Euphemisms are best changed frequently (2016)
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Wholesale renaming of something from A to B, doesn't very little to change perceptions of the root issue. It just stigmatises people who haven't got the latest linguistic memo.
I remember about 30 years ago, there was a fad of renaming disability to dysability and anyone who dared use the old term was considered to being completely insensitive to their needs, regardless of actions. Interestingly, that seems to all but vanished in the years since and there seems to be little trace of it left on the internet.
I think the real problem with euphemisms displacing the original words, is generally they're vaguer. One example is "person of colour" should literally mean everybody, but it's just used as a drop-in replacements for the words before it that are now considered offensive. Substituting one phrase for another does nothing to adjust people's prejudices or intentions when using a word.
So, the real issue is how we change societal attitudes towards other (people generally don't seem to consider any of these older terms offensive if the speaker is in the same group) in the subset of people who use these words pejoratively, rather than just creating linguistic minefields for everyone else to traverse.
Which is the root problem IMHO: people often insult each others, fully intentionally. Remove that human trait, and the need for euphemisms will evaporate. But that'll never happen, of course.
One group wishes to spread awareness of afflicted people, in the belief they can improve the empathy shown to such people by society, even though it's at odds with human fear of disease and disfigurement. It's one thing to be crippled, it's another to crippled and society finds you repulsive and treats you like shit.
This group reckon that the afflicted need a good marketing campaign. This is why they're coming up with media strategies, slogans, and of course euphemisms. Why it's National Unfortunate Bugger Day today! Let's take a look at the plight of these poor bastards and be quietly relieved we don't have their problems.
The other group is the rest of humanity, and when they feel the need to insult their peers, they reach for the strongest words they can muster. As you say, it's inevitable. In the words of Professor F. J. Lewis: See that <horrible thing>? That's you, that is. That's you trying your best.
The UK's Blue Peter and the National Spastics Society found this out the hard way when in 1981 they broadcast a story on Joey Deacon, a man with cerebral palsy. Blue Peter wanted children to learn about how Joey was intelligent, but his condition made it very hard to communicate that. What actually happened after the broadcast is that "joey" and "spastic" became the hot new playground insults, along with impersonating Joey's speech mannerisms. It was so bad that the National Spastics Society renamed itself to "Scope" to avoid the negative connotations the word had picked up. Of course, UK children then adopted "scoper" as an insult too.
This didn't reach the USA at all, which is why "spaz" is a mild insult in US English, while in the UK it's a grave insult.
I know someone who has resorted to, "This displeases me," as his condemnation of choice to combat this tendency, to keep right in front of himself the reality of the situation, that he doesn't like something, but his displeasure is his responsibility.
I think that recognition has to happen to make space for a response to the situation, rather than a reaction to it. Does my displeasure motivate me to take action? If so, what kind? Are other people pleased by the situation? Can I see it their way? Is their response measured, or reactionary?
It buys time, and inserting a beat between the event and the response makes all the difference.
If someone does something blazingly stupid, I should be able to calmly and legitimately point that out.
Sometimes you want to speak not to the idea but the person. “XYZ has an unbroken track record of coming up with flagrantly stupid ideas and then acting on them with zero thought to their obviously-foreseeable consequences” is a mouthful beginning to cross, itself, into euphemistic territory.
Note, I'm not saying you should never insult - it's a tool that's sometimes useful - but you should carefully choose if you want to use that tool. And it's definitely a different tool than "calmly and legitimately pointing out". You cannot, in this case, have your cake and eat it too.
If you're insulting to feel good, that's on you. But if you're insulting to be sure your point came across clearly, that has utility.
I'm simply challenging the claim that the "desire to insult comes from the unwillingness to take responsibility for one's own reactions." It can also be from a desire to avoid miscommunication. Strong language is strong because it demands strong interpretation. If what you need is a strong interpretation, strong language is legitimate.
> an insult definitely feels better in the moment, but it does nothing to actually identify the problem
Most of the time, the process is fucked. But sometimes, a person is unqualified. Or a liar. In those cases, the person is the problem. The fact that it displeases someone is secondary, and honestly, totally irrelevant. Trying to re-frame that in a form that pretends the person isn't the problem is the point of euphemism. It's more polite to say "ABC is having difficulty with their workload" than "ABC is a moron; these are not difficult asks."
The insult defines the person by a failure, instead of limiting the criticism to the relevant task.
If you're stooping to defining a person by their inability to do some specific thing, I still hold that you need to take responsibility for your own reaction.
The first is debatable. The second implies you don’t want to debate this. There is succinctness lost when one forbids the second.
> stooping to defining a person by their inability to do some specific thing
Yes, within a utilitarian context, a person is defined by their ability to do a thing. In the short run, there is a trade-off between empathy and efficiency. You try to avoid those situations. But not every environment permits you to.
If the case is time sensitive, I’d much rather my surgeon or commander be extremely direct when someone is screwing up than explain that they’re bad at everything they’re supposed to be doing. Being able to make this call is, in my opinion, a gating component of serious leadership
Overlooking a person's humanity for the sake of efficiency is at the root of the problem, and an attitude that supports it as at the root of insult culture.
Just saying, for common example, "That was blazingly stupid," isn't calmly and legitimately pointing it out. Calmly and legitimately pointing it out would be to connect the cause with the effect and highlight that the person didn't want the effect, like, "That's what happens when you touch a hot stove." The obviousness of the connection causes the person to see their own error rather sharply.
If this is the goal insults are the wrong tool. If getting the person out of the way is the goal, insults can be effective.
In other words, you're never going to land on a purely positive term for "mentally retarded" because of the harsh reality of the situation. (it's worth reminding folks that "mentally retarded" previously was the polite euphemism.)
Where I live, MR is considered a slur, not an objective descriptor of a biological fact.
For some, it's an intellectual version of bullying the poorer and older and less well connected for having unfashionable clothes.
Paul Graham wrote in 2004 on this better than I could.
"What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed."
And he gave really good practical advice:
"Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot."
Not doing so is thus morally evil.
World is not binary, people even less so.
Keeper
Like LatinX, that definitely seems like a top-down word, that still hasn't caught on among actual Latinos.
This is exactly how I and most other Spanish-speaking hispanics I've talked to about it take it. It's usually someone who doesn't know Spanish using it, and the implication is that something is wrong with our language and anglos need to fix it for us (and that we're so backwards that even anglos who don't know our language are more qualified to fix it for us than we ourselves our, in our poor foolish backwardness)
Anyone who knew Spanish well would know that grammatical gender is vestigial and often meaningless. Why are rocks female but boats male? Why are cars male and trucks female? It's nothing to do with semantics anymore than there is an extant meaning to why in English i comes before e except after c other when said like a as in neighbor and weigh, etc.
But of course, the advocates for this nonsense don't know Spanish. When I do hear someone of latin heritage embrace latinx, invariably I find the are monolingual English-speakers who were not taught Spanish by their ancestors.
It's reminiscent of the "machismo" slur-- anglos using "macho" as a stereotype of toxic masculinity, even though the worst toxic masculinity I've seen is by far has been in the US, not Latin America.
It's all just a way to update anti-hispanic sentiment to account for modern progressive attitudes. Of course, that sort of thing went on 100 years ago too. The progressive-for-the-day attitudes were used to bludgeon Irish and Italian and other immigrants too then, you know.
If you want to "fix" my language I invite you to do so-- right after you finish learning it well enough to converse at even just a very basic 5th grade level. Until then, mind your business.
It bothers me because I feel there are political repercussions I don't like. Because the people trying to force Latinx on Hispanics keep trying to force people to think of them as an oppressed minority. That's a problem because they're trying impose a low status. That's never a winner.
A certain amount of this is just necessary to treat other humans beings humanely.
But I'd hardly say it doesn't help: it means that today, you've not made someone wonder if you're insulting them on purpose.
We already constantly have to change so that our language doesn't sound dated. It's doubly important if it also avoids insult.
I have to wonder a bit about people who really don't want to stop using terms that have become insulting, but otherwise freely pick up new usages of words in other contexts. It seems to me like they just want to be insulting.
Maybe instead of wanting to be insulting, people just don't want to be insulted (called ableist, racist, etc.) for failing to keep up with modern slang. Can you see why someone might be upset about being made a de facto bigot when they are only guilty of aging?
