yea. Agression implies intent. Microagression does not.
Which can actually be kinda confusing to folks not familiar with it, but this is true of many sets of jargon, not just Social Justice.
Which can actually be kinda confusing to folks not familiar with it, but this is true of many sets of jargon, not just Social Justice.
My issue is the idea that one person or group can universally dictate that "X is offensive to Y." That's an impossible thing to do, and it has a side effect of dictating what's offensive instead of responding to what's offensive.
I have no horse in the SJW goings on, but my casual observation has been that there's as much creation of social taboos as there is attempts to raise awareness of existing ones. In either event, a one-size-fits-all approach is misguided.
On the other hand, it's routinely frustrating when especially technical communities, full to bursting with misappropriations of common terms, seem especially unable to see past the letters in a word to its meaning in context. Maybe we just intrinsically don't believe that other areas of inquiry could be so complex as to need their own jargon...
I'd speculate that true appreciation for jargon comes more from multidisciplinary studies than anything else, so in any field the most passionate, least experienced members are likely to make a mess of things-- and if there's one thing the activist community has in surplus it's members with a high passion:experience ratio.
Having acknowledged that issue, I'm still reluctant to excuse anyone in this case, simply because we're talking about a term that doesn't have any other meaning. If you see a word you've never heard before, and think "I can probably figure out what this refers to based on its sounds" with Google sitting right there, naah, the problem isn't the jargon.
Edit: Like, seriously, would this happen if the word was "microclimate" or "microevolution"? Yeah, on the YouTube comments, but not usually on HN.
Also, I had completely forgotten that "function" also means, like, cocktail parties.