Banning words won’t make the world more just

Pedantic Prosaic Pediatric Postel Principle

Who's banning whom, though? If I decide to call a pregnant woman a "person with pregnancy" and someone jumps down my throat and screams, "she's a PREGNANT! WOMAN!!" who's doing the language policing here? If I've adopted some trendy equity lingo, that's on me. I'm not telling you what to call her, why are you insisting that I call her by the god-given American apple pie Christian traditional term? I mean, I can fairly guess why, because "person with pregancy" probably sounds icky, performative, and vaguely dehumanizing to you. But if you are a Defender of Free Speech, then you should be supporting my right to utter the terms I prefer from my own mouth, as long as I don't try to force those words into yours. And yes I know there are plenty of "progressive" types that will try to force people to use socially correct speech, but Packer's article is complaining about equity language guides being used by corporations, an entirely different phenomenon. Why is he bent out of shape about this? I don't have a problem with Sierra Club enforcing stylistic etiquette in their own writings, as long as I myself not being compelled to conform with their corporate judgment call. Polite language changes over time, and it's reasonable for companies to adapt to that. I'm old enough to have heard tales of when "pregnant" wasn't used in polite company at all, and people instead said, "she's with child."

Packer recognizes this on some level, stating, "The battle against euphemism and cliché is long-standing and, mostly, a losing one." But I think he's a bit off with his next assertion: "What’s new and perhaps more threatening about equity language is the special kind of pressure it brings to bear. The conformity it demands isn’t just bureaucratic; it’s moral." No, euphemism has always been moral. What's new now is that everyone's a publisher now thanks to social media. So it's not just Emily Post, The Hays Code, the US Congress, and other big gatekeepers determining by fiat what counts as offensive, and the rest of us passively falling into line. Now every loser gets to proclaim to the world how offended they are, and due to the nature of social media, the more controversial and theatrical their level of offense is, the more engagement they will receive. Couple that with modern tribalism where people have to prove their loyalty by completely accepting all tenets of their tribe and utterly rejecting all tenets of the opposing tribe.

Personal anecdote: I was raised to believe that "the n-word" was inherently offensive. It was never spoken in my house, and to this day I don't use it in casual conversation. But I also loved the work of John Lennon. He had an album which featured a song entitled "Woman is the N*** of the World." The word was spelled out on the album cover and sung in the lyrics. When I was young I would feel hot and embarrassed listening to that track, so I would generally skip it. But I understood and appreciated the sentiment behind it. Even at a young age I could separate his laudable intentions from the potential inappropriateness of his methods. Anyway, it would never have occurred to me to stop listening to Lennon entirely just because of one cringey song. Much less to call radio stations or whatever and try to get them to stop playing his music. It's not that I don't get highly offended over people saying the N-word. I do. I just believe that, although we should strive not to be needlessly offensive, in the hierarchy of things that are wrong with the world, "getting offended" is pretty far down. Thus I can't get behind hair trigger "social justice" warriors who want to destroy the lives of everyone who in their estimation holds shitty personal beliefs. But what's even worse are the "free speech" warriors who with no sense of irony will attempt to enact laws banning the speech and ideas of their opponents.

Makes sense actually. Now that you mention it I can imagine Casablanca to be enjoyable to "watch" even with my eyes closed. A lot of the black and white stuff. I guess they were (better) written, more like plays, with actors projecting their voices. Now they do the mumble whisper thing, even native speakers are forced to turn on subtitles for increasingly terrible plots.

BTW you should know my comments had a +5 and now are being downvoted by the woke mob, who know what is best for you.

Edit: And its back to very positive. I only remark on this when the cowardly woke losers try to bully people with downvote brigading otherwise the points don't matter. Bet there's a lot of screeching on a Mastodon somewhere.

The difficult part of this being, some of the 100% blind people effectively don’t like the word and don’t want to be called blind. Then some people are ‘only’ 80% blind, and don’t want to be called blind. Then some family members of blind people don’t want the word to be used.

I think it’s pretty common phenomenon, like the people who call themselves “black”, those who are called “black” but hate it, and everyone in the middle usually not knowing what’s the position of any specific person’s on the issue.

I don’t think there even is a correct answer, as long as there are many people in different situations with different perceptions of what the words mean, there’s no way we get a consensus on this. At most we could get a majority sharing a common sensibility and bully the rest into submission, as it happened so many times in history.

> Gender suffixes have always had a gender connotation, because it is plainly what they mean.

no, it isn't what they mean. you might say it's "equally" sexist, but "man" meant "mankind", it meant "person", and woman comes from "wifeman", person who is a wife. So mailman is "person who delivers mail". A good way to think of it is that language is actually neutral. Cultures have ideas and values, and those ideas and values suffuse communication, but the language is just a transport mechanism and will be bent and altered to communicate what people are thinking. But the language, always neutral.

it's similar to the names of native american tribes. There are so many examples of "the Sioux didn't call themselves the Sioux, they called themselves Lakota, their enemies called them the Sioux." What did Lakota mean in Lakotan? It means "the people". Everybody else? they weren't even people. Every native american tribe did that, and probably our own hunter gatherer ancestors did that too.

None of this is cause for concern, it's actually really interesting.