At the same time, there are a whole lot of people who want to staunchly defend using language that has become offensive, and even use it gleefully. I have much less sympathy for this position.
I have plenty of sympathy for people who react to this needless cruelty with a total rejection of the concept and deliberate rebellion. Rationally, sure, they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But this is an emotional response and I can understand it and sympathize.
Admittedly, I have sympathy for everyone. I ultimately believe in determinism; I can no more fault a serial killer for a murder than a cloud for blocking the sun. There is a utility to behaving as though good and bad people exist, rather than just good and bad outcomes: you can improve those outcomes. But witholding sympathy does not improve outcomes.
Yah-- using gender neutral terms when possible is nice, and someone has to coin those terms.
But what I'm talking about: there's a whole lot of these words that were initially offensive, or became offensive because they have been used derisively. If you insist on referring to people by terms they find offensive, even after correction, then you are being a jerk.
> using gender neutral terms when possible is nice
That's your opinion, and it tends to very strongly correlate with left-wing politics, it's not a consensus opinion.
It's been favored in pretty much every style guide for decades at this point. I am presently in the middle of the political spectrum, but I've spent the majority of my life pretty right-leaning. At the same time, I see no reason to choose words that might imply to a lot of people that I'm only talking about men, or to choose other words that might cause people offense.
It's funny how we can so clearly see this in so many domains -- referring to an unintelligent person as a "moron" would pretty clearly be not nice -- but are willing to defend doing it to other disfavored groups so strongly.
- but neither would it be an attempt to demean everyone who suffers from a learning disability. It would, instead, be an affirmation that low intelligence is an undesirable quality. And anyway, in practice, overwhelmingly such language is aimed at people of ordinary or even above average intelligence, with the intent of suggesting that the target is not meeting expectations.
No, but it might have that net effect, to whomever is in earshot.
> And anyway, in practice, overwhelmingly such language is aimed at people of ordinary or even above average intelligence
If you don't think the kid who is struggling in school is being called a "retard," I don't know what to tell you.
Another example-- the word "boy." There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the word "boy," but it was used by a lot of people to demean black men. I certainly wouldn't want to say it to a person who would think I'm doing the same thing to that point. And at that point, maybe it's time to prune the word "boy" as a word of address out of my language, and discourage my kids from the "booooiiiiii" that would be interpreted very poorly in the wrong situation.
You could start by giving me a reason to believe it.
36% of youth in 2009 reported having heard the word "retard" directed towards someone with an intellectual disability.
My wife's brother had a birth injury and endured it pretty constantly throughout his school years.
And given that there's people with that experience, perhaps it's time to heavily discourage use of the word in general. Calling your buddy it to be funny helps normalize it for the people who want to use it to be cruel, and gives them cover.
Haven't we been doing that in the US since 1990?
Our culture's imperfect, but there's a fair bit of evidence that it's a kinder, more courteous world-- especially for youth-- than 30 years ago. Taking some sharp edges off language may have helped with that.
But that is not the question here, I am merely pointing out that it's very easy to understand why some people may object to ideologically invented words, without have any issues with words that appear organically, like "mousepad". Pretending to not understand the difference is just a bad faith argument.
The use of gender neutral language as a favored practice has been largely settled in English style guides everywhere since I was a small child, and I am old. To a pretty big portion of the population, "chairman" sounds dated.
It's worth noting excessive prescriptivism cuts both ways. Once upon a time the singular "they" was widely accepted and used; then it was deprecated in favor of just using "he"; now people want to tell us using "they" to describe a person of undetermined gender is just wrong. Language is how we use it, and it's better for it to not contain excessive constraints or connotations that are unhelpful.
Sure. The point is that reasonable people can believe that the zeitgeist is absurd, or that the use of terms doesn't actually reflect popular opinion (perhaps you've heard terms like "preference falsification" or "filter bubble").
> The use of gender neutral language as a favored practice has been largely settled in English style guides everywhere since I was a small child, and I am old. To a pretty big portion of the population, "chairman" sounds dated.
I don't understand how you reconcile your argument with the fact that many people insist that using terms like, say, "patriarchy" to describe all that is wrong with the world - or "toxic masculinity" to describe the supposedly harmful effects on men of behaving according to their social stereotypes, but "internalized misogyny" to describe the supposedly harmful effects for women doing the same - is not evidence of bias against men.
> Once upon a time the singular "they" was widely accepted and used... now people want to tell us using "they" to describe a person of undetermined gender...
There is a rhetorical sleight of hand here. Historically, singular "they" was used to describe an indefinite, hypothetical or otherwise vaguely described person (e.g. the perpetrator of a crime before being identified) - not a definite person whose gender was simply unknown (e.g. someone unseen, known by a gender-neutral name). Further, its use is quite restricted - it doesn't admit all the inflections and noun-verb agreements that "he" and "she" do.
> and it's better for it to not contain excessive constraints or connotations that are unhelpful.
It seems to me that you propose entirely unnecessary constraints.
I don't know how you ascribe some particular uses of language that are outside the mainstream with my descriptive note that language has moved towards mostly using gender-neutral terms. I'm not blaming a lot on patriarchy; so it's not really fair to point out that a small minority of people who share my viewpoint that neutral language is preferable do.
> Historically, singular "they" was used to describe an indefinite, hypothetical or otherwise vaguely described person (e.g. the perpetrator of a crime before being identified) - not a definite person whose gender was simply unknown (e.g. someone unseen, known by a gender-neutral name). Further, its use is quite restricted - it doesn't admit all the inflections and noun-verb agreements that "he" and "she" do.
You're right that most of this historical usage of singular they isn't the personal singular they, but you still find plenty of it-- e.g. the King James Bible has quite a bit (perhaps influenced by translating from languages that tend to use equivalent devices).
"vnto thy gates, euen that man, or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones till they die."
> It seems to me that you propose entirely unnecessary constraints.
I think that if I talk about the "mailman" it could be misleading. Ditto for singular "he/his" for indeterminate gender. It seems more useful to use gender-neutral terms-- no need to edit it based on the actual gender that shows up.
The inclusiveness isn't even the primary reason why I feel this way. However, I have heard people say that they thought that it wasn't societally permissible for them to do something based on the way the nouns and pronouns used in sentences; avoiding that seems desirable, too.
I disagree that the standard use of established feminist terminology is "outside the mainstream". Anyway, the point is that they are obviously not gender-neutral terms. It is a blatant double standard to suppose that the term "chairman" disparages women by its construction (despite no such original intent), but that the term "patriarchy" doesn't disparage men by its construction (when it was specifically constructed to describe a construct, by academics who had free choice).
> e.g. the King James Bible has quite a bit
No, that's precisely "an indefinite, hypothetical or otherwise vaguely described person (e.g. the perpetrator of a crime before being identified)". Other examples I could find myself were not any more compelling.
> However, I have heard people say that they thought that it wasn't societally permissible for them to do something based on the way the nouns and pronouns used in sentences
Within the last quarter-century or so? Despite the readily available evidence of other people of the same gender doing that thing?
Using "patriarchy" to describe a specific male-headed familial structure is for the purpose of criticism is descriptive, just like "matriarchy" is. Of course, it can be misused, like in the cases you pillory.
> No, that's precisely "an indefinite, hypothetical or otherwise vaguely described person (e.g. the perpetrator of a crime before being identified)".
I thought you were drawing a different distinction; it's definitely the personal singular they. That exact type of usage is when I use "they" to refer to a person of indeterminate gender, e.g. someone to be hired.
> Within the last quarter-century or so? Despite the readily available evidence of other people of the same gender doing that thing?
Much less within the last quarter-century... in part because all of the style guides about this stuff changed about 40 years ago, when I was a small child.
No, obviously not. A "chairman" can just as well be a woman. What it does imply is just that _historically_, chairmen were mostly men. You might object to the word because its etymology reveals a past where men occupied these roles, but it is not true at all that the word today implies anything about the sex of the person.
> That exact type of usage is when I use "they" to refer to a person of indeterminate gender, e.g. someone to be hired.
