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Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

itcommunity.stanford.edu

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Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#291

Post by hnbear »

henrikschroder wrote: post #259

The corporate memphis art and the content warning is just the cherry on top of this steaming pile of crap. Projects like this are doomed, because they fundamentally ignore how language works, how language evolves, and how humans work. My favourite example is "idiot". Once upon a time it was a clinical diagnosis used by physicians to describe people. This word of course turned into a slur, so the diagnosis word had to…

A huge number of current rude terms have medical origin, including an entire measured scale, including idiot, as you called out:

Moron (from Wikipedia): --- It was once applied to people with an IQ of 51–70, being superior in one degree to "imbecile" (IQ of 26–50) and superior in two degrees to "idiot" (IQ of 0–25). The word moron, along with others including "idiotic", "imbecilic", "stupid", and "feeble-minded", was formerly considered a valid descriptor in the psychological community, but it is now deprecated in use by psychologists. ---

Similarly cretin as someone with congenital iodine deficiency syndrome, but now far less polite and just generically dumb.

The list misses huge numbers of terms. It feels very much like a small group of people sat down and brainstormed for 5 minutes writing out the things that bothered them individually, or knew about individually, and that was it.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#292

Post by timonoko »

I remember English teacher lady being slightly offended because I kept referring she as "he". I could not help it, native language has no grammatical genders.

But this was 50 years ago, could not imagine what would happen today. Judging by Youtube-videos bodily harm would be almost certain.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#293

Post by zumu »

rendall wrote: post #47

I heard a theory that woke is actually a class marker of manners, indicating that someone has the time and privilege to track the constantly shifting, baroque signals of what is and is not acceptable to say during any given season. If someone were to make that case, this could be evidence in favor.

I always considered it ageist. Gen-X and above who have been using terms like "guys" since they were subversive are now targeted and made unwelcome. Younger "folks" meanwhile are fresh from the birth place of PC terminology--American universities--and therefore on the level by default.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#294

Post by malcolmgreaves »

School-Cotton wrote: post #60

“You guys” is the plural form of “you” for most speakers of colloquial American English, and is completely ungendered, in an empirical sense: if you observe native speakers speaking naturally and colloquially, you will find that everyone who uses it (regardless of gender) uses it consistently to address groups of multiple people (regardless of gender). It’s derived from the noun “guy”, which is indeed often gendered.…

Out of all of these, y’all rolls most readily off the tongue.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#296

Post by tum92 »

sacnoradhq wrote: post #274
kgwgk wrote: post #69

I don’t think I had seen those before: tarball [use instead: tar archive] While the term refers to an archive that has been created with the tar command, it can be negatively associated with the pejorative term tarbaby. whitespace [use instead: empty space] Assigns value connotations based on color (white = good), an act which is subconsciously racialized. Some of the “solutions” are funny: Hispanic [use instead: Lat…

Wut? They jumped the shark(tm) on tarball.

I had to look that one up because their interpretation seemed so unlikely to me. Doesn’t necessarily mean there is no other history there, but I found out tarballs are real things.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarball_(oil)

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#298

Post by gtbcb »

It’d be funny if “conspiracy theorist” was on the list as critical of people with poor education, people less able to form rational thoughts about how the world works, people easily deceived, people unable to discern truth. I suspect conspiracy theorists find this term derogatory.

Thoughts on what replacement they’d prefer? I also suspect though that they wouldn't want to be identified as a group at all. What do you do when there's group that doesn't want to be referred to as a group?

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#299

Post by hbrn »

henrikschroder wrote: post #259

The corporate memphis art and the content warning is just the cherry on top of this steaming pile of crap. Projects like this are doomed, because they fundamentally ignore how language works, how language evolves, and how humans work. My favourite example is "idiot". Once upon a time it was a clinical diagnosis used by physicians to describe people. This word of course turned into a slur, so the diagnosis word had to…

Maybe doctors are realizing how language works? I bet "mentally handicapped" is less likely to become a slur because it's not short, catchy and convenient like "idiot" or "retard".

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#300

Post by onionisafruit »

gtbcb wrote: post #298

It’d be funny if “conspiracy theorist” was on the list as critical of people with poor education, people less able to form rational thoughts about how the world works, people easily deceived, people unable to discern truth. I suspect conspiracy theorists find this term derogatory. Thoughts on what replacement they’d prefer? I also suspect though that they wouldn't want to be identified as a group at all. What do you…

“theorist” has a sophisticated sound to it. I can’t think of a better sounding alternative.
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