64 ms·

Banning words won’t make the world more just

• GoblinSlayer 4y ago
  The poor and vulnerable don't exist, empowerment is not allowed and "corporation" should be spelled "pbuh".
• sirsinsalot 4y ago
  All too often the people calling for a certain change, often aggressively and with great judgement ... Have never bothered to ask those they claim to fight for what they need or want. Its a form of virtue signalling that needs to end.
• flippinburgers 4y ago
  Banning biology wont make the world less biological.
• garfieldnate 4y ago
  I've mentioned this in a previous comment, but I see these policies about language control as fundamentally misguided because they assume that changing words can change the way we think to a significant extent. This is known as the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and is long considered false by linguists. If you want to change how people think, you must directly convince or teach them to do so. For example, "Mentally retarded" was introduced as a kinder term, and it led to the plain "retarded" that people use as an insult. "Special" went the same way.
• gumby 4y ago
  The use of Sierra Club as the lead example is a good one because of the racialist motivations in the founding of the club. The change of usage to “enslaved people” is an important one because of the lack of agency in being enslaved (!). It’s easy for the brain to make the connection that a term like “slave” is an inherent property of the person so described, like “brown-haired” rather than something imposed upon them. But as a non-American who’s lived in the US a long time, seeing the term “American” used generally doesn’t bother me: it’s trivial and automatic to see when it’s simply synecdoche for “resident”, “taxpayer”, or, yes, “US citizen, so not applicable to me”. I am not offended when I see a headline, as I did this morning, saying “your passport will be delayed so apply early”. Just doesn’t apply to me so who cares?
  • mc32 4y ago
    It's like they want to abolish metaphors and want to become language prescriptive --which people and grammarians wanted to get away from in the 60s and later (not that that ever persuaded the French against prescriptive language). And I guess English lends itself to more demands like this because its vocabulary-rich. Other languages have to re-use and recycle words for different meanings a lot more and are not able to accommodate these demands.
    • gumby 4y ago
      > Other languages have to re-use and recycle words for different meanings a lot more A rather extraordinary and unlikely claim. Not to mention that words in languages like Arabic have much deeper semantic ramification compared to a Germanic language like English.
  • tgv 4y ago
    > the lack of agency in being enslaved I don't get this, at all. It makes at least one fallacy, namely assuming that people are born free. They are not. Every newborn is restricted by parents, society, environment, etc. We must accept that: we can't think, act or sustain ourselves until much older. Thus, we loose our restrictions slowly, and we don't loose them all. Some people were actually born as slaves. That's the horror of it: to be born as property. Agency has nothing to do with it: suggesting that it does implies the possibility to avoid it, and ipso facto that staying enslaved is the slave's problem. The appeal to a made-up brain process doesn't improve your case.
    • gumby 4y ago
      > Agency has nothing to do with it: suggesting that it does implies the possibility to avoid it That was the point of my referring to it: the agency lies with the enslaver, not the enslaved.
      • tgv 4y ago
        But the word is not about agency: it expresses a state. How that state was achieved, doesn't matter. Are we going to say "enprisoned people", "people who somehow and totally against their will caught COVID", "people who accidentally experience permanent, fully reduced hearing"? Do you still call people who once were, but not longer are, slaves, enslaved? The assumption behind it all is that if someone can make a inference about your thoughts, no matter how far-fetched, those thoughts must contribute to an undesirable state, hence you are a bad person.
• t344344 4y ago
  Is not "equity language" just another form of neocolonialism? How can "rich educated people" rename entire ethnic group (latinx) without their consent? Also there is nothing offensive about being "poor"... Equity language is just another tool to oppress people.
  • mc32 4y ago
    It's the new prescriptivists who want to set the rules for the commoners to follow -reminds me of the apocryphal story about a Spanish king of some sort who had a lisp and in turn, the population not wanting to offend him began speaking with a lisp so Spanish ended up with a "th" sound where other romance languages did not.
    • herewulf 4y ago
      That's apocryphal. Sound change in language is constant and "s" and "th" are close sounds. This was just a natural process in Castilian Spanish.
  • SubiculumCode 4y ago
    People want to recognize inequities and lived experiences and choose to do something about it that is within their power, change their language. As the article embraces, this is a morally driven impulse that is unimpeachable in its intent, but in aggregate, fails and sometimes, even oppresses. Interesting article.