Yes, if you are giving instructions to the guard at the front, telling him (sic) to "let them in", that is the traditional, organic usage. Which is distinct from the politicised usage where you either know that the candidate is a woman but still say "them", or its a person that considers herself "non-binary" and insists that you use gender neutral language. Those two situations are different from the traditional usage.
Actually, the he or she agreeing with "them/their" later in a sentence is old and widely accepted. So a fair deal of this usage is a linguistic oddity.
> or its a person that considers herself "non-binary" and insists that you use gender neutral language.
The preferred personal pronoun thing is different. It has its own discussion and justification.
I am purely talking about "they/them" to refer to people of unknown gender, instead of "he" or "he/she"-- the singular, personal "they".
It went from occasional use in the 1300s-1600s to "wrong" in the 1800s. Now it's emerging as a best practice. Even though style guides that otherwise moved to gender neutral language in the 80's rejected it, it grew organically for quite awhile before starting to become accepted.
I agree with all your arguments, but just want to point out that this is not actually true. "Indefinite they" does inflect just fine. "Who attacked you, did you see them? No, but they dropped their gun." etc.
For example, if someone mis-dialled and called our phone, the conversation after would always be something like "Who was that on the phone?" "Oh nobody, they got the wrong number."
When I was at university, whenever I talked to my mum on the phone about any of my friends, male or female, I'd pretty much always use "they" unless I'd already mentioned their name, because if I ever made the mistake of mentioning a female friend, it'd turn into an hour long interrogation.
(Of course, having the tools in your toolbox that one would use to avoid pronouns sometimes lets you increase clarity; it's not a bad skill to have).
I disagree that words "become" slurs, in principle. Outside of a very few specific examples, where the term was constructed to insult, we know that words are insults because of the context in which they're used.
> It seems to me like they just want to be insulting.
It should be acceptable to insult people in certain contexts (not here, of course). But far more importantly, especially when it comes to terms like "idiot", "retard", "developmentally disabled" etc. etc.: when someone insults an idea, it's completely inappropriate to treat this as though some corresponding identity group had been insulted. Changing the words does nothing about it, anyway. When someone's purpose is to associate an idea with low intelligence, that will show through regardless of what word is used.
Aside from which, the treadmill isn't even remotely in sync universally. There are real discussion fora I've seen that take themselves completely seriously, where the word "stupid" is completely verboten and already has been for years - and not because of some general blanket policy against insults.
I disagree; perjoration is a well understood linguistic topic, and it tends to happen in particular with words associated with disadvantaged groups. Idiot, moron, mentally retarded, ghetto, gypsy, savage, spinster, etc.
> It should be acceptable to insult people in certain contexts
We might occasionally want to say negative things about people, but actual insult should be saved for playful contexts. I have a hard time defending deliberately being a jerk to someone else.
> it's completely inappropriate to treat this as though some corresponding identity group had been insulted
If we are describing another person with a word, in general, we should respect their desire to be called or not be called by that word. And when a word has taken on undesirable connotations, it's reasonable to pick a sane default that most people are not going to want to be called that.
> Aside from which, the treadmill isn't even remotely in sync universally. There are real discussion fora I've seen that take themselves completely seriously, where the word "stupid" is completely verboten and already has been for years - and not because of some general blanket policy against insults.
Sure, change is uneven and not all proposed change happens. I am fine with calling something "stupid"-- it's when the "stupid" is an idea belonging to a particular person or is being used to call someone a name that it's not so great. Of course, there's always context; if I was around someone that I knew was particularly sensitive about their intelligence, I would perhaps try harder to stay away from words like "stupid" or "dumb".
All of this, really, boils down to basic courtesy. If we're not told explicitly what is considered courteous, we need to make reasonable guesses based on the overall social context.
None of those meet my definition of "slur", except possibly "gypsy".
>I have to wonder a bit about people who really don't want to stop using terms that have become insulting, but otherwise freely pick up new usages of words in other contexts. It seems to me like they just want to be insulting.
Natural evolution of language feels natural. You start hearing and using terms as you need them. The word "gamepad" was scarcely, if ever, used 50 years ago, some inventions came to be and people needed a term to refer to a specific object, so they naturally picked up the term.
Start a campaign today to demand people stop using the word "gamepad" and start using "funtroller" with the threat of moral condemnation and you will find the same resistance.
- from Prejudice by Tim Minchin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw
"Colored people" does the opposite.
The difference is subtle, and in most cases, I would argue that "colored people" was just the term of the times and did not intend to imply inferiority.
Give it another ~20 years for the people who made "people of color" the popular term to have their children come of age and they'll decide that "people of color" is offensive for some reason.
Those negative "stereotypes" may be actually accurate, while the euphemism may be inaccurately positive. There is a reason the euphemism treadmill exists for various concepts, a reason new euphemisms gradually acquire a negative meaning again. One possible reason is that the category of things in question really has significant negative aspects.
For instance, when someone snarls 'what, do you think I'm retarded?' or 'it's right there, are you fucking blind*?', they're conveying more than just that it sucks or would suck to be disabled. They're insinuating something like 'it is deeply shameful to be comparable to a disabled person in any way'. There are many, many people who are blind and would say they'd rather not be, or that being blind is mostly negative (a hardship, socially isolating, etc.), and would still take some offense or scoff or register some annoyance at a statement like that.
In defense of the euphemizers, to say that we should not display disdain and contempt for mentally handicapped people is not the same thing as to say we should each pretend we're indifferent to taking on brain damage. These things sometimes do run together in practice, but I'd argue that this is merely incidental and an error. The goal of euphemizing isn't the erasure of differences in outcome but the blunting of explicit, directed, personal negative judgment.
I guess most people would pay a lot of money. Losing much of your intelligence is one of the objectively worst things that can happen to you. It would e.g. mean having way worse job opportunities. Which would mean earning less, and having generally a much more unpleasant job, if one gets a job at all.
This confirms that it is pretty objectively bad to fall under this concept, regardless of whether people express it with an euphemism or not.
There is generally a kind of hostile and personal judgement involved in the regard of referents of terms on euphemistic treadmills that goes beyond the judgment that the associated traits, afflictions, situations, etc., are undesirable.
Your method of analysis here does not do a good job of explaining the thing at issue, or at least, it leaves crucial elements unexplained.
One thing I noticed is that (for some reason) nobody has an interest to make cancer seem less bad than it is, while such interests exist for euphemism treadmill concepts. Though I'm not sure where this difference comes from.
It is also super common for people to assume that disabled people can't do things they genuinely can (if often through extra time, effort, or special techniques). So there's a real underestimation phenomenon that disabled people often try to push back against politically, in addition to strategies (often from outside disability communities but sometimes, imo, from within) that seek equal dignity and rights through an erasure of real differences. Both are going on.
I've honed in on disability here because I think it's one case (of many) of at least one kind of thing that's likely to get put on a euphemism treadmill: traits whose bearers are seen as making up a certain kind of person. Cancer I think we tend to see as incidental to who someone is, as opposed to some other things like reading ability, the capacity to walk, criminality, maybe certain aspects of personality, etc.
For instance there are the people who always capitalize the word "black" when it is used to refer to black people and then there are people who capitalize it the same way you would capitalize any other word.
Bloomberg Businessweek is one of the worst offenders: they always capitalize "black" on top of the frequently bad typography and what looks like pandering to Gen Z but is probably really aimed at older people who want to feel like they are with it. The thing is they have reviews of $2000 a night hotel rooms and $400 bottles of booze. Maybe they are just trying to make the $300 a night hotel room and $50 bottle of booze look affordable, but it damages their credibility as advocates for the downfallen.
It's completely real that black people face problems today and faced problems in the past. Changing a "b" to a "B" doesn't change any of that, but it's a great way to get labeled as a "racist" because you don't sign on to some superficial "anti-racist" behavior.
(The kind of language engineering seems to be more of a right than left thing, but the right does like to coin phrases like "luxury belief" and if you want to believe the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis the phrase "illegal alien" is a singular case of a phrase "going viral" and having a powerful political impact, much more than things like "latinx")
Did you say this backwards?
And luxury belief and illegal alien aren't euphemisms, they are specific terms with a set meaning. Illegal alien is a technical legal term with a precise meaning, even.
