I'm hardly a SJW but it's 2022, can we stop equating rape which is a shockingly violent violation/assult of a real a human being with anything less. I'm sure I'm gonna get slammed for this but whatever.
The original meaning of the word was “to take by force”. Using it to exclusively describe sexual assault is a more modern thing.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/rape
This kind of double meaning in English is very common. The word murder can also be used as “to perform badly”.
A way to look at it is English often has two forms of words like this. There is murder (general) and there is Murder (specific).
As someone who is bipolar, the “misuse” of labels around mental health is aggravating. The misuse of “rape” is the same.
The general usage of words dilutes the impact of the specific use. I’d love to bring back capital letters to English nouns. That way we could use Murder and murder to clarify what which meaning is used.
In this case, they are taking the original work, corrupting it, and passing it off as the original. Legal, but definitely not moral or ethical.
I think “rape” is a little strong, but not inaccurate.
No I'm not.
English is frustratingly imprecise.
If we all spoke Lojban, I'm sure the poetry would be very precise, but I wonder if it could convey the same things.
Also, is sexual contact with a corpse rape? As of 2015 it was not in Massachusetts and many other US states:
When you die, you lose your status as a person, Troyer explains, although you are still human, your body or your remains are quasi property. “You’re not really a subject, but you’re not fully an object,” he says.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/sep/04/necroph...
When we "kill" a program there's no life murdered or equivalent moral issue involved either.
But I don't take issue with the wording just because I've had a relative killed in a bad situation. And I don't think anybody should (or if they do, they should get over it).
"Kill" is used in many less severe circumstances. We kill plants and mold and bacteria. "Kill" does not nearly universally refer a specific severe act with a real human victim. Notice we don't murder programs.
Regardless of historical usage (words do not have some innate meaning which persists through all time), the current usage of the word is almost exclusively limited to a very particular crime. A better comparison would be "genocide". We should ask ourselves how we would feel about a company transitioning from cross-platform to a single OS being described as committing a genocide of other OS users. Or even better, we should ask actual survivors of genocide how they would feel.
And in this case, survivors are already telling us how they feel. For example: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stop-saying-rape-out-of-conte...
There are terms which because of their specificity and severity (in modern usage) cannot be used metaphorically without calling to mind the non-metaphorical meaning. This is quite distinct from more standard metaphors which we barely recognize as metaphors at all (no one thinks of a sprinter when we ask them to run a program).
Regardless of what decision we end up making on what terms we are comfortable using, we can recognize that not all violent terms are equal in how concretely they call to mind their violent meaning when used metaphorically and that victims of violence are speaking out about the usage of certain terms. How we should respond to that is a judgment call we all have to make.
Also since this submission hasnt been downvoted into oblivion, your personal, anecdotal reaction is not the norm (on HN)
He literally used the word “equating”.
> Notice we don't murder programs.
And if someone does say that, will you swoop in to tell them that it’s inappropriate? Because I have absolutely heard people use the word “murder” metaphorically.
> And in this case, survivors are already telling us how they feel.
Interestingly those are all cases where I can easily imagine someone saying “murder” instead of “rape”. I also think those examples are pretty flippant and waste the impact of the word.
For the record, I think this particular use of the word “rape” to describe the poem’s butchering is reasonable. The work shown was utterly destroyed.
The argument I'm trying to make is first that it's not arbitrary to question the use of this word but not "kill" or other violent words. There is a distinction because of the specificity and linguistic contexts in which the word is used.
And second that because it's not arbitrary, the complaints from survivors are also not arbitrary and should be considered--not taken as absolute unassailable truth, but considered.
For comparison, I can imagine those who lost loved ones in the infamous Air France Flight 447 might be upset to be reminded of Air France. But Air France is a 10+ billion euro company operating hundreds if not thousands of flights per day. It is stunningly rare that "Air France" is used to refer to that accident and on balance, I think most would conclude Air France is of positive or neutral impact to the world. I would be quite suspect of an argument that "Air France" is inappropriate language.
On the other extreme you have a term like "Holocaust" which effectively has no other meaning or usage than a reference to that genocide.
Now you may conclude that no usage of any word is inherently inappropriate, and if that's the case, we're simply at an impasse, and I'm fine with that. I won't try to stop you or change your mind. But for most people, I think there is a point where the triviality of the use and the severity of the word add up to inappropriateness.
It's not clear-cut. You'd probably be hard pressed to find anyone genuinely bothered by "killing" a process. But you also won't find too many people who would defend say... being kicked out of a bar for causing a drunken fight being described as being persecuted like in the Holocaust. There's a spectrum.