    • autodev1 4y ago
      I wonder... what is the difference between an "experience" vs a "lived experience"? If I have an experience-- such as walking through the park, this afternoon and picking a blackberry... What is a "lived experience" version of that same experience?
      • SubiculumCode 4y ago
        “lived experience” was generally first used to differentiate between a person saying “I have experience with x issue” who could be saying “I’ve studied it; I’ve worked with the population” but “lived experience” makes it specific to being an individual’s own life.
• wonderwonder 4y ago
  "The American Cancer Society advises that Latinx, along with the equally gender-neutral Latine, Latin@, and Latinu, “may or may not be fully embraced by older generations and may need additional explanation.” Cool cool, I look forward as a white guy to explaining to a group of Spanish people why they are wrong and are really LatinX and I'm doing it for their protection. Imagine being an immigrant and having to learn both English and then a made up filter created by well paid academics on top of it. Just don't be racist, we don't need all these made up rules created by our betters. It's all so tiresome.
  • freitzkriesler2 4y ago
    As a Hispanic American, I very regularly tell people I am Latino and that Latinx is incredibly offensive to my heritage. I'm in my 30s and the younger people I know also find it offensive.
    • QuercusMax 4y ago
      [flagged]
      • oaththrowaway 4y ago
        White people colonizing another language to virtue signal isn't inflammatory to you?
        • QuercusMax 4y ago
          As others have said in this thread, it wasn't created by white people. That's why I'm saying this is inflammatory.
          • oaththrowaway 4y ago
            Regardless of who created it, I've never seen a non-white person use it. My wife is Hispanic, and it has been offensive to her and her family.
• calt 4y ago
  It can often depend on the purpose you're writing for. Do you want to be bland, professional, and as inoffensive as possible? Great. In contrast, I think the highlighted excerpt really summed up the article well. > Good writing—vivid imagery, strong statements—will hurt, because it’s bound to convey painful truths. Writing poetry, songs, fiction, and impactfull writing with equity language will always feel hollow.
• scarmig 4y ago
  The semantic turn of the Left is one of the worst signs of intellectual decay. There's approximately zero evidence that linguistic changes influence thought: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is rejected by linguists except perhaps in some very narrow situations. The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, from negro, to black, to African American, to Black, to person of color. And none of them are better or worse than the other (though the 2020 innovation "bodies of color" managed to find a way to be more degrading than the worst that Stormfront could come up with). Why? We feel powerless to fix the problems that plague our society, so instead we turn to things we have agency over. Maybe we can't prevent group X from suffering from social discrimination, but if everything is just a matter of what words we use, we can just choose to use those words, stridently denounce everyone who hasn't gotten with the program, and pat ourselves on the back and call it a day.
  • paulv 4y ago
    > The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, from negro, to black, to African American, to Black, to person of color. You missed a couple at the beginning of your list. A really significant one in particular.
    • scarmig 4y ago
      Including it would distract from the main point (though IIRC there was no point at which it wasn't a slur; replacing non-slurs with novel non-slurs is a different category). That said, I think it supports my point. How effective has tabooing that slur been at eliminating racism in the USA?
      • QuercusMax 4y ago
        I'm the furthest thing from N-word apologist, but it's pronounced the same as the Latin word meaning "black" (modulo vowel pronunciation shifts), and spelled nearly the same. It's clearly derived from a word which did not originally have any meaning as a slur, and I bet you could find early usages in English which were merely descriptive. There's no reason to use it now, but understanding the fact that was originally a descriptive word is useful for the history of it.
• kodah 4y ago
  > The guide also rejects the disabled in favor of people living with disabilities, for the same reason that enslaved person has generally replaced slave : to affirm, by the tenets of what’s called “people-first language,” that “everyone is first and foremost a person, not their disability or other identity.” The reason people first language fails is because there's some subjects of this language that find the original wording insulting and there's some subjects of this language that find the new words insulting. I have back issues. Major ones that pinch my sciatic nerve due to a fractured column that healed improperly. They've gotten to the point a few times in my life where I could not walk much less feel (at all) my leg for prolonged periods of time. If someone called me a "person experiencing a disability" it sounds like you're trying to remove the hurdle that the disability puts in my life. I already had to grapple with the idea that I am not bound to that disability. I have found ways to climb small mountains, to hike, pack, move/lift heavy things, sit, and work out all with abundances of caution and very proper form. That's to say, codifying this language just does what the first correction set out to correct: it institutionalized language some people don't like. In a world with a big variety of perspectives and experiences, the best resolution to these problems isn't some authoritarian document telling people how to talk. It's gracefully correcting people on the way that you'd like to be spoken about and people respecting that. Nobody needs to walk on eggshells around how I'd like to be referred, they just need to meet me where I am when I make a choice.