Part of the language engineering dynamic, also, is to try and replace terms that have a precise meaning (illegal alien) with fluffier less precise words (undocumented, migrant) so that the idea that is being referred to (someone in the country without the legal right) doesn't even have language that can refer to it. Another example, what is the currently polite term that means "a woman that is not a transwoman"?
I always thought the switch from "illegal immigrant" to "undocumented immigrant" actually worked against people on the left trying to fight in favor of immigrants. "Undocumented", IMO, feeds into the false notion that most unauthorized immigrants simply hopped over the border without documentation, so we don't know who they are, when the reality is that most unauthorized immigrants are simply overstaying their visa.
"Unauthorized immigrant/migrant" is the best term, IMO, but "illegal" was fine. The argument that "HoW cAn A pErSoN bE iLlEgAl" was always dumb to me, because it insinuated that the "illegal" applied to the person, and not their presence, and nobody believed the person was illegal.
> Another example, what is the currently polite term that means "a woman that is not a transwoman"?
The full term is "cisgender woman", or abbreviated as "cis".
It is not a slur, no matter how much the nut jobs like Elon Musk want to say it is.
Undocumented or unauthorized alien/immigrant is a technical legal term [1], "illegal alien" is loaded language used for propaganda.
[1] https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/unauthorized-immigra...
You'd best tell your country that their main legal document contains "loaded language used for propaganda". Title 8 of the US Code contains multiple references to illegal aliens; just as one example, 8 USC § 1366 requires the Attorney General to report annually on how many "illegal aliens" are in US prisons: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1366
A person can also be an "alien terrorist" (8 USC § 1531), a "criminal alien" (8 USC § 1231) and an "illegal entrant" (8 USC § 1182).
Your government is free to stop using these terms and has not done so. It has repealed, replaced, moved sections of Title 8 before, and will keep doing that. The current law is defined using the term "illegal alien" in several places.
Also, the Democrats attempted to introduce a bill to change government terminology, that bill did not go forward: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/3776 - as they are currently in control of the executive, they can use whatever terminology they like, but they also can't bind their opponent's terminology should they get back into power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Definition
What I'd noticed is that people who want to defend "capitalism" won't accept any reasonable definition of what it is: for instance you might follow many historians who will trace it back to the Dutch East India Company and they'd say, no they were a bunch of statist jerks like Lenin and Stalin. Ultimately they won't accept anything unless it keeps all the good things and loses all the bad things.
The word was coined around the time of Marx and essentially reflects a Marxist viewpoint which posited a split between a large population of "workers" and a smaller population of "capitalists".
Actual advocates of the status quo would rather the system go unnamed because their best defense of the system is Margaret Thatcher's "There is no Alternative" and any naming or description of the system, particularly drawing a circle around it and saying "this is the system" and "this is exterior to the system" helps in the conception of alternatives.
The strength and resilience of the current system is precisely that it doesn't have a single center, instead it is like a Hydra with a tremendous number of heads. This is why "colonialism" and "mercantilism" have been replaced by a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-system
Even if the United States was wiped out overnight by a solar flare as happens to the Soviet Union in Larry Niven's story Inconstant Moon it might make less change in the direction of said system because the primary complaint people have over our chief competitor, which claims to be Communist, is that it seems to practice Capitalism better than us.
If your ideology is anti-Marxist, however, you might be tricked into adopting Marxist terminology such as Forbes magazine calling itself a "Capitalist Tool". It's why you don't ever want your ideology to be anti-something.
People get into trouble with "socialism" as "state owns the means of production" vs "social democracy" as "state provides pensions, benefits to the poor and sick, etc." Even in the latter case you can have differences such as in "socialized medicine" where, in the UK, the government owns the hospitals but in the US, Medicaid and Medicare cut checks to private hospitals.
Also one could claim that "Communist" governments have shown "Capitalist" characteristics in practice. Stalin's greatest accomplishment was starving the countryside to fund rapid accumulation of capital in the industrial sector. Brutal, but they survived Germany's onslaught in WWII. People in countries like India and China respected Stalin long after he was deprecated in the Soviet Union because they were hoping to develop as quickly.
Then there is contemporary China which has caused a political crisis in the west not because it is a "Worker's Paradise" but it seems so much more effective at capital accumulation. (e.g. they have high speed trains in Beijing, it costs us billions and billions to run one from Fresno to Bakersfield. They make EVs people want to buy, we make XXXL EVs that pile up in dealer lots unsold because nobody can afford them, etc.)
I thought the whole point of the PoC euphemism was to be vaguer. It’s not literally everyone, it’s everyone except white people. It’s not a replacement for other euphemisms so much as a supergroup meant to include other minorities in the conversation (one very much in a Western context).
If I think about colors in the scientific sense (black: lack of light, white: mixture of lights from all colors), the "person of color" expression would include everyone except black people, but how it is used, it includes everyone except white people (wherever we draw this "white-enough" line, depending on the context).
Why not just use "non-white person"?
But good point about the diversity aspect - you're right, that is a good reason to make the terms more inclusive.
You can tell that there is some division over whether vague is desirable by the increasing usage of "BIPOC" (black and indigenous person of color)
On the surface, it sounds like a respectful way to refer to people that belong to a racial minority.
But if you do even a second of thinking, you realize that "person of color" is a long way of saying "colored", a word that had serious negative connotations a century ago during the era of segregation in the USA. And if you peel it back even further, "colored" just means "non-white".
I suspect that people who say or write "person of color" are giving themselves a pat on the back for using the right euphemism of the year to refer to a (supposedly) marginalized group. But I think the truth is more sinister. They just found a way to say "non-white" without saying those exact words.
Speaking personally, I am classified as a person of color. I refuse to refer to myself using that term because it is ridiculous. If you feel tempted to call me that, just use "non-white" instead - it is more honest and transparent. You're putting whites in one category and everyone else in the "other" category. If you think that calling me "non-white" sounds wrong, then you should think that calling me "person of color" sounds equally wrong.
If you want to be racist, be openly racist. Don't hide behind fuzzy terms like "person of color". If you meant to convey "non-white", say what you mean.
> The crucial thing is to be able to step back from our instinctive reactions to the way such words sound to us now — we can’t help but hear the superseded ones as sounding terrible and the new ones as clean and shiny
But to me, the "superseded ones" sound brutally honest, while the new ones sound like doomed attempts to ignore reality - like calling a rose a redbloom because one doesn't like sweet smells.
If one believes that harmful attitudes are associated with a term, the problem is the attitudes - and changing the term doesn't make them go away. Changing them faster is irrelevant - the attitudes glom to the new term instantaneously, once people actually become aware that it's actually being used - and the terms will rightly be mocked for their ineffectiveness just as quickly. (Keep in mind, for example, that the term "people of color" dates to at least 1988: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/20/magazine/on-language-peop.... But in my universe, it effectively didn't exist until 2012 or so - and indeed, some mockery of the term might well have been my first exposure to it.)
No, person of color has a meaning. It's everyone who isn't a white person.
South Asian people are still South Asian. Black people are still black. And there's brown people, too. None of that has changed and all those words are still in use. But "person of color" is used to refer to ALL of them when that applies. It's a useful term, really.
Because most western societies are majority white. That means sometimes you want to refer to the minority. But they're not all the same, so you can't just say "black" because that's not accurate. So you can use "person of color" in that context and it's more accurate.
Can you define white person? Do you use the one-drop rule?
That may seem like a stupid definition, but it covers pretty much all the edge cases. Obviously the 1 drop rule isn't very good. I mean, I definitely have at least a little Romani blood in me and I'm definitely white.
It also covers whiteness changing throughout history.
While euphesim displacement is naturally occurring, it doesn't mean it is the best course for the common's sanity.
Not to mention the namespace exhaustion that goes along with it :D
https://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/
> In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
This is why I dislike the euphemism treadmill (although it's impolite to start a dysphemism treadmill!) - to use them at all is to shy away from truth, because the truth is often brutal.
What kind of society would we have if we were open and honest with each other?
One is indeed a natural feature of language development, in which a word slowly acquires more metaphorical connotations. The other process is strictly political, in which somebody in a position of power demands a thing to be renamed.
