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It's fascinating how far this unison reaches. Merriam-Webster changed its definition of "sexual preference" to mark it as offensive after Amy Coney Barret used

It's fascinating how far this unison reaches. Merriam-Webster changed its definition of "sexual preference" to mark it as offensive after Amy Coney Barret used the term in a congressional hearing. Not even dictionaries are safe. https://web.archive.org/web/20200928131548/https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/preference https://web.archive.org/web/20200928131548/https://www.merri... https://web.archive.org/web/20201014032220/https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/preference#usage-1 https://web.archive.org/web/20201014032220/https://www.merri...

alasdair_ 4y ago
Words change in their meaning over time. “Aesthetic” is my current bugbear.
- AinderS 4y ago
  Sometimes that change is more sudden than others. On September 28th, 2020 (the closest preceding archive) it was not yet offensive. On October 13th, she used "sexual preference" in her congressional hearing. The very next day, on October 14th (the 1st subsequent archive), Merriam-Webster already had the new, "offensive" definition in place. The fluidity of language really is fascinating to behold.
  - MonkeyClub 4y ago
    Back in the day I too thought that it's all about the fluidity of language, language as a living "thing" that evolves with time. Then I read Orwell's Politics and the English Language, and 1984. After that, the fluidity of language appears to me to be more and more in the hands of lexicographers as Newspeak developers who work hand-in-glove (with Them, whom else? :P ) to form the new way of thinking. No more romantic notions of lexicography as the track record of a civilization's linguistic endeavours.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    It's perhaps unsurprising that LGBTQ community's longstanding objection to the implications of "sexual preference" in discourse gained recognition after a high profile news story involving a high profile person using, receiving objections to and then apologising for it. Ironically, it's the exact same media attention phenomenon that meant that some people who have longstanding and entirely sincere objections to undue emphasis placed on US institutions in Wikipedia rocked up this week to the Recession article to question whether the NBER definition has been given undue prominence for the last 15 years, and not some other time when the definition of recession wasn't a major news story with unfortunate implications for a certain political figure.
    - AinderS 4y ago
      > LGBTQ community's longstanding objection to the implications of "sexual preference" So longstanding that not a peep of complaint is heard when Democracts use it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsYGOAVqmQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsYGOAVqmQI Or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a 2017 interview: "Our society has come to respect people, whatever their sexual preference," Ginsburg said. - https://freebeacon.com/courts/barrett-shredded-for-saying-sexual-preference-but-biden-democrats-have-said-it-for-years/ https://freebeacon.com/courts/barrett-shredded-for-saying-se... But I'm sure there's a very sophisticated, nuanced distinction I'm missing, that explains the different treatment as totally not partisan gaslighting. Starting with an explanation for why "preference" is considered changeable - I can't make myself prefer one food over another, but maybe I'm an exception.
      - notahacker 4y ago
        I mean, here's a media style guide from 2003 citing the American Psychological Association to warn against the "problematic" use of "preference". https://web.archive.org/web/20120813022744/http://www.colby.edu/psychology/APA/Gender.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20120813022744/http://www.colby.... Perhaps it was the work of time travellers desperate to create the impression that Amy Coney Barrett is not a born again liberal, or perhaps, if the extent of your knowledge of the debate is restricted to gotcha videos involving Democrat politicians from the Washington Free Beacon, you're not particularly qualified to tell people with a personal stake in the debate that they actually invented all the longstanding objections to "preference" to criticise a foreign judge's comments they were barely even aware of, that they're the ones indulging in partisan gaslighting...
- no-dr-onboard 4y ago
  Agreed, in general. I suppose the larger argument is "Who gets to decide what words mean?" Is it the case that because Merriam-Webster or the Oxford University Press decide arbitrarily to change the meaning of a word that we all have to concede to that authority? Is there room for another dictionary forum to exist? At what point does language diverge into different dialects because of this phenomena?
TechBro8615 4y ago
Would you expect any different? Those who self-select into a language police force come from mostly overlapping classes of people working in politics, journalism and dictionary editing (but I repeat myself). Not everyone has time to worry about that sort of thing, and of those who do, not everyone wants to. So naturally the people who commit the most time to policing and redefining the language appear to have an outsize effect on (your perception of) the language. They’ve literally made it their career. That doesn’t mean we have to listen to them. It is not rational to disambiguate truth from fiction based on words you read on the internet. It’s especially irrational to trust the words more when they’re on website served from a domain name of a company that paid an employee to write them according to some quarterly editorial calendar and Trello board. If you’re altering your behavior in response to changes in a reality you interpret based on the words of a 2015 Columbia journalism major, then you have bigger problems than whether your most-frequented news sites tell you we’re in a recession.

alasdair_ 4y ago

Words change in their meaning over time. “Aesthetic” is my current bugbear.