  • quantified 4y ago
    The tenet assumes that people are in the large just dense. Following it, you have no airline pilots, mothers, mentors, judges, felons, idiots, and maybe not even proper names. Just "person who is female and has borne living children", "person who judges others in court", "person named Judy", etc. There might be a worthwhile transition to a new framing that makes sense. I've heard people rip on using the metric system because supposedly its proponents wanted 10-hour days and 10 days a week, etc, which was taking tenets to ridiculous points. The problem now is trying to frame some changes in grander terms because you might well get ridiculous outcomes ( and in current society definitely will).
  • derbOac 4y ago
    I had sort of a similar reaction to the piece — reading through it really clarified for me some impressions that had been sitting in the back of my mind. Language at some level is really about the speaker, in terms of their background, knowledge or lack thereof, what they want to communicate and so forth. Sometimes I think what this equity language betrays is some desire to convey moral or intellectual status, or even some assertion of social power, but sometimes it reflects a genuine attempt to respect the wishes of the subjects of what they're saying. The problem as you point out is different groups might see things in different ways, and maybe even want to be seen in different ways in different settings or at different moments. Maybe they want to be seen as strong or resilient in one setting, and maybe in another they want to discuss the injustices they have to be resilient against. I think this is only a natural part of human nature. So it makes sense that these edicts about proper language aren't just morally problematic because they reflect some power motive on the part of the speaker, at the expense of the subject of the speech, but because in doing that, they deny some flexibility in how certain topics and persons can be portrayed or portray themselves. The example of the passage from Behind the Beautiful Forevers is compelling in how it illustrates how equity language can be disenfranchising and therefore counter to its own stated purposes. The passage works because it is meant to convey something about the parents' perspective and to cause us to wrestle with that. The author is channeling the parents' language. In a different context, maybe the same situation might be described differently, more positively. It's not just that the language in the second version is intellectualized and distanced, it's that it denies choice of language from those who potentially are in the best position to say something about it.
• mbfg 4y ago
  if people don't want certain words associated with them, i'll do my best not to do that. I may not know, or i may fail, but i will attempt to do that which is asked of me. Because it's not a problem for me to try.
  • wonderwonder 4y ago
    That's the thing, most of the people described by these changes are not requesting them. Small self appointed experts are coming up with the rules and attempting to force them on society.
    • 13years 4y ago
      None of society wanted most of this. They were convinced it was necessary for promotion of moral good. Essentially an elite language of virtue signaling making it easier to identify with others in the club.
      • deely3 4y ago
        Heh, reddit moment: "I disagree, therefore I downvote".
    • mbfg 4y ago
      I'm happy to read these things, as it exposes me to ideas that i might not have thought about. It will make me more sensitive to situations where words may affect people in ways i didn't see, but should have. It is no offense to me to take these ideas on board. It costs me nothing, and potentially makes other people feel more included. So win-win, from my point of view.
• 13years 4y ago
  Given time, “woke” will evolve into its own dialect completely incomprehensible to common language. Every persons unique experience becomes new terms to be added to the lexicon. A burden of irrelevant knowledge for the rest of society to navigate in order to communicate.
  • ticviking 4y ago
    ADnD called these kinds of dialects, "Alignment Languages." They're a larger form of Shibboleth that provide a filter of if someone is in a particular in-group, and the rulebook actually explicitly calls out speaking an Alignment Language in public as seen as very rude. Being able to code switch between them, or simply avoid jargon from your own Alignment Language and understand the jargon from others is a critical communication skill when you need to work with people who have radically different values than your own.
    • 13years 4y ago
      > radically different values than your own These values didn't originate naturally. It is a side effect that creates division. Cyberpunk RPG 1995 rule book NeoTribes ... "It is now accepted among historical scholars that in the decades before the Collapse, America suffered from the sicknesses of racism and "cultural identity'. Everyone wanted to be seen as special. Every group had to be "equal" to or preferably better than its neighbors, and fought to protect its "special" rights. If anyone had something that someone else wanted, they were painted as racist, sexist, elitist or worse. This divisive "me first" attitude eventually tore the fabric of American culture apart and caused it to self-destruct in a fireball of competing ideologies, none of which truly recognized each other's validity. Diversity led inexorably to anarchy."