The processes can be distinguished both by their speed and their effect on the mind of the speaker. The natural process is slow, to be measured in decades and centuries, and creates no intellectual conflict. The old and new word exist simultaneously for a period, until the old word is slowly forgotten and loses its meaning.
The political process is rapid, to be measured in years, and creates anxiety within the speaker. He wants to use a certain word; he knows exactly what the word means, and he knows his listeners know as well. He chooses the new word merely because he fears negative consequences if he doesn't.
I think all the examples from the article can be neatly categorized along these lines.
Accordingly, you need new words whenever the old ones become standard, since at that point they no longer serve the estranging/interventionist role.
Especially this "your membership in a group of people concerned to change" part, which is virtue-signalling at its best.
I have NEVER met someone using alternative language like "differently abled" who actually did something substiantial for the community or for a particular person. Almost all cases have a touch of patronisation.
I need nothing of it. If you cant call me disabled, you are part of the problem, not the solution.
I recall one such poster getting upset over the word 'Chinaman'. Something this Englishman, sharing an office with two Irishman, a Frenchman and a Dane, found rather bizarre, particularly as the chap complaining was not Chinese themselves!
Such virtue signalling is at its worst when used to pile-on a speaker or post for uttering some perceived slight, or daring to suggest an unpopular idea or political view. It is bad for open discourse, even open society, and needs to stop.
As I see it, the US - the first place with a supposed egalitarian bent on the cosmopolitan society - created a system whereby people from all backgrounds and ethnicites could interact in the public sphere without tripping each other's emotional wires - that is the basis for Political Correctness. Keep your baggage at home, and out in the real world and in the market you can interact with everyone as equals (so, Mike Munger's "the answer is trasaction costs!").
The system worked pretty well for a time (fine, it's called the 90s). The problem is that the edifice kept on being built up, as more voices raised more touchy subjects that needed to be sanitized in public, enough that it began to bother people. I think that as alternative means of communication allowed people to more be "themselves" in the digital, if not real, public domain, the discrepancy between public discourse and private thought became more glaring.
Now, for every system, there are those who naturally like to uphold norms, and these are the ones you say are "virtue signalling" - I think they're just norm upholders. But for the rest of us, it takes only one euphemism that hits us the wrong way to get us questioning the whole over-built edifice. The fact that one political side arbitrarily took it up as a cause, of course, made the other side all the more dogmatic in its application.
So it will be eventually torn down and replaced by something identical and the cycle will continue anew. ~fin~
I think the Englishman comparison is not very smart. With the same logic, it's fine to use pedophile to refer to someone because it's grammatically constructed similarly to audiophile and no one never complained when associated to the word audiophile. I don't think a pejorative word (recognized as such in all modern dictionaries) stops to be pejorative because it exists a similar construction that is not pejorative.
And I don't think you need to be the one accused to be a pedophile to be offended when you see someone uselessly accusing someone else to be a pedophile. (but again, I would probably not have reacted, and have given the benefice of the doubt to the interlocutor, assuming they were unaware of the pejorative connotation)
To me, this set of words would already lean negative and imply someone hopelessly devoted to a specific country, not someone of that nationality, even if "Chinaman" didn't also already have a pejorative history.
It's a bit similar to how some people just posit that "The Ukraine" or "The Congo" is somehow pejorative just because most countries don't have a definite article.
And yet "Chinaman" is considered derogatory. If you believe the Wikipedia page, it has been considered so since at least 1965 in British English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman
You might not consider it logical for "Chinaman" to be considered derogatory when similarly structured words like "Frenchman" are not, but the reality is that if you use the term then you will be evoking the current meaning.
> and needs to stop
The point of the article is that you can't stop the euphemism treadmill, no matter how emphatically you request it.
A Dane, a Swede, a Norwegian (Norseman brings to mind beards and battle-axes), a German, a Welshman, a Luxembourger.
English is weird!
Source: An native English speaker of His Majesty the Kings English, not one of those weird leftpondian dialects :-)
It is usually easy to understand if you just look into it.
It's one of those words you certainly shouldn't be offended at finding in an old book, or not even if an elderly person uses it, but if a young person uses it then he's probably dug it up deliberately for questionable political reasons.
However, I think the parent tried (and seemingly failed) to convey the idea that the use of certain euphemism is intended to affect public opinion among the outsiders rather than the minority group in question.
In other words, it's not for disabled (or any other group) but the rest of the society, meant to change public opinion through removal (by avoiding use of terms that evoke those associations) of harmful stereotypes, thus the weird language. The meaningful purpose of virtue signalling is not to comfort oneself into how nice human one is, but to establish a societal norm by sending this "we're all considering ourselves decent folks here and we aren't looking down on $group, right y'all?" peer-pressurizing social message. Which is, of course, fake, but the idea is that given enough time it ends up becoming true. Generations change, young people don't have inherent biases, so they end up ingesting whatever is around them, which is the reason, I guess. Again, this is just my understanding of it trying to rationalize the idea (my logic is "it can't be just something stupid, right, someone must've thought it through?"), so I could be totally making things up.
Of course, I can't say this is all working as intended. Surely, not well, given how it feels offensive to the actual $group (like the example of calling a person disabled in this thread; or I've yet to see a Latin person who wouldn't frown at "latinx" linguistic nonsense, etc.), so it doesn't look like a great idea overall.
I have been privileged enough to only be discriminated based on my nationality and ethnic group (rather than more permanent things), so I have limited experience here. Just trying to figure it out and make an opinion of it.
You can see virtue signaling in this behavior, and there may be a part of it, but that is not the only reason it is used and it's dicey to jump to the conclusion that virtue signaling can only be the main goal. The fact that you don't see these others goals or refuse to believe that they may be the main reason does not change the reality of the existence of these goals.
It's like people who are saying "if you say you prefer Linux over Windows, it's only because you are jealous of Windows popularity and want to feel different". Maybe it is, maybe it is not. But they just refuse to even consider that maybe the other person is not acting by jealousy.
> I have NEVER met someone using alternative language like "differently abled" who actually did something substiantial for the community or for a particular person. Almost all cases have a touch of patronisation.
That sentence sounds very strange to me: why on earth someone using alternative language like "differently abled" would suddenly be required to do something that you don't even blink an eye for people who don't use that language?
It feels like the virtue signaling resides in your eyes only: you are seeing someone saying X, you _invent_ that it is because they want to be seen as a knight helping the disabled people, and then you show that there is an incompatibility because they don't really act like a knight helping the disabled people.
But what if people using this language don't do it to be seen as a knight helping the disabled people. Then there is absolutely no incompatibility at all.
The fact that this incompatibility exists is even a clue that maybe this behavior has nothing to do with virtue signaling.
> And as a disabled person, I can tell you, I need nothing of it.
I think that the goal as described by the previous comment has nothing to do with you. The goal is to reshape the way of thinking "there is a hierarchy of 'good situation' with abled people on top" into "there are differences, with sometimes good situation and sometimes bad situation, but it's more complicated than that and simplifying the picture as a simple hierarchy is incorrect". The goal is not to please you, the goal is to avoid having a way of thinking that does not correspond to the reality.
It's the same reason why some people stop saying buzzwords like "artificial intelligence" when referring to a smartish complex algorithm composed of if conditions and no machine learning at all. They are not doing that to be fair to algorithm, they do that because there is a gain for them and for the society to not maintain misconceptions.
Writing a serious reply doesn't feel like a good use of my time. You have already demonstrated that you have no regard for the lived experience of minorities and prefer your pseudoanalytical explanations over everything a person from such an in-group could tell you.
The truth is, the story is much more complicated. But trying to explain that to you feels draining and useless, so I just stop here.
YOU are the one explaining what other have in their mind. I just tell you "maybe it's not so simple".
And you get all virtue signaling, explaining that everyone who dares not agreeing with you can only be a bad guy because you have a disabled get-out-of-jail-for-free card.
And that is not a "pseudoanalitical" explanation, that's sooo simple, if you don't get it, it's your problem. That's very easy: I don't call "artificial intelligence" an algorithm that is just a bunch of if-conditions, just because it's misleading. Others use "different abled" FOR THE SAME REASON. The fact that it does not affect you is irrelevant, you are not the reason they prefer to use a term they think (correctly or not, who cares) is better suited, and they don't do it to look good. It's very simple.