AinderS 4y ago
Sometimes that change is more sudden than others. On September 28th, 2020 (the closest preceding archive) it was not yet offensive. On October 13th, she used "sexual preference" in her congressional hearing. The very next day, on October 14th (the 1st subsequent archive), Merriam-Webster already had the new, "offensive" definition in place. The fluidity of language really is fascinating to behold.
- MonkeyClub 4y ago
  Back in the day I too thought that it's all about the fluidity of language, language as a living "thing" that evolves with time. Then I read Orwell's Politics and the English Language, and 1984. After that, the fluidity of language appears to me to be more and more in the hands of lexicographers as Newspeak developers who work hand-in-glove (with Them, whom else? :P ) to form the new way of thinking. No more romantic notions of lexicography as the track record of a civilization's linguistic endeavours.
- notahacker 4y ago
  It's perhaps unsurprising that LGBTQ community's longstanding objection to the implications of "sexual preference" in discourse gained recognition after a high profile news story involving a high profile person using, receiving objections to and then apologising for it. Ironically, it's the exact same media attention phenomenon that meant that some people who have longstanding and entirely sincere objections to undue emphasis placed on US institutions in Wikipedia rocked up this week to the Recession article to question whether the NBER definition has been given undue prominence for the last 15 years, and not some other time when the definition of recession wasn't a major news story with unfortunate implications for a certain political figure.
  - AinderS 4y ago
    > LGBTQ community's longstanding objection to the implications of "sexual preference" So longstanding that not a peep of complaint is heard when Democracts use it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsYGOAVqmQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsYGOAVqmQI Or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a 2017 interview: "Our society has come to respect people, whatever their sexual preference," Ginsburg said. - https://freebeacon.com/courts/barrett-shredded-for-saying-sexual-preference-but-biden-democrats-have-said-it-for-years/ https://freebeacon.com/courts/barrett-shredded-for-saying-se... But I'm sure there's a very sophisticated, nuanced distinction I'm missing, that explains the different treatment as totally not partisan gaslighting. Starting with an explanation for why "preference" is considered changeable - I can't make myself prefer one food over another, but maybe I'm an exception.
    - notahacker 4y ago
      I mean, here's a media style guide from 2003 citing the American Psychological Association to warn against the "problematic" use of "preference". https://web.archive.org/web/20120813022744/http://www.colby.edu/psychology/APA/Gender.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20120813022744/http://www.colby.... Perhaps it was the work of time travellers desperate to create the impression that Amy Coney Barrett is not a born again liberal, or perhaps, if the extent of your knowledge of the debate is restricted to gotcha videos involving Democrat politicians from the Washington Free Beacon, you're not particularly qualified to tell people with a personal stake in the debate that they actually invented all the longstanding objections to "preference" to criticise a foreign judge's comments they were barely even aware of, that they're the ones indulging in partisan gaslighting...
no-dr-onboard 4y ago
Agreed, in general. I suppose the larger argument is "Who gets to decide what words mean?" Is it the case that because Merriam-Webster or the Oxford University Press decide arbitrarily to change the meaning of a word that we all have to concede to that authority? Is there room for another dictionary forum to exist? At what point does language diverge into different dialects because of this phenomena?

TechBro8615 4y ago

Would you expect any different? Those who self-select into a language police force come from mostly overlapping classes of people working in politics, journalism and dictionary editing (but I repeat myself). Not everyone has time to worry about that sort of thing, and of those who do, not everyone wants to. So naturally the people who commit the most time to policing and redefining the language appear to have an outsize effect on (your perception of) the language. They’ve literally made it their career. That doesn’t mean we have to listen to them. It is not rational to disambiguate truth from fiction based on words you read on the internet. It’s especially irrational to trust the words more when they’re on website served from a domain name of a company that paid an employee to write them according to some quarterly editorial calendar and Trello board. If you’re altering your behavior in response to changes in a reality you interpret based on the words of a 2015 Columbia journalism major, then you have bigger problems than whether your most-frequented news sites tell you we’re in a recession.