  • b800h 4y ago
    The curse of Babel.
  • latency-guy2 4y ago
    They're already near incomprehensible for myself. It's like they're casting spells and wards in some pseudolang that moderately resembles English.
• the_snooze 4y ago
  >When Latinx began to be used in advanced milieus, a poll found that a large majority of Latinos and Hispanics continued to go by the familiar terms and hadn’t heard of the newly coined, nearly unpronounceable one. There's also a practical case: these terms make you sound like a damn space alien. Unless your audience already agrees completely with you, you lose credibility by using this language. Posturing for your own team has become more important than relating your views to others and pursuading them to join your side.
  • next_xibalba 4y ago
    Here is the poll, which has been repeated for a few years: https://thinknow.com/newsite/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/thinknow-identity-report-2022.pdf https://thinknow.com/newsite/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/thin... It is not that large, but the tiny number of respondents who identify as Latinx has been stable. It's crazy that this label is still being pushed.
    • OrvalWintermute 4y ago
      > It's crazy that this label is still being pushed. This is a great example of how intellectually bankrupt some of the social mis-movements towards redefinition truly are. First they come up with a term that is clearly not a term used by the native speakers of that group. Then they utilize that term in order to collectively identify them. Then they push it across media, education, and many other avenues to make it "a thing". This term which originates in English, and doesn't truly relate to Latin* derived cultures but instead to a smaller subset of cultures from a specific geography, and is difficult to speak for a native speaker, and violates the grammar, is then hoisted upon them like a label to which they'd actually subscribe. As many of these cultures self-identify as uniquely distinct from one another, and are competitive, this type of collectivist label is all the more rude. What Chutzpah!
      • docandrew 4y ago
        My guess is an English speaker was forced to take French or Spanish in college and struggled to remember the gender for a word like “bicycle” and decided the whole notion of gendered language was silly and should be abolished.
• TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  Let's just not create any new words / neologisms for "social justice" purposes. To be clear, no newspeak. Let's remain using the OED from circa 2006.
  • feoren 4y ago
    Yes, language should never change. All used languages have been continually changing for their entire hundreds- or thousands-of-years' lifespan, but they should STOP changing, right around the year I was in college. Music, too! What's with all this new awful music! In the entire history of all humanity, music was best right around when I was in college! I used to be with it, and I can still be with it, as long as they just stop trying to change everything! Everything has gone downhill since the exact specific year that exactly specifically I was in college! Change has been a constant for two hundred thousand years of human history, but I DEMAND it stop as of 2006!!
    • TurkishPoptart 4y ago
      TFA is about "equity language". Let's stay on topic.
      • feoren 4y ago
        The topic is your comment, and my reply is quite on topic. > Let's remain using the OED from circa 2006 You literally said the English language, which has been evolving for over a thousand years, should stop changing as of 2006. That's what you said. You don't like these new words because you don't want the world to change from how it was in your own personal golden years. It's fine, it happens to everyone; I'm just pointing out that that's the person you've become now. You're happy with all the "social justice movements" that happened from 100,000 BCE up to 2006 because those were either history, or your generation's causes. Now you're unhappy with "social justice" (your scare quotes) because it's all those liberal youths who are doing it. Since that covers the large majority of all backlash against "wokeism", I'd say it's quite on topic.
        • 4y ago
• Animats 4y ago
  Is this going anywhere outside the US? The "pronouns" thing went nowhere in France. It was considered damaging to the French language. > The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, from negro, to black, to African American, to Black, to person of color. Also, the shift from moron to mentally defective to retarded to whatever. This is such a sideshow. First, conservatism lost its way. Then liberalism lost its way. If only we had a center with a clue. Nobody wants to tackle the hard but solveable problems. We get "defund the police", rather than "fire the bottom 10% of cops".
  • JohnFen 4y ago
    > First, conservatism lost its way. Then liberalism lost its way. It's almost as if the underlying issue is independent of political leanings.
