4 ms·

Yeah, I appreciate the sentiment and I don't think most of it is out of ill-will. I just think it's ineffective. I'd rather just accept the need to educate ev

Yeah, I appreciate the sentiment and I don't think most of it is out of ill-will. I just think it's ineffective. I'd rather just accept the need to educate every generation of its own responsibility for treating people fairly - rather than pretend that fixing words would make a difference. There are also cases like "white-glove" where the phrase doesn't just represent the stereotypical "white = good & black = bad" - there is real meaning here, since white is a color which makes dust more visible.

Spivak 5y ago
I completely agree, although in my own writing I would probably avoid white-glove not because of any race association but again because it’s an idiom that you have to have existing context to know. If your upbringing didn’t make you associate white gloves with fastidious butlers then you will probably be confused. You might instead associate cleanliness with the yellow gloves worn by many cleaning staff.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Or people could learn something by, for example, encountering the phrase and looking up the historical context. The extension of your logic is that all writing should be geared to people with no knowledge, no historical reference, no firm understanding of the language, no visual or auditory cues (how do you talk about music without harming someone? Seriously, I ask this as a former music columnist). That is not language. [Edit: It's at best a graphic, except even that would be prohibited]. That is the conveyance of minimal information, like, 'don't stand here (in the place formerly known as being in front of a door).' It's completely absurd. It's inhuman. It's bent and wicked.
  - neetle 5y ago
    Yeah nah, old mate over here putting in the hard yakka and ignoring the place of code-switching. There's a middle ground between "souless corpo speak" and speaking colloquially. You need to give everyone a fair shake of the stick and assuming everyone comes from the big smoke doesn't. Words are a tool used to convey meaning mate. Cracking the shits because you've gotta make concessions means you're not seeing a hammer as a hammer
    - noduerme 5y ago
      Look, if I wasn't a big fan of Paul Hogan and had to look up what you meant, I'd still put in the time to wiki all of it. And sometimes that's the whole point of using words in a certain way (as you did): to get people to reflect on the subtler shades of meaning. And that should be perfectly fine, because you're choosing the audience you want to address and how you want to address them. I don't understand half of Ulysses without reading the footnotes, but I don't expect I was supposed to. If you want people to ponder what you're saying or hear it in a certain poetic way, that's absolutely your prerogative, whether you're writing documents for an app or addressing Parliament. It's not as if Google is suggesting that dropping colloquialisms is a clearer way of communicating to more people for the sake of efficiency. They're essentially demanding uniform corpo-speak and trying to stop you from even using your own words in your own private docs. It's tyranny.
      - notahacker 5y ago
        If the entire point of using words in a certain way is to get people to reflect on subtle shades of meaning, admire your poetry or reach for a thesaurus, you're entitled to ignore the suggestions. Probably you'll want to ignore grammar suggestions which have been in word processors for decades without hundred comment whingefests and spurious Orwell comparisons too. Maybe even spellcheck if using yer own werrds in yer own pryvate documents is really iMpoRtAnT to yoo[1]. Most people aren't using Google docs to write Ulysses or Riddley Walker though, they're using it to draft documentation and letters to a customer base. (And elsewhere it's being asserted with equal fury that master/slave replication and assumptions that people are exclusively male shouldn't be flagged because the choice of words doesn't have any deeper meaning...) Honestly, can you not see how staggeringly self-centred it is to insist that if readers have to Google your idioms that's the beauty of language (even for documents where clarity is more important than linguistic flourishes) but removable squiggly line suggestions are far too much of an imposition on native speakers (who are of course both incapable of making a word choice in error and too vulnerable not to unthinkingly accept Google's suggested alternative in their private documents). Honestly, the word privilege is overused, but I can't think of anything more apt to describe a cohort of people so far removed from any real threat that the most tyrannical thing they can think of is a clunky grammar check feature. [1]Ironically, my phone actually insisted on overwriting my pryvate werrds with alternative spellings. Tyranny, I tell you.

Spivak 5y ago

I completely agree, although in my own writing I would probably avoid white-glove not because of any race association but again because it’s an idiom that you have to have existing context to know. If your upbringing didn’t make you associate white gloves with fastidious butlers then you will probably be confused. You might instead associate cleanliness with the yellow gloves worn by many cleaning staff.

noduerme 5y ago
Or people could learn something by, for example, encountering the phrase and looking up the historical context. The extension of your logic is that all writing should be geared to people with no knowledge, no historical reference, no firm understanding of the language, no visual or auditory cues (how do you talk about music without harming someone? Seriously, I ask this as a former music columnist). That is not language. [Edit: It's at best a graphic, except even that would be prohibited]. That is the conveyance of minimal information, like, 'don't stand here (in the place formerly known as being in front of a door).' It's completely absurd. It's inhuman. It's bent and wicked.
- neetle 5y ago
  Yeah nah, old mate over here putting in the hard yakka and ignoring the place of code-switching. There's a middle ground between "souless corpo speak" and speaking colloquially. You need to give everyone a fair shake of the stick and assuming everyone comes from the big smoke doesn't. Words are a tool used to convey meaning mate. Cracking the shits because you've gotta make concessions means you're not seeing a hammer as a hammer
  - noduerme 5y ago
    Look, if I wasn't a big fan of Paul Hogan and had to look up what you meant, I'd still put in the time to wiki all of it. And sometimes that's the whole point of using words in a certain way (as you did): to get people to reflect on the subtler shades of meaning. And that should be perfectly fine, because you're choosing the audience you want to address and how you want to address them. I don't understand half of Ulysses without reading the footnotes, but I don't expect I was supposed to. If you want people to ponder what you're saying or hear it in a certain poetic way, that's absolutely your prerogative, whether you're writing documents for an app or addressing Parliament. It's not as if Google is suggesting that dropping colloquialisms is a clearer way of communicating to more people for the sake of efficiency. They're essentially demanding uniform corpo-speak and trying to stop you from even using your own words in your own private docs. It's tyranny.
    - notahacker 5y ago
      If the entire point of using words in a certain way is to get people to reflect on subtle shades of meaning, admire your poetry or reach for a thesaurus, you're entitled to ignore the suggestions. Probably you'll want to ignore grammar suggestions which have been in word processors for decades without hundred comment whingefests and spurious Orwell comparisons too. Maybe even spellcheck if using yer own werrds in yer own pryvate documents is really iMpoRtAnT to yoo[1]. Most people aren't using Google docs to write Ulysses or Riddley Walker though, they're using it to draft documentation and letters to a customer base. (And elsewhere it's being asserted with equal fury that master/slave replication and assumptions that people are exclusively male shouldn't be flagged because the choice of words doesn't have any deeper meaning...) Honestly, can you not see how staggeringly self-centred it is to insist that if readers have to Google your idioms that's the beauty of language (even for documents where clarity is more important than linguistic flourishes) but removable squiggly line suggestions are far too much of an imposition on native speakers (who are of course both incapable of making a word choice in error and too vulnerable not to unthinkingly accept Google's suggested alternative in their private documents). Honestly, the word privilege is overused, but I can't think of anything more apt to describe a cohort of people so far removed from any real threat that the most tyrannical thing they can think of is a clunky grammar check feature. [1]Ironically, my phone actually insisted on overwriting my pryvate werrds with alternative spellings. Tyranny, I tell you.