So my point is just this... there are some logical reasons why many people consider a usage like this article on the inappropriate side of the spectrum. We can at least acknowledge that and recognize that there's a legitimate judgment call to be made here. We aren't in "killing a process" territory. And we certainly aren't in arbitrary word policing because we happen to be bothered by it territory.
Unless of course you fundamentally disagree that any metaphor could be inappropriate because of the thing which is alluded to in the metaphor. In which case we're just starting from different fundamental assumptions, which is fine. I'm not trying to challenge anyone's values.
I'll end here. There are obviously legitimate grievances in the article regardless of the word choice in titling it, and I've done enough to derail the discussion of those already. For that, I apologize.
I also think there is balance. The fact that some claim offense or hurt at a word does not mean no one should use it.
This asswipe, Martin. He fucked up Bukowski's poems. With his mincing, middle-class stink.
Oh, it's not a dirty poem anymore, it's a vulgar one. By the time he's done, it sounds like Bukowski went to Vassar.
Now you? You're going to mince around like this too?
But Michael Phillips -- he respects Bukowski. He knows how to write. He uses the right goddamn word in the right goddamn place.
Like: "castrating". Because Martin took the balls from his poems. "shitty". Because he shat all over them. "unmolested". Because it's like he diddles kids.
That's the same thing you're doing. You're trying to castrate Phillips. And you know what that is?
Rape.
By changing "ancient" to "medieval" and "dirty" to "vulgar", he's trying to invoke the switch from Church Latin to the vulgate. I mean, there's the organ music in the background, the red wine like the blood of Christ. And then he's saying, "Look at Charles Bukowski, he writes in the language of the common people".
He then reinforces "no vulgarity" later. An addition about "clean[ing] up my act" is also there, to go with the "cleaning the shit stains" (now also explicitly "cleaning"). Which is about devulgarifying the poems.
To go along with all this he makes the poem about why he writes "like" that, not just "why he writes". To make clear that it's about why the poems are vulgar specifically, not why the poems exist at all.
And then he emphasizes that Bukowski is pleased with the result (he puts "pleased" in twice).
So there's a logic to it. It's a little pedantic and a little pretentious. And it changes the meaning of the poem. And it does some of the very devulgarification it's talking about. But it's not totally dumb.
But I can't help but wonder, would you had felt the same way had the author chosen other shockingly violent acts such as "disembowelment", "lobotomy", "castration", or "amputation"?
I guess it depends on how much you like Bukowski if it feels overdone or not.
It works against the author's apparent interest. They throw the dials to 11 as a bit of norm-setting editorializing about supposed severity of the unjust edits, but it just ends up being more bullshit clickbait, blending in to the background of every! other! desperate! headline!
Why?
If you are, however, under a constant, low-level threat of being raped, then you kind of want people to take that seriously. You don't want people to make light of it. You don't want people to devalue that.
And we, who are not under that threat, can and should respect that.
I understand the argument about being sensitive to the topic of rape. I do not think that extends so far that no one can use the word except in its literal meaning.
I get what you’re going for and have already stated elsewhere that I think rape jokes are tasteless. But your criteria doesn’t make much sense. Good for you for wanting to be sensitive to others. But if you’re going to be sensitive to others, maybe ask why your care doesn’t extend to victims in general and somehow only applies to this one word.
Odd then that you seem so dismissive of the other concerns called out.
Murder and torture and suicide occur at nowhere near the same scale, and in two of those the primary victims are not around to suffer poor choice of words. For what it's worth, I also wish we didn't speak so trivially of "killing" e.g. UNIX processes. "Rape" is an easy word to avoid.
You didn't care about the quote on "castrating him" in this article, or being analytical or relating this to dirty realism so you clearly are.
The article is literally about people like yourself wanting to edit these things from history (article is 2013)
Read Charles Bukowski "The Fiend" and then understand why words like rape and castrating were chosen if you care at all about what's being talked about and why the article was written this way.
I despise trigger warnings but surprises are also unfair on a tech forum even if we are talking Bukowski, it is about child rape -
https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/charles-bukowski/page,22,416... (The Fiend starts half way down)
sure, we can but in fact using rape as a metaphor for really bad things that one person does to another person is not used to downgrade rape but really to point a finger at why the thing being done is bad. Because rape has power as a bad thing.
Sure, but I mean we must not use rape as an analogy for anything that is not rape, holocaust for anything that is not holocaust, fraud must only be used for things that are legally prosecutable as fraud and so forth. The language must be cleaned and simplified, metaphor and analogy while a seemingly necessary component of the human mind must be excised.