  • feoren 4y ago
    > We get "defund the police", rather than "fire the bottom 10% of cops". That's because we can't fire the bottom 10% of cops. Who gets to decide who the bottom 10% are? There are deeply engrained cultural issues, systemic perverse incentives, in most police departments in the country. If you ask them to fire 10% of their forces, it's more likely to be the people who speak out against the Clan Police than it is the "bad apples" you're thinking of. Besides, while maybe only a small minority would brutally murder a man by kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and 43 seconds while he cries for his mother, almost every single police officer on the force would stand there next to him and protect him while he did it. If you ran up and pushed the murderer off the man he's killing, trying to save his life, the other cops would beat you, possibly to death. Not 10% of them. 90% of them. You would be beaten and arrested. It's 90%. At least. Whereas we can reduce funding to police departments; that is within the power of elected officials that the "defund" movement can help get elected.
  • PaulHoule 4y ago
    How about mentality retarded -> special so that now "special" is the cruelest taunt on the schoolyard? As for "defund the police" I think I'm the only one who remembers the Reaganite "defund the left" slogan https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/11/opinion/defund-the-left.html https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/11/opinion/defund-the-left.h... which "defund the police" seems to be modeled after. Thatcherism (the British strain of Reaganism that was just a bit meaner) became so ingrained that the fish who swim in it can't even recognize it. Today there is such a poverty of the imagination that the left can't imagine anything else.
• fundad 4y ago
  Has anyone considered that non-binary Latine benefit from inclusive language differently than people pretending there is a ban on the word Latino?
  • deely3 4y ago
    Could you help me, I have a question: who should define how group of persons should be called? * Group that outside of the group * Majority of the group * Minority of the group * Any of the above when they think its for inclusion ?
    • fundad 4y ago
      Nice, you're discovering intersectionality. Seriously though, you are pressed about other people using a term you don't use even though you're free to say Latino or Hispanic as much as you want. The context matters immensely: The Sierra Club, a lobbyist group, conducts their work with politicians and government officials who are not pressed by inclusive language.
• politician 4y ago
  > The project of the guides is utopian. What I've learned from history is that every utopian dream realized is a dystopia. "In theory, theory is no different from in practice..." as the saying goes.
• variant 4y ago
  Can we just all start operating from the perspective that we're not trying to offend each other? Do away with all these rules that serve no purpose other than to slot each other into buckets of enlightened and evil. It's a sign that we have things way too good.
  • deely3 4y ago
    But how can we logically separate "trying to offend" and "not trying to offend" stances here, on a social platform, by reading two or three sentences comment written by some anonymous?
    • twodave 4y ago
      You shouldn't try. Assume the best and move on. This is just basic manners.
    • DiggyJohnson 4y ago
      By assuming others are not trying to offend, and practicing apathy when we suspect they are. Offense is not violence.
    • nomdep 4y ago
      Easy. You always asume “not trying to offend” unless there is strong evidence to the contrary
    • karaterobot 4y ago
      Assume good intent and interpret as generously as possible. I believe some version of these common sense notions are even in the site guidelines for Hacker News.
  • SyzygistSix 4y ago
    >It's a sign that we have things way too good. That is not the case though.
• awesome_dude 4y ago
  They're right to drop "American" but not for the reasons outlined. An "American" is by definition is someone from the American continents (North and South America). Further a "North American" is someone from Mexico, USA, and Canada. It gets worse when people have "Black Americans", "Italian Americans", "Asian Americans" because that means that "Americans" is only referring to one group of people from the USA.
  • nverno 4y ago
    It makes sense though, cause it's the United States of America. It's usually obvious from the context. Mexico and Canada are already single word countries, so you can easily say Asian Canadian or whatever. South Africa would pose a similar conundrum, where people are called South Africans, but they aren't the only people living in Southern Africa.
  • crazygringo 4y ago
    Not by common usage of the word. Particularly because I'm not sure I've ever come across a case in my life when a speaker or writer wanted to include people from both continents as a single group. It's just not a label that's useful for much of anything. "North or South American" isn't a particularly meaningful or relevant concept at all. In contrast with e.g. "Latin American" which is very useful/meaningful. And if people from the United Mexican States are Mexican for short, it's an easy shorthand to similarly call people from the United States of America, well, American.
    • cesarb 4y ago
      > Particularly because I'm not sure I've ever come across a case in my life when a speaker or writer wanted to include people from both continents as a single group. That's the thing: for many people, it's a single continent, called just "America", which can be further subdivided into "North America", "Central America", and "South America" (but these three are not continents, they're subdivisions within a single continent; another common subdivision is "Latin America", which corresponds to the countries colonized by Spain or Portugal).