He's just pointing out that "differently" and "dis" have different connotations. You're not dis - abled. You ARE able to do things. And some things you have to do differently.
There are so many things I can not do independently, and cant do with external help either because that is not always aviable, that I definitely feel disabled, not differently abled.
All of you have been spoiled by leftist ideas have absolutely no idea what are you doing and how patronising you actually are.
Its my life, I decide what words are appropriate. If you have been spoiled by language whitewashing, the problem is you, and not me.
This is part of why this political language is so abrasive. Who are you (the "general you," not "you the person who posted this comment") to tell me what my current assumptions about the group are? It's incredibly presumptive and sanctimonious.
Edit. Dolores Umbridge from HP is a brilliant caricature on them.
I also want to point out the inherent absurdity of referencing an admitted caricature as if it was somehow demonstrative, especially considering the cartoonish villainy of the caricature.
> Part of the role a phrase like “differently abled” plays is to estrange your base assumptions about disability and to signal the existence of and your membership in a group of people concerned to change the conditions around disability
Less euphemistically, you want to make other people think and act differently. And if disingenuous language policing or the threat of condemnation by said "group of people" gets the job done, that's just fine.
What you're doing is asinine because it attempts to cast the familiar as alien and ironically is an example of the behavior you describe - you're being disingenuous and trying to 'make other people think and act differently'.
I don't know how else to say this: someone trying to change your mind is not an attack. People disliking you because you behave like shit is not a conspiracy.
I don't know if this is a "healthy" process. Inevitable it may well be. But it doesn't change attitudes, it doesn't help the people involved and one issue I don't see talked about is that the quality of the language itself seems to drop through this process. "Crippled" has a certain pithiness and is a distinct word. "Differently abled" has many more syllables and verbal overlap with words like "different" and "able". We're shrinking the ability to describe things in a process that might literally be Orwellian.
If, a decade from now, someone comes up with a better term I might be whatever that is.
But I still am glad we've moved on past early 20th century labels and are trying new ones on. Some might not fit nicely, but they are progress generally.
It just seems so futile to have to keep coming up with new words for the same thing, when the new words will inevitably become slurs in the same way, at least if anyone uses them. So it's not like we can avoid the offence, it is just transferred to a new word. Wouldn't it be better to accept that some people will say mean things, and focus on learning to live with that, and on making people be less mean?
And sometimes we return to them. Queer is a label I use for myself that's a reclaimed slur. I know plenty of gay men who call themselves fags. Some disabled people use "crip" as a term of endearment. But usually these reclaimed slurs are for the exclusive use of the members of the community internally.
I wonder how common this is with any minority. The majority gets to decide what to call you. Guessing they didn't ask first to see what you think, either. I would be wildly irritated to be in that position.
> The crucial thing is to be able to step back from our instinctive reactions to the way such words sound to us now [...] and to realize they’re steps on an escalator, moving slowly but inexorably
Is this an ironic attempt to demonstrate notion of the euphemism treadmill, by renaming it to an escalator?
Because escalators and treadmills are kinda the opposite of one another.
With an escalator you do nothing, and get to where you want to be.
With a treadmill, you expend lots of energy and get nowhere - and if you don't expend the energy, you get flung off the back.
Why?
(That you don't see any of them in official publications doesn't count for much in my opinion. Official publications try to avoid all negative emotive language.)
Once an unfashionable euphemism falls out of use, people gradually cease to recognise the offensive meaning which made it unfashionable.
If someone gets offended because I was looking for the cheese where it's traditionally been, then they can enjoy the offence that they imagined. Even if I went to the effort of consulting a dictionary before every communication it could not be updated quickly enough.
Its quite useful, means I can safely ignore any opinion they have on the topic at hand.
Speaking of an incredibly negative and gross "virtue"—this growing trend of people actively seeking to identify members of an out group who they can safely ignore is disturbing.
Once upon a time we actually tried to understand even our opponents, if only so we could beat them in the debates. Now we're so confident that we're right, they're wrong, and right makes might that we don't feel the need to attempt to understand them even to debate them—we just throw meaningless insults at each other and win elections based on who can drum up the most fear of the "incredibly negative and gross" other.
If you are like, "oh, shoot, didn't know, I'll try to remember that" then most folks are pretty chill.
It's only when someone is like, "it's too fucking hard to remember the current term every decade I just want to use the term that offends people because I refuse to update a pointer in my memory!" That people generally get edgier over.
If someone is using a term maliciously to express real prejudice, I'll call them out on it. If they are just communicating using the terms they know for the same concept that a newer term now exists for, that doesn't strike me as a reason to dock any points.
I'm disabled. Do not call me differently abled. I'm sorry if you had a textbook that taught you to do so, and I will gently gently correct you.
Language always evolves. If you can learn what "yeet" means, you can practice using words people prefer for their groups.
If I can manage not to forget your username, hungie, then I will try to remember not to call you "differently abled". But please be patient and forgiving of my confusion if, between now and our next conversation, I encounter a third individual who insists that I never refer to them as "disabled" and instead call them "differently abled", and my memory for which of you preferred which term fails me. Forgive me doubly if you're both in the audience at the same time when I'm giving a presentation about installing a wheelchair ramp, and struggling to come up with a mutually-satisfactory term. I already struggle enough with names alone, such that I often decline to use them out of anxiety of making a mistake!
We're talking about using words. I have never used that word.
If you see someone performatively policing language feel free to call them out on it. Unless I missed something though I don't think anyone is asking you to pull a shift as a language cop, or otherwise 'dock points'.
Okay. Stop policing[0] the language of others! Is that about right?
Can you explain why this struck you as disingenuous? ESL struggles are a daily concern for me and the people I know.
As for being a language cop, I have no interest in doing so; I'm more concerned about the people who find themselves on the receiving side of feeling policed. When I say "that doesn't strike me as a reason to dock any points" I'm talking about my ideal that everyone will behave in a non-language-policing way. In order to avoid sounding lecturing or critical, I often refer to myself when expressing how I hope other people will behave too. ("When crossing the street, you should look both ways" --> "When crossing the street, I should look both ways"). It seems you interpreted it rather differently than I meant, which just goes to show again how clear communication is already hard for all of us.
I object to the word cishet that you used early, strongly. From my point of view it seems one particular crew is declaring that there need to be all these new words, and I don't agree that these are the people who get to decide that. Consider me a Blood, and I'm not accepting words created by the .... wait, respecting your wishes, I mean, consider me a Crip, and I'm not accepting words created by the Bloods. Come talkin that trash, we'll pull your card, knowin' nothin' in life, but to be legit, don't quote me, boy, 'cause I ain't said shit. Thanks, Eazy-E, couldn't have said it better myself
Isn't a new word. It's just the sort of most prolific, "default" position of human so we don't really use it because it isn't relevant.
Heterosexual is a word, cisgender is a word, and both are 100% accurate descriptions of MOST people. Since MOST people are both of those things, we have cishet.
"Why does this exist?" you may ask.
Because sometimes we need to refer to the minority - as in, people who ARE NOT both cisgender and heterosexual. Or sometimes we need to refer to people who don't face societal challenges around their gender/sexuality - those people are cishet.
I think the fact you think gays don't have the authority to "create" words is weird. Um, why not? Why don't you want to use them? Will something... bad happen to you or is it more so an out of spite thing?
Also neither cisgender or heterosexual were created by the gays. Both created by cishet people. People just put them together, boom, cishet, easy. Not a new thing or cause for concern IMO.
For others, who may not be aware, cishet is a portmanteau of cisgender heterosexual. Cis being the opposite of trans, Latin prefixes for "the side of" and "the opposite side of". Transgender is therefore just "the opposite gender" and cisgender is "the same gender". (These prefixes are commonly used across science.)
Most folks are aware of homosexual (same sex attracted) and heterosexual (opposite sex attracted), which are the Greek prefixes for same and opposite.
Maybe you are one of today's lucky 10,000 who didn't know where that term originated! (https://xkcd.com/1053)
The passive voice thing always gets me here. It omits who is doing the considering. It's not like some word suddenly is offensive. A small group of people decides the word is offensive and then they either succeed or not at dragging everyone else along with them.
