251–260 of 429 posts
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"Previously owned automobiles" just got shortened to "pre-owned" and that's all over the place today, and I daresay it's seeped into things other than cars.
Upcycled is the latest, including upcycled food https://www.upcycledfood.org/
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For literally thousands of years humans personally slaughtered animals and had no problem with it. But you assume people wouldn’t do this without some fanciful words for it. Based on what? Wishful thinking?
I think you are correct. People will be fine with the general idea of killing animals. But. In those thousand of years, was the meat produced the same way? What type of antibiotics alternative were our elders using to prevent sickness in large groups of animals? Did they raised them squeezed next to each other without moving for their all life? Where our forefathers feeding a purée of the dead one to the next generat…
TBH what I notice more of these days is geopolitical terms that mean the exact same thing, but one has a negative and one has a positive connotation:
Regime VS Government
Separatist VS Independent
Irredentist VS Unifying
Coup VS Ousting
Terrorist VS Armed Wing
Political VS Democratic
Rioter VS Protester
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> Much more people would have been vegans or they would be much more indifferent to violence if every pack of meat had a QR code to a video showing the life and processing of that particular animal. I think more people would be pushing for animal welfare and proper slaughtering/raising conditions if this was done, even if they still ate meat.
> I think more people would be pushing for animal welfare and proper slaughtering/raising conditions if this was done, even if they still ate meat. Why does animal welfare matter if at the end they will end up as food anyway? Not trolling, I legitimately want to understand. From my point of view, livestock is just food, that happens to be in a temporary living state, before being ultimately eaten. As an end consumer,…
Heavily stressing animal's makes the meat taste worse ends up all gamey.
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A great recent example is everyone changing whitelist/blacklist to allowlist/blocklist because Americans are so fucking obsessed with race politics that they see it absolutely everywhere
Allowlist/blocklist is more clear and accurate tho? The software community loves to complain about this stuff like the change from master to main branch but I always get the sense that people just liked to complain rather than any meaningful objection.
The reason is because people use it for whatever agenda fits. It's a Rorschach.
Cons see these quotes and think it's applicable to "PC culture" and think George Carlin would tell kids to toughen up.
Libs see these quotes and think it's applicable to "truthiness" and the post-truth world the alt-right spins.
Truth is, George Carlin died in 2008. He missed the entire Obama years and the Trump era. We have no idea what he would've said or thought about the evolution of culture, of cancel culture, of Trump, of trans rights, on Ukraine.
Learn from the man what you want, but don't try to find quotes from 2001 and go "Hey wow look, it almost looks like he's talking about " here.
Just for fun, from the first example: * Toilet paper -> bathroom tissue --- sure, a softening of the language. * Sneakers -> running shoes --- not a softening; sneakers aren't the same as running shoes, and "sneaker" was a regionalism (it's "gym shoe" where I grew up). * False teeth -> dental appliance --- a softening, though a welcome one in this case. * Medicine -> medication --- a softening (a nominalization of a…
>* Medicine -> medication --- a softening (a nominalization of a denominalization, at that!). Down with medication! I think the extra layer adds a shade of meaning here. Medication is something you take because a health professional wants to medicate you with it. Medicine is just anything that might make you better. That's why we still talk about "natural medicine" or "alternative medicine" rather than "alternative m…
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A great recent example is everyone changing whitelist/blacklist to allowlist/blocklist because Americans are so fucking obsessed with race politics that they see it absolutely everywhere
Allowlist/blocklist is more clear and accurate tho? The software community loves to complain about this stuff like the change from master to main branch but I always get the sense that people just liked to complain rather than any meaningful objection.
No it's not, not at all. Is "blocklist" a list of file system blocks? Bitcoin or other crypro blocks?
As someone who speaks English as a second language, the first time I read "whitelist/blacklist", I simply looked them up in a translation dictionary and immediately understood what they mean. Those are actual words with definitions spanning centuries.
>The software community loves to complain about this stuff like the change from master to main branch but I always get the sense that people just liked to complain rather than any meaningful objection.
Yes we love to complain, but there were many meaningful objections that were ignored. There was a reddit outage that occurred due to the madness around "inclusive language" and removing the word "master": https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditEng/comments/11xx5o0/you_brok...
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I think the more heinous "conservative" (as you put it) changes are related to physical conditions and the euphemism treadmill. George Carlins "soft language" specifically spells out an example; shell-shock, battle fatigue -> Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I think making a term so long that it becomes an acronym is definitely part of this. The most up-to-the-minute example I can think of is "CSAM" which removes all…
> George Carlins "soft language" specifically spells out an example; shell-shock, battle fatigue -> Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I’ve always thought that this was a bad example of the euphemism treadmill, because each step is clearly an attempt to be more general than the last. The name makes it clear that this isn’t just a disorder you’ll find in soldiers at constant fear of being shelled at any moment (shell sho…
In some ways it's a natural consequence of broadening the scope of something. Is the loss of impact because of the language, or because it now applies to a lot more situations which we imagine is expressed in different ways (whether that's largely true or not)?
Shell shock likely didn't conjure the idea of a person going through a harrowing experience as much as a soldier going through constant shelling for weeks. The first encompasses the other, but the second one is much more explicit and conjures specific thoughts that we can latch on to when we try to imagine the experience.
Battle fatigue also paints a somewhat specific picture, even if more broad than shell shock. We can imagine what types of things caused this, even if our imagination probably only covered a subset of the actual causes. Those things it does conjure are bad though, so the idea is very impactful.
PTSD, which more accurately encompasses a lot more situations, not all of them (or maybe even the majority of them) related to war, also leaves us without as much information to use to form an emotional response to as we imagine what it was they went through. Was it the horrors of war? Was it assault by a stranger as a civilian? Was it physical abuse by someone you know? Was it long term mental abuse? We know it was bad, to affect the sufferer, but it's harder to form a real emotional response, I think, when the cause is ambiguous.
So, is the problem the language, or is the language just a side-effect of the increased scope of the term, and the problem is actually the increased scope?
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You're talking about relatively few people -- I too would bet that most people (those of us not working in slaughterhouses) would find videos from factory farms disturbing. There's a reason big-ag farmers are afraid people will see videos showing their operations. So afraid that they pay off politicians to ban such video recording.
> I too would bet that most people (those of us not working in slaughterhouses) would find videos from factory farms disturbing. But why would they be more disturbing than watching a person slaughtering and cutting up an animal? You didn't answer the question, you just said that one was disturbing, not why one was more disturbing than the other.