7 ms·

Basically anything that can make anybody[1] offended. If a term doesn't seem offensive right away, see if you can make it offensive through mental gymnastics.

by hbrn 4y ago

Basically anything that can make anybody[1] offended. If a term doesn't seem offensive right away, see if you can make it offensive through mental gymnastics. [1] This, of course, excludes people like me, who are offended by the very existence of such lists.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
josephg 4y ago
Uh oh! “mental gymnastics” sounds like it implies able bodied people who can do gymnastics are better than people with disabilities! Burn the heretic! I find a lot of the cultural appropriation items on this list deeply ironic because they imply English is allowed to take words from French (“beef”, “rendezvous”) and German (“welcome”, “hound”, …). But terms from non-white cultures aren’t allowed to become part of english? (“Guru”, “bury the hatchet”, and so on in this list.) Is it just me or is that policy remarkably racist?
- wasabi991011 4y ago
  The negative forms of cultural appropriation they want to remove is when a religious/ceremonial/"important" term from another culture (gury, bury the hatchet) is used in inappropriate context, not just any word from another language (beef, rendezvous, welcome, hound). If you want a better example (though convoluted and still imperfect) of what that could look like for English, it would be like if a different language/culture started using the word "PhD" for anyone with some expertise. Now maybe you don't mind, but you've got to recognize that a fair amount of people would feel like it cheapens the work and expertise that goes into becoming a doctor.
  - dfadsadsf 4y ago
    You do not need to come up with convoluted example like PhD, just call code monkey an engineer and see chartered engineer come out of woodwork to complain that to be called engineer you need to do some random formal stuff and without that you break law in one province or another.
    - vlovich123 4y ago
      And as someone who went to an accredited engineering program, I’d agree they’re silly. Doctor’s and lawyers have specific value in being restricted because the harm is so high. Chartered engineers can’t be confused because the business hiring them should be doing a backend check with the licensing board to confirm their license anyway (regardless of the title they put on a resume). I used to think it’s a good thing but I’ve come around to recognizing it as unnecessary protectionism / wanting to feel special. Also doctors raise similar complaints when PhDs call themselves doctors.
      - 908B64B197 4y ago
        > Also doctors raise similar complaints when PhDs call themselves doctors. ... what do they think the "D" in PhD stands for?
        vlovich123 4y ago
        Doesn’t matter. The powers a licensed medical doctor have are very different and when someone says they’re a doctor in the middle of giving medical advice, they can’t play the “but I have a PhD card” or “free speech” because the recipient of that message would reasonably assume due to common colloquial understanding that that person is a licensed medical doctor (unless the PhD somehow clarified this in a reasonable way). The main distinction that lawyers and medical doctors have in terms of the title is that these professions talk to lay people outside their profession regularly and there needs to be a distinction between them and other people offering advice that’s not governed by the rules of the medical community and codified in law. The risk and consequence of harm would be elevated and the ability for recourse would be limited. For example, if you get bad legal advice from random Joe Schmoe, you can’t claim ineffective council (heck you can’t even do that if it’s a licensed lawyer who told you something if that isn’t your lawyer. This doesn’t happen with