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There is a difference between organic shifts in language use over time and forced shifts made by an influential few motivated by some misguided urge to improve
by quotemstr 8y ago
There is a difference between organic shifts in language use over time and forced shifts made by an influential few motivated by some misguided urge to improve society by limiting the range of thought.
Think of the word "gun". The image that entered your mind just now was not a water gun. It was a weapon, the kind of device the gun emoji used to depict and now no longer does.
The people forcing this kind of change want you to associate the concept of a gun with a water gun or other toy, and they think that by changing your though pattern this way, they'll make society safer.
This is terrifying and totalitarian idea. Once you buy into the idea that you can force a change to the language to achieve your desired social aims, there's no intrusion into private life that you will be unable to justify.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago> The people forcing this kind of change want you to associate the concept of a gun with a water gun or other toy, and they think that by changing your though pattern this way, they'll make society safer. Very Orwellian. In 1984, that was the point of Newspeak - to make it impossible to express certain ideas.
- ekphrasis 8y agoYes, but as the author of the article argues, the emoji icon of an eggplant has been culturally interpreted with a different semiotic meaning. The same could very well happen with the emoji icon of a watergun (despite the emoji’s semiotic shift), indicating a symbolic duplexity in the meaning of a handgun. I.e., if you choose to mean a handgun when writing a watergun, the emoji’s meaning can change.
- mc32 8y agoThis very much reminds me of the CCP banning words online and then people coming up with new “synonyms” to bypass the ban, then that gets banned and new phrases words take its place and it goes on...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- smhost 8y agoYeah, such a tragedy for all those native emoji speakers
- ben174 8y ago> native emoji speakers Anyone born in the last dozen or so years.
- retox 8y agoSee also the recent change to the Google salad emoji to remove eggs and make the salad 'vegan friendly'. https://www.cnet.com/news/google-removes-egg-from-salad-emoji-making-it-vegan-friendly/ https://www.cnet.com/news/google-removes-egg-from-salad-emoj...