391–400 of 1001 posts
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It can’t be that complex if virtually every human society came up with two distinct words to express the concepts. It’s only complicated if you start from the premise that language must accord the same importance to the experience of small minorities as to the experience of the overwhelming majority.
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What was it, 10 to 20 years ago, people started to be noticeably nervous when they were coming near a description of my disability. It used to be so simple. I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short. But all of a sudden, people external to the community started to fumble around with "visually challenged", and all the nonsense variations of that in m…
I was going to recommend a masterpiece of cinema to you called Blind Fury: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Fury The realization that it would be pointless, alas, came to me too late. Let me just give you a taste: While serving in Vietnam, American soldier Nick Parker was blinded by a mortar explosion. Rescued by local villagers, he recovered his health and, though he remains blind, was trained to master his other…
As I am embedded in a visual culture, I do consume movies from time to time, so there is actually no reason to be self-conscious about mentioning media products like that...
Given time, “woke” will evolve into its own dialect completely incomprehensible to common language. Every persons unique experience becomes new terms to be added to the lexicon. A burden of irrelevant knowledge for the rest of society to navigate in order to communicate.
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Isn't that mostly a result of how much you want to focus on the outliers? XX male syndrome is estimated to exists in 1:20000 - 1:30000 people. It's so rare that we have a name for it. Somewhat like rebutting to what a car is by arguing that a handful of cars through history actually had two wheels. And yes, I'm aware that XX syndrome isn't the only outlier but the point still stands.
>Isn't that mostly a result of how much you want to focus on the outliers? I don't want to focus on the outliers. I want to focus on the fact that we're enforcing a binary distinction when there are outliers.
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.
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Isn't that mostly a result of how much you want to focus on the outliers? XX male syndrome is estimated to exists in 1:20000 - 1:30000 people. It's so rare that we have a name for it. Somewhat like rebutting to what a car is by arguing that a handful of cars through history actually had two wheels. And yes, I'm aware that XX syndrome isn't the only outlier but the point still stands.
>Isn't that mostly a result of how much you want to focus on the outliers? I don't want to focus on the outliers. I want to focus on the fact that we're enforcing a binary distinction when there are outliers.
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> For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" Calling my wife a "birthing person" just made her feel like some gross vessel for having a baby. We purposefully chose providers that didn't use that language. "Chestfeeding" is another one that's cropping up and makes zero sense. Men have breasts, so breastfeeding is already gender-neutral. But it's seen as female-centric so out th…
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Woman: Adult Human with XX sex Chromosomes
What was it, 10 to 20 years ago, people started to be noticeably nervous when they were coming near a description of my disability. It used to be so simple. I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short. But all of a sudden, people external to the community started to fumble around with "visually challenged", and all the nonsense variations of that in m…
People appropriating your disability to excuse their bullying has led to what is effectively PTSD dealing with the groups whose voice was appropriated.
That’s sad — and has impacted not only disabled people, but race and gender relations.
I miss 10-20 years ago, when people were people rather than defined by protected class.
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 completely understand the “gender is social and not biological” concept, and I believe it is true to a large degree. But this is not the case: if you are able to bear a child, then by definition you are female and a woman in the biological sense.
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…
It seems to me that one of the issues is that the (more extreme) woke culture has put the entire burden of communication on the speakers rather than the listeners. Is not enough that you intend to offend, or that you say something that offends someone, is whether something that you say could possibly offend someone, even if you didn't have the slightest intentions. On the other say the listeners are free to interpret…