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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

#531

Post by Penyngton »

hedora wrote: post #195
karaterobot wrote: post #181

This language got popular not because people thought really hard and all arrived at it independently, through cold-blooded analysis, but because they heard it was what the better class of people did now, and there was peer pressure around it. Because it never had a firm foundation, never really made sense when you thought hard about it, it can easily change to something else. In other words, it's a fashion, and fashi…

Honestly, I think it got popular for the same reason slowly backing away from the dude playing with a switchblade at a bar is popular: It’s generally better to avoid taking the bait when someone is trying to pick a fight with you.

I agree with you, but this is how bullies get their way.

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

#532

Post by kenjackson »

nine_k wrote: post #279
angarg12 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But interpreting someone's words in the most uncharitable way possible is an ancient sport, intended to slight and annoy the opponent, when finding reasonable, material objections fails. It's just an ancient hold of wresting in the (verbal) mud. It sort of gives the party who successfully pulled it an upper hand. Now that these wrestlers found out that they can persuade the public that the most uncharitable interpret…

And to be clear, these uncharitable interpretations go far beyond word policing.

The one that actually annoys me the most is “analogy policing”. If I say “would you be ok if i stole your bike”. And then your response is “now you’re equating me to a bike thief!” Or “ you’re trivializing This to bike theft?!”

We can’t have discussions because every phrase is taken as a way to win an argument. IMO this is far worse than language policing as there is not even the intention of trying to protect a disadvantaged group.

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

#533

Post by heresie-dabord »

jurassic wrote: post #50

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…

> equity language censors took this way way too far.

In fact, they took it so far that it is now in the realm of fan fiction.

Language cannot be legislated, and meaningful change requires more than a new literay style of expression.

Social progress in real, measurable ways is possible and important. Workers' rights, pay equity, access to education, public health-care, affordable living, good care for our elderly... These are good things that measurably grow happiness in community.

Hurt-Feelings Fan Fiction is a section of the book store that I will never visit.

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

#534

Post by Nemrod67 »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #507
iLoveOncall wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am French so the wording part did not reach us yet This is not true at all. The absolute trainwreck that is "écriture inclusive" is spearheading those inclusivity initiatives, and we have also incorporated a lot of the other words mentioned here in the language.

écriture inclusive is basically non-existent in France, whee did you see it except on some university pages that wanted to be "ahead of their time"? It is BTW forbidden by the ministry of education. Which other words have we incorporated? Un handicapé is a disabled person. We do not have any "mobility challenged" words. Aveugle is blind, malvoyant is vision impaired (which is not the same, one being an extreme of the…

Guess you never heard the joke about the Education Nationale using the term "Référentiel Bondissant" to designate balloons/balls... Quick search indicates it was used by the Grenoble academy at one point in the 2000s XD

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

#535

Post by naasking »

JenrHywy wrote: post #223
tastysandwich wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> There seems to be this weird erasure of women taking place at the moment. This is the crazy thing. After a century of legitimate struggle for equality, women are having the language of feminism turned on them to deny the existence of femininity. Honestly, I thought the lines would have been drawn with sport, but that fact that it's leaking into medicine is pure insanity. I've been somewhat worried about there not b…

Feminism has always been about eradicating gender roles, and that's usually fine because the gender stereotypes that existed were almost all factually incorrect. It's definitely going in directions people never expected though.

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

#536

Post by jen20 »

kristianbrigman wrote: post #243
crazygringo wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure, but people certainly talk that way in Victorian novels (does anyone actually know Mr. Darcy’s first name? :)

Fitzwilliam.

But yes, that notwithstanding, any period drama (Downtown Abbey) will give a good indication of this.

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

#537

Post by Aidevah »

>Traditionally, Prescriptivists tend to be political conservatives and Descriptivists tend to be liberals. But today’s most powerful influence on the norms of public English is actually a stern and exacting form of liberal Prescriptivism. I refer here to Politically Correct English (PCE), under whose conventions failing students become “high-potential” students and poor people “economically disadvantaged” and people in wheelchairs “differently abled” and a sentence like “White English and Black English are different, and you better learn White English or you’re not going to get good grades” is not blunt but “insensitive.” Although it’s common to make jokes about PCE (referring to ugly people as “aesthetically challenged” and so on), be advised that Politically Correct English’s various pre- and proscriptions are taken very seriously indeed by colleges and corporations and government agencies, whose institutional dialects now evolve under the beady scrutiny of a whole new kind of Language Police.

>From one perspective, the rise of PCE evinces a kind of Lenin-to-Stalinesque irony. That is, the same ideological principles that informed the original Descriptivist revolution — namely, the rejections of traditional authority (born of Vietnam) and of traditional inequality (born of the civil rights movement) — have now actually produced a far more inflexible Prescriptivism, one largely unencumbered by tradition or complexity and backed by the threat of real-world sanctions (termination, litigation) for those who fail to conform. This is funny in a dark way, maybe, and it’s true that most criticisms of PCE seem to consist in making fun of its trendiness or vapidity. This reviewer’s own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just silly but ideologically confused and harmful to its own cause.

- David Foster Wallace, Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage, 2001

https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-...

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

#538

Post by bombcar »

sva_ wrote: post #478
lynx23 wrote: post #289

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 once had an injury in both of my legs after a long hike. It caused my legs to be so swollen that I had very limited mobility, but I could still walk - though it probably looked very awkward. In school, children get taught that when someone looks disabled, you shouldn't look at them, because staring at them is some kind of discrimination or so. I couldn't disagree more. When I had that injury, and was kind of crip-w…

I kind of feel the euphemism treadmill is the language version of “looking away”.

Blind is stark; powerful; forces me to contemplate the lack of vision - I can’t escape it.

But if I start using “visually challenged” then it’s softer, sounds like a game, challenges can be overcome, this isn’t something I need to worry about.

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

#539

Post by bombcar »

YeBanKo wrote: post #383
lynx23 wrote: post #289

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…

From non-native speaker perspective, it sounds like it also obscured the truth: visually challenged can still consume visual info, blind - can’t. For the former larger fonts, adapted color palette, simplified graphics, etc can be useful, for the latter no amount of adaptations will work and you have to completely switch to audio or tactile mode of communication.

It’s complicated by “legally blind” being a term that includes people who can see “somewhat”.

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

#540

Post by pas »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #418
wonderwonder wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it as unintentional discrimination. It's treating the people they are relabeling as children that need the kind progressives to step in and save them. It's so condescending. Minorities don't need white Knights to save them, neither do the disabled. If an individual wants me to not refer to them as x because they find it offensive, no problem. But a group of academics should not be able to sit around and decide…

Identity politics is not unintentional. Those indoctrinated into it may be unaware but the intention is to divide us.

Well, it's a newish power niche that's getting exploited.

(One (postmodern) interpretation is that it's yet another "society of control" in crisis. Basically, the old tools that provided stability (social conventions, morals, beliefs/prejudices) all used to look like big formalish institutions, from family-school-factory-military-prison, and you were either in the system or completely out of it. But as this system of systems post-WWII has "eaten the world" it's now bound to face its own limitations, hence the crisis. Hence all the reforms, real and so-called ones.)

The niche is (was) that most people has (had) only a super basic over-simplistic belief about language, which could be summed up as "something something the n-word". Instead of the more correct "when talking to/about someone it's very disrespectful to call them names they don't like".

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