engineers. Now I’m not defending or espousing any specific position here. I’m just trying to illuminate the differences and the claims. The counterpoint is that these licensing requirements don’t actually change anything, they’re over broad, they raise prices on services far more than they should, they unfairly exclude people from prestigious jobs that maybe they could do anyway even without schooling (eg an experienced paralegal for 15 years maybe doesn’t need a “lawyer’s education” for certain kinds of legal work) and they go against the principle of free speech. On the other hand, trademarks exist and inhibit free speech in similar ways. On the other hand, trademarks can’t be regular words. On the other hand the government is responsible for writing the rules of trademarks. On the other hand, this post brought to you by Tevya the Milkman and his fiddle.
  - FactoryReboot 4y ago
    Doctor’s borrowed the title from academics. They didn’t even have it first.
  - jkingsbery 4y ago
    But that's what the word in Latin doctus means: being learned or skilled in something: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doctus https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doctus. And in any case, when a word is incorporated from another language, it's meaning is misunderstood all the time. Why is this case somehow morally offensive?
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  England didn't take words from French, the French inserted them by force. The French conquered them and they had to learn some French to understand their lords and masters who spoke a different language. That's why they as peasants looked after the cows, but the aristocrats from France ate the beef. (Sheep/mutton, pig/pork)
  - mbg721 4y ago
    Your comment reminded me of a line I heard from a 90s comedian: "Oh, the royals are a sort of middle-class German family really,"
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    > England didn't take words from French, the French inserted them by force. Is "reverse cultural appropriation" a thing then, or do we have a better phrase for when it's no longer appropriate for a population to use words that were inserted into their language by force?
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      They fight back by pronouncing it horribly: “L'anglais n'est que du français mal prononcé” “English is little more than badly pronounced French” -- D'Artagnan in Vingt ans après
      - 082349872349872 4y ago
        murky buckup poor lead !
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    England didn't take words from French, the French inserted them by force. The French conquered them and they had to learn some French to understand their lords and masters who spoke a different language. False, it was not the French but the Normans, Vikings who had learned to speak French, who conquered England. An England made up of Brittanic Celts who had been conquered, ruled over, and had mixed with and learned to speak the Germanic languages of the Angles, the Saxons and then the invading Danes. French, the language of France, is derived from the Latin language of the Romans who had conquered that Gaulic Celtic place before they were in turn conquered by the Germanic Franks who switched from their lingua franca to Latin. Then the Normans settled in Normandy, just north of Brittany, still occupied by the Celts. So there is nothing French about the Germanic Franks, nor anything Gaulic or Frankish about the language French, a language the Romans brought to Gaul and the Germanic Normans brought to Great Britain.
- gorwell 4y ago
  Yes, that's right. It's racist but defended as "anti-racist", which is a remarkably effective phrase. It was the same thing with food packaging. Land 'o Lakes literally removed the Native American woman but they kept the land! She used to be in every grocery store. Now removed.

