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Comment by zarathustreal | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed this trend of changing the meaning of words in recent decades. How do we prevent corruption of meaning? I hear "language evolves over time!" quite a lot, as if it's a law of nature, but I've never heard anyone question the statement to determine whether it's true or why it would be true. "Diversity" is a good example but there are numerous ("racism", "bigotry", etc).

I suspect the reasons for change would be insufficient to sway a majority. I suspect this is why the reasons aren't examined.

Originally there was an idea that a group with completely homogenous thoughts and opinions would lack innovation and problem solving ability. Ironically, the meaning of "diversity" has been corrupted to the point that it now requires homogenous thoughts and opinions.

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The "language evolves over time!" folks conveniently omit the fact that they think it should only apply when the new meaning is beneficial to them. Otherwise, they are perfectly happy to argue the opposite viewpoint. This is prescriptive, not descriptive language analysis...

About your last paragraph, I find it quite telling that diversity notoriously does not include diversity of thought, it's all about immutable character traits. It is also sometimes no longer considered permissible to hide your immutable character traits anymore which I find sad.

In Orwells book 'Newspeak' is a controlled language designed to limit the individual person's ability to think critically or to articulate subversive concepts, such as personal identity, self-expression, and free will.

I do not think that language operations happen of their own. I see corporate messing with language. I see BlackRock enforcing diversity and other things. I see corporate ideological parades to show that they are with the common folk. In reality they are brainwashing people.

I do not see language change organically. I see organizations prohibiting certain words, suggesting certain words. All in the name of "X".

It all reminds me of religion. Reminds me of computer logic. If you say "X" you are a good person. If you do not say "X" you are a bad person. Language is a powerful thing. I feel as if one tampered with it.

Stop treating the astroturfed re-definition as serious. They should be laughed out of the room but corp media gloms on for the fight and then legitimizes it in some peoples minds.

> I've noticed this trend of changing the meaning of words in recent decades.

I think you're referring to words with political meaning, so I won't rant about the word "literally".

There are people who insist that some words must change their meanings, and that other words must be entirely abandoned, because they see language as shaping how people think, and so by changing language, they hope to steer the way that people think. Steering the way that people think is indistinguishable from political campaigning, as far as I can see; so I see the blacklisting etc. of words as a kind of political campaigning by the back door.

I find these word-games offensive. I don't want to offend people, so I try not to use terms that are considered offensive. But they don't give up; "negroe" became "black" became "african-american" and so on. I've lost patience.

And I have a strong sense that these word-games are a substitute for persuading people; like, persuasion seems to have failed, so let's manipulate them by changing the language. I hate the sense that I'm being manipulated.

I think it doesn’t require homogenous thoughts and opinions, that’s rather bad faith and obviously untrue on its face: you cannot have homogenous thoughts and opinions with a diverse background of people. However it does limit what kind of diversity is acceptable: an opinion that gay people should be given the death penalty might definitely be unique in the workplace but also I would argue not beneficial to a workplace setting.

One's background does not dictate one's thoughts and opinions, that's an argument for predestination and I reject it outright.

Hiring practices are not, cannot, be based on background, due to time constraints of the hiring process. It is not possible to know a person's background, though you could certainly get some idea of it given enough time, perspective alone would prevent you from understanding it as they do. In fact, hiring is based almost entirely on the prejudices of the person(s) making the hiring decision. These days, publicly traded companies are incentivized through market forces (blackrock, ESG scoring) to be prejudiced against certain groups.

If you're looking for a faith-based interpretation of the meaning of words, good, bad, or otherwise, you'll need to extend some faith in the existing meaning first.

I'm not going to defend an opinion that I haven't given, such as that the death penalty should be given to a person based on their sexual orientation. I will, however, defend the notion that every person's opinion holds valuable information and perspective. You cannot argue on principle that diversity is a good thing while simultaneously arguing that it can be a bad thing. This is an obvious contradiction. It changes the meaning of the argument from "we've discovered a fundamental truth" to "we'd like you to act a certain way" and that glosses over the outstanding implicit request, by the existence of a status quo, for you to act a certain way.

This is the paradox of tolerance; you cannot be tolerant of the intolerant if you hope to foster a tolerant society. I’m merely arguing that it’s entirely possible to have a diverse thought community that all value diversity. There’s people who believe communism sucks, and there’s communists. There’s people who believe unions good, and people with bad experiences with unions. Someone who is a veteran will by necessity have different opinions (based on lived experience) than someone who had never lifted a gun, or someone who is a refugee of war. It’s inevitable that such a group of people will not all have the same opinion on things.

If the demand is to act a certain way, it’s only that the demand is to accept others who are different in a way that doesn’t actually harm anyone and foster an environment where no one person is unreasonably limited based on factors like being black or being a parent through thoughtless setup of the working environment.

The diversity of thought thing is always strange to me because it implies the only diversity of thought that matters is the thought to discriminate against others or the thought to put one’s head in the sand and ignore implicit discriminatory factors. Notice you totally ignored that the professor could’ve just written about accessibility, but the professor implicitly apparently does not consider accessible labs to be merit-based or something, because he argues the only solution is to sue since DEI is so against his meritocracy position.

> This is the paradox of tolerance; you cannot be tolerant of the intolerant if you hope to foster a tolerant society.

The paradox is about unlimited tolerance, and the specific intolerance which aims to remove the liberty of thought. A society can (and should) harbor any kind of tolerance and intolerance, but must draw a line where forces grow which plan to remove this liberty, because then the tolerance ends anyway. But if you start becoming intolerant for any topic and reason, then you've already lost the tolerance.

> You cannot argue on principle that diversity is a good thing while simultaneously arguing that it can be a bad thing. This is an obvious contradiction.

Moderation (in the sense of temperance) as a meta-ethical principle has an exceedingly long pedigree, starting with Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. Every virtue he describes is a mean between two extremes; courage lies between cowardice and recklessness, for example.

TL;DR: Every virtue has a “oops you went too far” failure mode, this doesn’t make it “self-contradictory”.

You obviously need some amount of homogeneity. I could rattle off opinions that are incompatible with any sort of community all day. "It is best if everyone actively works to make the group fail" as a trivial example. So obviously within some bounds diversity of opinions, skills, and backgrounds is desirable, but it's not unbounded and this isn't a contradiction. Without being specific about what "diverse opinions" you think should be welcomed you're just being naively contrarian.

No, you don't need homogeneity of thought and opinion. There's an obvious difference between holding an opinion and taking an action. Thinking it would be best for a group to fail and actively trying to make said group fail are two different things. Furthermore, the value of different thoughts and opinions is in the difference of approach and perspective, not necessarily in the thoughts or opinions themselves. The value comes from the act of consideration of other opinions and thoughts, not from blindly doing whatever other people (who may happen to disagree with you) want.

> I hear "language evolves over time!" quite a lot, as if it's a law of nature, but I've never heard anyone question the statement to determine whether it's true or why it would be true.

Have you heard of linguistics? Language changes all the time. Languages changes constantly. The word silly once meant "blessed by God".

Like, this is so obvious and so well known that I just have to assume you're trolling here.

You'll get a lot further in life by assuming you don't understand than assuming others are trolling. Indeed, sometimes it's the only way to get information from data. In this case you don't seem to have understood the context in which the phrase in question is often uttered. The context is politics. Power dynamics. Changing the definitions of words to change what is possible to be expressed with language. Not the natural kind of language evolution that happens over generations due to misunderstandings or new inventions.

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