"Is considered offensive" lends it a gravity that it doesn't deserve if you translate it: "some people whose opinions you may or may not value consider xyz offensive".
You have several comma splices, just as many missing commas, some dubious capitalisation and a missing full stop or two. I personally find sloppy punctuation offensive but I don’t usually point it out. How do /you/ handle being corrected? These rules change a lot less often than once a decade.
Now, you may not like prescriptivist grammar, but if you don’t, I’d like to see how you justify one form of prescriptivism and not another.
And if you don’t like how I picked on your choice of a single word in your post: That is the behaviour you’re defending.
I'm not bothered by your post! Genuinely. I find it takes all types, and if there's a way I can improve to be better understood, that's a language win for me. I level up when corrected.
>When one becomes frustrated with the way a policy or guideline is being applied, it may be tempting to try to discredit the rule or interpretation thereof by, in one's view, applying it consistently. Sometimes, this is done simply to prove a point in a local dispute. In other cases, one might try to enforce a rule in a generally unpopular way, with the aim of getting it changed.
You're trying to apply prescriptivism consistently to the point of absurdity. In turn this causes you to reply to people who hold genuine views with a bad faith exaggerated offense at punctuation, just so you can illustrate your point, and that turns a genuine discussion into a something much less interesting.
In wiki culture, they call this POINT-y behavior: Taking rules too far in bad faith just to prove a point. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:POINT)
TL;DR: Please don't do that, it makes the discussion very annoying!
I don't know if the above statement is parody or reality in this ever changing political correctness climate.
At first it's partly activist, and when you adopt it it means that many people won't understand you, think you're criticizing their use of the previous term, or think you're probably activist on other topics too, when you think you're using a normal, neutral expression.
So most people are sceptical and wait with adopting new terms until they're widespread.
The morally virtuous new term that the experts have decided is the correct replacement is "golly gee willikers". Please use it.
Your suggestion suggests you are not discussing in good faith.
The general tendency of most people to favor the in-group probably also provides enough of an underlying reality to make it hard to "destigmatize" the various ways of calling someone part of the out-group.
I think this is just not true - the underlying concepts are constantly being destigmatized. I mean compare now to 50 years ago.
Whether the words helped this or not - not sure.
I wonder what the author would think of the fresh cycle of euphemism derived from platform algorithms, like "unalive."
You cant unalive an idea . . .
. . . but you can euphemize it
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/18vdpyg/whats...
Perhaps related in the sense of being self censorship of restricted topics, although not liguistic, is the recent trend of firearm-related YouTube channels showing disassembly but not assembly. Of course assembly is mostly just disassembly in reverse, but one is permitted by platform terms and the other is not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXknwMx0_BQ&t=3m38s
Deadpool's fourth-wall awareness (which manifests in-universe as mental illness) enabled him to know that he was in an animated cartoon series, but he was applying the standards of animated series from the 1980s and early 1990s, in which death was not discussed and the topic was avoided entirely. Sometimes the baddies spoke of "destroying" or "eliminating" their opponents, but never killing them. Ultimate Spider-Man was a more mature series released in a time when we thought we'd moved beyond such standards-and-practices nitpicking in the name of "protecting the children" but... apparently we have not. New media (YouTube) provoked new moral panics and the cycle repeats...
I'm 99% sure the organizations that do this - tiktok, roblox, etc - are well aware of the users' attempts of euphemizing around the filters, so they are OK with it. That, or it's from higher up but the legal whatsits can't keep up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc
The author of this article pointed our some similar examples: welfare -> cash assistance -> TANF.
Is the problem just shortening it because it takes too long to say?
I wish I could cleverly work in a "QED" here (from Latin) but it just doesn't fit.
Horrors of War Syndrome would probably be better.
She primarily worked with sexual abuse victims, but spent a lot of time veterans as well. Her focus was PTSD, and talk therapy is really effective for PTSD.
Her opinion was, in world war 1, They didn't really have the psychologic or physical frameworks to really distinguish. Certainly, some people had mechanical damage, like football players. Certainly, some people really had a hard time experiencing the horrors of war. They just didn't really know.
Calling it shell shock, that helped some of the veterans. Helped them sorta get that they're not alone. People have dealt with this for a long time.
Rape victims, shell shock isn't a great name. For a lot of reasons.
It's kinda about recognizing that this trauma is a real thing, there's nothing wrong with you. This is a normal reaction, everyone goes through it. Some people need a little help finding their way back to normal.
I doesn’t have to be a negative thing either. PTSD is more inclusive, since it doesn’t imply that you’ve literally had bombs dropped on you relentlessly, like shellshock does.
If I say to someone to "make way for the blind person walking there" I'm not attacking them, but trying to help them navigate a crowded area safely. That's true regardless of whether I referred to them as blind, unsighted, vision-impaired, differently-abled, or anything else. Similarly, If I were mocking them I'd be stigmatizing them regardless of the word I used for it.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-...
When it was written, "African-American" was the politically correct term but now it seems it has regressed to "Black"
Frankly, I think these are developed by HR so that they can more easily write inoffensive copy without considering their bias or the audience. Most people I've worked with know whether they're black, indigenous, european immigrant, ESL, partially blind, suffering from PTSD, paraplegic, etc. The problem is that those things are just too specific to quickly gloss over in an anonymous uninformative screed. Easier to have a catchall phrase to abstract and dehumanize the issues.
I think it could be simplified to: the euphemism treadmill is driven by fear of how those, other than the persons involved, will react to its use.
"Latinx" is a great recent example [1].
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/us/latinx-gallup-poll-prefere...
Yeah that's because they're different things.
Some things refer to POC, and some to black people, and some to indigenous people etc.
You can still say black, brown, south Asian, what have you. But if you need to refer to all non-white people, you say "people of color". Which makes perfect sense to me.
Uh oh. I’ve been using it wrong for a while, whoops.
But also, don't call us crippled. (Some people with disabilities do reclaim that term.)
Likewise, I call myself queer, but don't call me queer unless you are also queer.
Language like this fascinates me, because not only does it evolve, there is insider and outsider use. The cishet community can use lgbtq+, and that describes the same group of people as queer, but it means something quite radically different. Queer is steeped in radical implication in a way lgbtq+ is not.
Nothing in my post is meant to judge you, reader, more to say, "wow! Language is fucking wild!" I'm excited to see where it goes over the remainder of my life.
In the same way that we say queer instead of "non-straight"
Or is it just because cishet was "created" by gay people, so therefore it's automatically bad and you don't want it?
I'll never understand this mentality. "no dude I'm normal don't call me that shit!!" Like... come on.
To be clear I'm not saying this is YOUR mentality 100%. But whenever is see people say this, almost every time, this is their mentality.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/2...
This isn't good for society. I understand that words can accumulate baggage, but that alone doesn't explain euphemism or excuse its use.
This tendency is totally counterproductive, since it creates yet another barrier between the disabled and "normal" people.
I am blind. If you dont like that, stay away. But it is even more hurtful if I can feel your uncomfortableness through the language.
Like the whole "unalived" instead of "killed" thing.
I wonder if euphemisms have some metaphorical overloading that changes over the time, or so.
I was talking to my elderly Dad about an issue he was having at his club. To summarise his point he used an almightly slur, which knocked me backwards, especially as my two young boys were sat nearby.
I didn't react as I didn't want to draw attention to it. Anyone who has young kids will know how they love to pick up new words they shoudn't use.
Fortunately it went right over their heads, but, for me, this is exactly why we should move language forward.
i can’t find it offhand though, but the idea’s the same.
surveillance and dossier building - advertising
behavioral data gathering - telemetry
I'm sure there are more for recurring charges, dark patterns, predatory pricing and all the cleaned-up names associated with enshittification.
I don't know if you ran into this one but I was convinced to use 'allow list' and 'block list' over white/black list purely on the basis that its just a bit more descriptive. I sort of wish we could clean language up like this more regularly, just imagine a world where we didn't maintain the notion of an electrical current that flowed opposite to the flow of electrons. So tidy.
