at an elite institution. This is how Republicans, a coalition of rich tax-avoiders and poorer people resenting the contempt of the elites, stay in power. And their political program - slashing benefits, cutting social services - hurts marginalized people the most.

By creating a way to be a "good person" that only the most hip and educated people can follow, the language policers are creating a rift between themselves and the people they are trying to help, preventing a political coalition from forming that would be able to pass helpful policies.

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

#278

Post by stephen_g »

jurassic wrote: post #54

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…

I think the “people-first language” is actually kind of dumb in a lot of cases. Because the idea behind it is not really sound.

Shall I now say I have to call a “person who performs plumbing work” to fix my drain because calling them a plumber indicates that they have no worth outside their job? No, that’s not how language has ever worked.

Basically for “people-first language” to exist, you have to create a problem that didn’t exist before to come up with it as a solution.

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

#279

Post by visarga »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #251
HyperSane wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pregnant person is a woman.

[flagged]

> otherwise a trans man can get pregnant

Should everyone take care to account for the most improbable interpretations, even unintended ones? Thanks for providing a good sample of equity language. Feels like being dictated by an elite to the masses.

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

#280

Post by alar44 »

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…

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