by hbrn 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

josephg 4y ago

Uh oh! “mental gymnastics” sounds like it implies able bodied people who can do gymnastics are better than people with disabilities! Burn the heretic! I find a lot of the cultural appropriation items on this list deeply ironic because they imply English is allowed to take words from French (“beef”, “rendezvous”) and German (“welcome”, “hound”, …). But terms from non-white cultures aren’t allowed to become part of english? (“Guru”, “bury the hatchet”, and so on in this list.) Is it just me or is that policy remarkably racist?

wasabi991011 4y ago
The negative forms of cultural appropriation they want to remove is when a religious/ceremonial/"important" term from another culture (gury, bury the hatchet) is used in inappropriate context, not just any word from another language (beef, rendezvous, welcome, hound). If you want a better example (though convoluted and still imperfect) of what that could look like for English, it would be like if a different language/culture started using the word "PhD" for anyone with some expertise. Now maybe you don't mind, but you've got to recognize that a fair amount of people would feel like it cheapens the work and expertise that goes into becoming a doctor.
- dfadsadsf 4y ago
  You do not need to come up with convoluted example like PhD, just call code monkey an engineer and see chartered engineer come out of woodwork to complain that to be called engineer you need to do some random formal stuff and without that you break law in one province or another.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    And as someone who went to an accredited engineering program, I’d agree they’re silly. Doctor’s and lawyers have specific value in being restricted because the harm is so high. Chartered engineers can’t be confused because the business hiring them should be doing a backend check with the licensing board to confirm their license anyway (regardless of the title they put on a resume). I used to think it’s a good thing but I’ve come around to recognizing it as unnecessary protectionism / wanting to feel special. Also doctors raise similar complaints when PhDs call themselves doctors.
    - 908B64B197 4y ago
      > Also doctors raise similar complaints when PhDs call themselves doctors. ... what do they think the "D" in PhD stands for?
      - vlovich123 4y ago
        Doesn’t matter. The powers a licensed medical doctor have are very different and when someone says they’re a doctor in the middle of giving medical advice, they can’t play the “but I have a PhD card” or “free speech” because the recipient of that message would reasonably assume due to common colloquial understanding that that person is a licensed medical doctor (unless the PhD somehow clarified this in a reasonable way). The main distinction that lawyers and medical doctors have in terms of the title is that these professions talk to lay people outside their profession regularly and there needs to be a distinction between them and other people offering advice that’s not governed by the rules of the medical community and codified in law. The risk and consequence of harm would be elevated and the ability for recourse would be limited. For example, if you get bad legal advice from random Joe Schmoe, you can’t claim ineffective council (heck you can’t even do that if it’s a licensed lawyer who told you something if that isn’t your lawyer. This doesn’t happen with engineers. Now I’m not defending or espousing any specific position here. I’m just trying to illuminate the differences and the claims. The counterpoint is that these licensing requirements don’t actually change anything, they’re over broad, they raise prices on services far more than they should, they unfairly exclude people from prestigious jobs that maybe they could do anyway even without schooling (eg an experienced paralegal for 15 years maybe doesn’t need a “lawyer’s education” for certain kinds of legal work) and they go against the principle of free speech. On the other hand, trademarks exist and inhibit free speech in similar ways. On the other hand, trademarks can’t be regular words. On the other hand the government is responsible for writing the rules of trademarks. On the other hand, this post brought to you by Tevya the Milkman and his fiddle.
- FactoryReboot 4y ago
  Doctor’s borrowed the title from academics. They didn’t even have it first.
- jkingsbery 4y ago
  But that's what the word in Latin doctus means: being learned or skilled in something: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doctus https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doctus. And in any case, when a word is incorporated from another language, it's meaning is misunderstood all the time. Why is this case somehow morally offensive?
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
England didn't take words from French, the French inserted them by force. The French conquered them and they had to learn some French to understand their lords and masters who spoke a different language. That's why they as peasants looked after the cows, but the aristocrats from France ate the beef. (Sheep/mutton, pig/pork)
- mbg721 4y ago
  Your comment reminded me of a line I heard from a 90s comedian: "Oh, the royals are a sort of middle-class German family really,"
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > England didn't take words from French, the French inserted them by force. Is "reverse cultural appropriation" a thing then, or do we have a better phrase for when it's no longer appropriate for a population to use words that were inserted into their language by force?
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    They fight back by pronouncing it horribly: “L'anglais n'est que du français mal prononcé” “English is little more than badly pronounced French” -- D'Artagnan in Vingt ans après
    - 082349872349872 4y ago
      murky buckup poor lead !
- fsckboy 4y ago
  England didn't take words from French, the French inserted them by force. The French conquered them and they had to learn some French to understand their lords and masters who spoke a different language. False, it was not the French but the Normans, Vikings who had learned to speak French, who conquered England. An England made up of Brittanic Celts who had been conquered, ruled over, and had mixed with and learned to speak the Germanic languages of the Angles, the Saxons and then the invading Danes. French, the language of France, is derived from the Latin language of the Romans who had conquered that Gaulic Celtic place before they were in turn conquered by the Germanic Franks who switched from their lingua franca to Latin. Then the Normans settled in Normandy, just north of Brittany, still occupied by the Celts. So there is nothing French about the Germanic Franks, nor anything Gaulic or Frankish about the language French, a language the Romans brought to Gaul and the Germanic Normans brought to Great Britain.
gorwell 4y ago
Yes, that's right. It's racist but defended as "anti-racist", which is a remarkably effective phrase. It was the same thing with food packaging. Land 'o Lakes literally removed the Native American woman but they kept the land! She used to be in every grocery store. Now removed.