(Worth noting: something I picked up while trying to reboot my memory on this is that from an electrical engineering standpoint, it's actually not super-useful to think about current as "flowing electrons" unless you're dealing very specifically with a situation where electrons are jumping through air or a vacuum and it matters. In a battery, the flow is ions; in a hydrogen fuel cell, the flow is protons; in wires, sure, the flow is electrons, but the fact that what's really moving around and causes phenomena is charge concentration matters and, conveniently, conceptually covers all these cases, and as long as your concept of charge concentration is consistent it doesn't matter if you're considering the concentration to equalize by flowing from positive to negative or negative to positive, there's a symmetry to charge density minimization.)
That is a good point, but, it would still be really nice if the convention for current just so happened to match the flow of electrons through a wire since it is the common case. At least, I remember that being pretty disorienting for me at times in some electrical engineering classes. Wish I could remember something specific though!
Do appreciate you pointing out some counter examples though, always fun.
Why does there have to be a slave just because there's a master? That is just one very specific meaning of the word, out of several dozen, and in the git context it was pretty clear that it wasn't used in that sense, but rather something like "master copy". So the master to main renaming thing was especially silly.
You are unironically doing the thing I was talking about by not noticing that I already said that about git's master branch. Master/slave is also a pretty common phrase in computing when talking about hardware, and its a pretty ugly concept when applied to humans, so I'm also not terribly surprised people chose to change their default branch name even if the association is only tangential. You wouldn't be surprised if the old name was 'ScrapedCornea' and people didn't love it. But again, its bizarre that a shift from 'master' to 'main', which is shorter, provokes this response. Do you feel personally critiqued by it somehow? Genuinely curious.
I personally have much closer ancestors, that were tortured by the communists within living memory. What if I told you that for this reason the word "comrade" triggers me? Or in analogy with the github situation, if I asked people to stop wearing Che t-shirts? Would you say that was reasonable, or a sign of insanity?
As I said, "allow list" is more descriptive if you don't know the word whitelist in the sense that it's easier to guess its meaning the first time you see it. My point is that this is not generally considered important, just look at 100 random words, most of them would be hard to guess the exact meaning of, even if like me you studied classical languages.
Then out of respect I would would attempt to stop using it around you, And if enough people agreed with you we would probably mothball it in favor of something else.
This lengthy 2018 video on the phenomenon [0] discusses two examples, where:
> When "Illegal Immigration" comes up [...] one of the candidates says he wants to tighter the border because "Mexico is sending us rapists and thieves." I'm sorry, what? What just happened!? [...]
> Now they're talking about "The War on Terror" [... ] but then that same candidate pipes up that, if elected, for the sake of security, he wants to create a "Muslim registry" and--what the hell is going on? [...]
> The guy seemingly tanking his candidacy by appealing to extremists is the one who finally secures the nomination. You realize with some shock that in each of these cases you are witnessing the death of a euphemism. The death of a euphemism is a rare celestial event. Politicians only let a euphemism die when they don't need it anymore. This does not imply good things for Mexicans or Muslims.
________________
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dBJIkp7qIg - "The Alt-Right Playbook: The Death of a Euphemism"
The Department of War sounds so mean. It's the Department of Defense now.
If I'm not mistaken, the earliest form of this dilemma comes from the place where most contemporary cultural controversies spring, from the black civil rights struggle in the US[0].
1. The people formally known as "Negroes" or "Colored," in the mid-1960s at the culmination of a struggle that ended in legal equality, as a group mostly decided they wanted to be called "black" as a way to put them on the same level as "whites." This was the first "politically-correct" thing that I can recall, if you define that as words that have to be said, regardless of the attitude behind them. "Negro" would from then on be seen as hostile, although black people and the most aggressive antislavery and anti Jim Crow whites would have exclusively used "Negro" just a few years before. If you were always a moral paragon when it comes to black issues and just had been out of the loop for a few years, when you returned to the conversation you ran the risk of being yelled at for an innocuous, or even kind and insightful statement that contained the word "Negro."
2. But to illustrate imposition from above, the next change was from "black" to "African-American." This was a term engineered by a small group of "pan-African" activists that managed to find purchase within the Democratic "Rainbow/PUSH Coalition" led by Jessie Jackson in his bid for the Democratic Nomination in 1984. The concept of the Rainbow Coalition (as a campaign) was to transfer Jackson's success as a black civil rights activist to a concept of the nation as a federation of minority rights activist groups, with Jackson becoming the head coordinator of all of these groups as POTUS.
Jackson had made his living as a negotiator between businesses/institutions and the black public during controversies, either after communication had broken down or even preemptively. His basically decent politics, and his authority from having stood next to MLK, and from saying positive things that rhymed in a preacher's voice, would calm the public down, and he would tutor the companies on the magic words to say to make black people feel better while making trivial concessions.
"African-American" (as influenced by the pan-Africans) was the magic word that came out of the Rainbow Coalition (later, in 1989), and it was simply proclaimed to be the new respectful word for black people. White people adopted it immediately. The New Democrats, who had famously introduced themselves to the world by destroying the Rainbow Coalition, grabbed onto the word as a means to feign affinity with the concerns of the campaign they'd just destroyed.
This was entirely a top-down mandate. It is still a top-down mandate. Although it is an absolute requirement to use in professional in institutional circles, to the extent that in the 90s and early 00s people in the UK were accidentally calling black British people "African-Americans" and people were referring to Africans themselves as "African-Americans." You can say "black" if you're a white person, but it can give off an air of being overly familiar, smarmy and faux-chummy (like "folks" along with it.)
Black Americans currently do not prefer African-American.[1][2] In 1991, when the term had nearly already been made standard, "black" was preferred to "African-American" 72% to 15%.[3] I've been black all my life (never even met a white person who wasn't a teacher until I was 13) and I've rarely met a black person who referred to themselves as African-American. Yet, when institutional media talked about the term "black" in 2012, they discussed the fact that black people seem to prefer it as if they were talking about people who were riding penny-farthings and wearing pocketwatches.
> The labels used to describe Americans of African descent mark the movement of a people from the slave house to the White House. Today, many are resisting this progression by holding on to a name from the past: "black." [4]
Attacks on language are generally authoritarian impositions, coming from government and other powerful institutions. Attacks on language about minorities also seem to be, like so many other things, everybody in the world seeing themselves in the black civil rights struggle and thus relegating the black civil rights struggle to a metaphor for the real struggle - which is their own, against whatever annoys them personally at the time.
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[0] The world follows the US, and the US is obsessed with its slaves and their descendants, it's just a historical accident.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/vault/315566/gallup-vault-black-amer...
[2] https://atlantablackstar.com/2021/08/11/new-poll-shows-black...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/29/us/poll-says-most-blacks-...
https://www.ithaca.com/news/tompkins_county/bipoc-community-...
where some people have opened a BiPOC garden and faced persistent harassment from a neighbor.
As somebody who goes to museum ships and stuff like that I like the idea of a garden that interprets the impact of colonialism (people in Canada have to fight "Canada Thistle" that was brought by settlers) and features plants that were important to indigenous people here and to black people when they lived here and when they were in Africa and that are important to people in the global south now. I even like the story about the person that its named after:
https://www.rootworkherbals.com/bipoc-community-garden
So far so good, I'd like to see it, am I welcome?
As a space committed to healing from legacies of colonial violence on
land and the liberation of all people, we believe the garden must center
the needs of the most marginalized among us in overarching white supremacist,
capitalist systems. We center and celebrate our Queer, Trans, Disabled
Chronically Ill, Mentally Ill, Femme, Poor, Immigrant, Refugee, Fat and
Darkskin community.
Is "gay" or "lesbian" good enough or do you have to be "queer?" What exactly do they mean by "Femme" (e.g. presenting the image of a women?) What about immigrants and refugees who come from places with conservative values?
I get the inclusion of "ill" because of their emphasis on herbalism and healing, but according to the government about 73% of people are fat and about 52% have a chronic condition
https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti... https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2020/20_0130.htm
When a list like that gets longer and more complicated it becomes less meaningful and it's a problem for movements like that which are going to discover that skinny Queer people don't give a damn for straight fat people, no refugees show up and nobody in the group has a good idea of the challenges they face in the community, etc. They'll show up and hold a banner a few times but when the barricades go up they'll scatter, I wouldn't even count them to show up and vote because they think the Democrats are fascists because they support Israel or they funded a police department or something.