4 ms·

Off topic, but... Why do you put "environment" and "pollution" in quotes? My guess is you don't believe, or mean to convey that you believe, that these are pho

Off topic, but... Why do you put "environment" and "pollution" in quotes? My guess is you don't believe, or mean to convey that you believe, that these are phony concepts or issues, but that lower income people treat these as someone else's concern. I find this linguistically interesting. Someone could write a paper about this. Perhaps someone has.

oblio 4y ago
Because poor people don't care about them if their lives become worse. That's the sad truth. I mean, they do care about them, but their lives already suck a ton so distant doom is not really on their radar when faced with constant, present doom. Simple example: EVs are arguably less polluting. So there might be a need for a policy to ban ICEs, which are much, much less expensive monetarily. That would mean poor people wouldn't be able to buy and use cars, at all. So poor people will obviously vote against that. It both makes sense and it's sad at the same time. Oh, to clarify: rich people also pollute a ton and don't care about the environment, but they have the luxury of not caring if environmentally sound but more expensive policies are adopted (they can go "whatever" and do the right thing with no major personal loss for them). On top of that, it is the rich people's responsibility to find environmentally sound policies which are acceptable to everyone, since they're the ones with most of the power. Edit: Oh, you don't have to believe me. Go talk to 100 low income people (construction workers, cooks, waiter, nannies, agricultural workers, etc) about the environment, it will be quite eye opening for ivory tower folks.
- DFHippie 4y ago
  My point was just that it's an interesting use of quotation marks. People once had no writing system at all. Then they had no way to represent speech sounds. Then they had no way to represent individual phonemes. They had to invent spaces between words, punctuation, capital letters. I expect the Egyptians had no way to represent what was represented here with quotation marks. I'm curious how long and how widely quotation marks have been used this way.
  - lioeters 4y ago
    You'll like this: Irony punctuation. It includes "scare quotes". > The use of a graphic symbol on an expression to indicate irony or dubiousness goes back much further: Authors of ancient Greece used a mark called a diple periestigmene for that purpose. > In certain Ethiopic languages, sarcasm and unreal phrases are indicated at the end of a sentence with a sarcasm mark called temherte slaqî, a character that looks like the inverted exclamation point (U+00A1) (¡). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation > Scare quotes (also called shudder quotes, sneer quotes, and quibble marks) are quotation marks that writers place around a word or phrase to signal that they are using it in an ironic, referential, or otherwise non-standard sense. > Scare quotes may indicate that the author is using someone else's term, similar to preceding a phrase with the expression "so-called"; they may imply skepticism or disagreement, belief that the words are misused, or that the writer intends a meaning opposite to the words enclosed in quotes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) wrote in his Etymologiae that the diple was used to mark quotations from the Bible. He mentions how diple periestigmene (dotted diple) were used to mark dubious passages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diple_(textual_symbol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diple_(textual_symbol)
- PenguinCoder 4y ago
  Agreed, hard to give a thought to the plights of the world when you're busy just trying to survive and afford basic necessities. The big picture environment doesn't matter to the person trying to find food _now_.

oblio 4y ago

Because poor people don't care about them if their lives become worse. That's the sad truth. I mean, they do care about them, but their lives already suck a ton so distant doom is not really on their radar when faced with constant, present doom. Simple example: EVs are arguably less polluting. So there might be a need for a policy to ban ICEs, which are much, much less expensive monetarily. That would mean poor people wouldn't be able to buy and use cars, at all. So poor people will obviously vote against that. It both makes sense and it's sad at the same time. Oh, to clarify: rich people also pollute a ton and don't care about the environment, but they have the luxury of not caring if environmentally sound but more expensive policies are adopted (they can go "whatever" and do the right thing with no major personal loss for them). On top of that, it is the rich people's responsibility to find environmentally sound policies which are acceptable to everyone, since they're the ones with most of the power. Edit: Oh, you don't have to believe me. Go talk to 100 low income people (construction workers, cooks, waiter, nannies, agricultural workers, etc) about the environment, it will be quite eye opening for ivory tower folks.

DFHippie 4y ago
My point was just that it's an interesting use of quotation marks. People once had no writing system at all. Then they had no way to represent speech sounds. Then they had no way to represent individual phonemes. They had to invent spaces between words, punctuation, capital letters. I expect the Egyptians had no way to represent what was represented here with quotation marks. I'm curious how long and how widely quotation marks have been used this way.
- lioeters 4y ago
  You'll like this: Irony punctuation. It includes "scare quotes". > The use of a graphic symbol on an expression to indicate irony or dubiousness goes back much further: Authors of ancient Greece used a mark called a diple periestigmene for that purpose. > In certain Ethiopic languages, sarcasm and unreal phrases are indicated at the end of a sentence with a sarcasm mark called temherte slaqî, a character that looks like the inverted exclamation point (U+00A1) (¡). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation > Scare quotes (also called shudder quotes, sneer quotes, and quibble marks) are quotation marks that writers place around a word or phrase to signal that they are using it in an ironic, referential, or otherwise non-standard sense. > Scare quotes may indicate that the author is using someone else's term, similar to preceding a phrase with the expression "so-called"; they may imply skepticism or disagreement, belief that the words are misused, or that the writer intends a meaning opposite to the words enclosed in quotes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) wrote in his Etymologiae that the diple was used to mark quotations from the Bible. He mentions how diple periestigmene (dotted diple) were used to mark dubious passages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diple_(textual_symbol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diple_(textual_symbol)
PenguinCoder 4y ago
Agreed, hard to give a thought to the plights of the world when you're busy just trying to survive and afford basic necessities. The big picture environment doesn't matter to the person trying to find food _now_.