5 ms·

People have adopted burgers, coca-cola, Hollywood movies etc. from The Current Dominant Culture, why wouldn't they parrot things like woke pronouns.

nix23 5y ago
>The Current Dominant Culture Haha, travel more buddy, the dominant culture is the country's own culture, not the one from the US. You know, the US adapted Beer and Sushi too. BTW: Movies, Games and "Social-media" is NOT Culture but cheap entertainment.
- pindab0ter 5y ago
  I live in the Netherlands and so much of what’s on TV, in cinemas is the games we play are American. It’s really inescapable. I’d easily call America the dominant culture in the west from my experience.
- SirGiggles 5y ago
  It would be more accurate to instead call it cultural diffusion instead
- _zamorano_ 5y ago
  Spaniard here. Here, If you are aware of new wokeness trends in the US is question of about 3 months until the spanish left and media start parroting the new word, idea or whatever. The consumed culture is overwhelmingly US based. Netflix, social media... The local shows that happen to succeed, mostly are created due to legal obligations imposed by the goverment. If it were not for that...
  - lemmsjid 5y ago
    An obervation, though, is that the academic underpinnings of the “wokeness trends” you’re describing were very explicitly leveraging modern French philosophers. Don’t pretend Continental thinking did not have a string influence on the situation :). That’s to your first paragraph, I quite share your thoughts on your second one.
    - spaniard89277 5y ago
      Yeah, but french philosophers layed the grounds several decades ago. They're not the ones running the propaganda machine nor pumping out "papers" about this issues nor the ones financing activism over this issues. It's almost 100% american.
    - burntoutfire 5y ago
      It just happened during the transition from French to American cultural domination.
- burntoutfire 5y ago
  I've been to dozen or so foreign countries, and everywhere I see establishments named in English (or even named "Hold the Door" or "Central Perk" - based on American popculture). Another example - quite suddenly, people in Poland started eating steaks and drinking whiskey - something that just wasn't done even 15 years ago. Oh and the leading newspapers basically parrot a lot of what they themselves read in New York Times, incl. doing interviews with American book writers or even discussing American racial issues (hard to find an international issue less relevant than that to people on the ground in Poland) etc. That's also partly because most of them don't know say German, French or Italian, so they can't really be influenced by those cultures quite as strongly.
jhgb 5y ago
> why wouldn't they parrot things like woke pronouns Because different languages have different pronouns. You don't adopt function words into your language the same way you can adopt content words (unless you're, for example, code switching, but even then you don't switch for a single function word).
- umanwizard 5y ago
  Funnily enough, the words “they” and “them” were adopted into English from a foreign language (Old Norse).
  - jhgb 5y ago
    It happens, as does grammaticalization, but it takes a looooooong time. And the existence of a large extant written corpus and an educated population (as it is the case today, but wasn't quite the case back then) makes it all the harder. As long as you don't have written language, you can have very disparate regional dialects and language quickly evolving. But the need to communicate across time and space seems to stabilize languages in some respects (just witness the case of English spelling, for example). (Also, Old Norse was quite a bit closer to Old English than presumably modern English is to some of those languages in question - Finnish, especially.)

nix23 5y ago

>The Current Dominant Culture Haha, travel more buddy, the dominant culture is the country's own culture, not the one from the US. You know, the US adapted Beer and Sushi too. BTW: Movies, Games and "Social-media" is NOT Culture but cheap entertainment.

pindab0ter 5y ago
I live in the Netherlands and so much of what’s on TV, in cinemas is the games we play are American. It’s really inescapable. I’d easily call America the dominant culture in the west from my experience.
SirGiggles 5y ago
It would be more accurate to instead call it cultural diffusion instead
_zamorano_ 5y ago
Spaniard here. Here, If you are aware of new wokeness trends in the US is question of about 3 months until the spanish left and media start parroting the new word, idea or whatever. The consumed culture is overwhelmingly US based. Netflix, social media... The local shows that happen to succeed, mostly are created due to legal obligations imposed by the goverment. If it were not for that...
- lemmsjid 5y ago
  An obervation, though, is that the academic underpinnings of the “wokeness trends” you’re describing were very explicitly leveraging modern French philosophers. Don’t pretend Continental thinking did not have a string influence on the situation :). That’s to your first paragraph, I quite share your thoughts on your second one.
  - spaniard89277 5y ago
    Yeah, but french philosophers layed the grounds several decades ago. They're not the ones running the propaganda machine nor pumping out "papers" about this issues nor the ones financing activism over this issues. It's almost 100% american.
  - burntoutfire 5y ago
    It just happened during the transition from French to American cultural domination.
burntoutfire 5y ago
I've been to dozen or so foreign countries, and everywhere I see establishments named in English (or even named "Hold the Door" or "Central Perk" - based on American popculture). Another example - quite suddenly, people in Poland started eating steaks and drinking whiskey - something that just wasn't done even 15 years ago. Oh and the leading newspapers basically parrot a lot of what they themselves read in New York Times, incl. doing interviews with American book writers or even discussing American racial issues (hard to find an international issue less relevant than that to people on the ground in Poland) etc. That's also partly because most of them don't know say German, French or Italian, so they can't really be influenced by those cultures quite as strongly.

jhgb 5y ago

> why wouldn't they parrot things like woke pronouns Because different languages have different pronouns. You don't adopt function words into your language the same way you can adopt content words (unless you're, for example, code switching, but even then you don't switch for a single function word).

umanwizard 5y ago
Funnily enough, the words “they” and “them” were adopted into English from a foreign language (Old Norse).
- jhgb 5y ago
  It happens, as does grammaticalization, but it takes a looooooong time. And the existence of a large extant written corpus and an educated population (as it is the case today, but wasn't quite the case back then) makes it all the harder. As long as you don't have written language, you can have very disparate regional dialects and language quickly evolving. But the need to communicate across time and space seems to stabilize languages in some respects (just witness the case of English spelling, for example). (Also, Old Norse was quite a bit closer to Old English than presumably modern English is to some of those languages in question - Finnish, especially.)