• walnutclosefarm 4y ago
  These wholesale moves to prescribe new language in the interest of social justice are the reductio ad absurdum result of the whole menagerie of post-modern identity theories and movements, from critical race theory to post colonial theory to queer theory. It's all in service to the notion that you can create truth, particularly about identity, by modifying language and usage. Ironically, it's also deeply counterproductive to the goals of identity theories, because it draws overt attention to language and sensitivity about language, in a way that makes identities appear, and to some extent actually become, fragile and dependent on the language. Where a word is owned and deployed by a group to suppress and control some other group (ni**, e.g.), taking the word away, anathematizing it, can indeed be of value. But most of the targets in modern social justice language correction have very little such power, and are not deployed as tools of suppression or oppression by most people. Take a broad enough run at them though, and you can give them that power, at lead in the mind of those to whom the refer.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jurassic 4y ago
  The pendulum is swinging back because equity language censors took this way way too far. People-first language ("enslaved people" not "slaves") makes complete sense to me, but making a big fuss about how common English idioms like being "blind to a problem" is somehow offensive is going to earn you nothing but eyerolls from nearly everyone. Some of these, like "grandfathering", cannot even be understood without deep diving on etymology to discover the racist origins. People are so far up their own asses on victimhood culture that the people of high education and privilege driving these initiatives are looking for literally any reason to feign offense on behalf of other peoples' identities and disabilities. With the prioritization of equity also comes erasure of identity. For example, it seems like we can't say "mother" anymore in medical settings. For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" because of some tiny number of trans men that exist and also want to give birth. I support trans people living however they want, but my mother was a mother, goddammit, not a "birthing person", and I don't appreciate anyone implying that this word and identity are somehow offensive. At work, a "women in engineering" group got renamed to something bland like "gender minorities in tech". The recently reported bowdlerization of Roald Dahl by 'sensitivity readers' is another symptom of this illness. The whole equity language sterilization process forgets that words which are synonyms are not interchangeable because to the writer each word is chosen with intention for the flavor it provides, its connotations and rhythm, the image it creates in the mind. People should be able to communicate using whatever words they wish. Otherwise we're just deleting colors from the artists' palette.
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    That is ridiculous. Was this hospital on the coast? I did not hear this at our hospital.
  • low_tech_love 4y ago
    This is an academic issue, ”a solution in search of a problem” as almost all the rest of academia is. As such, it never stops at a reasonable, meaningful equilibrium; it has to be kept pacing, moving forward towards more and more ridiculous extremes. An academic, in order to stay relevant, needs to keep pushing the invisible and mostly inexistent boundaries that they perceive in whatever field they are involved in. If they’re faced with a set vocabulary today, then tomorrow they’ll have to come up with an ”aha! Found a new offensive word” to position themselves as a relevant, meaningful part of this strange, ethereal movement. It’ll never end, because the movement itself needs its members to keep also pacing forward and motivated in order for itself to remain existing. The exact same could be said of any academic movement; the difference is that, in most cases, it mostly does not spill into reality. Other than a bit of research funding money, meaningless academic ideas don’t hurt society much. In this case, however, the academic movement is dead set on spilling all over everything, using the most aggressive possible strategies of shaming and reputation murder in order to push down its opposition.
• seydor 4y ago
  These may sound funny white north american people's problems, but imagine when your AI app is is trying to explain european history to your children without referencing slavery racism or war.
• fyloraspit 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EMiSsxpP0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EMiSsxpP0E
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• legitster 4y ago
  "Avoid metaphors, which can introduce unneeded baggage." This is my favorite one from UC Irvine's language guide. Nothing better encapsulates the irony and lack of self-awareness most of these guides display. This is clearly not actually about morality - no one in their right mind would argue that someone is racist just because they didn't know the etymology of "cakewalk". And a complete racist could follow these rules easily enough. This seems to me that these are a set of moral grounds to punish people for having a low EQ. None of these rules or guides are even internally consistent. What it will and has always come down to is understanding how to read a room and follow imposed social etiquette (aka, EQ - something that we know is not equally distributed!) Whether people promoting this stuff understand it or not (I think some of them are very aware), they are going to be roping of sections of society just on the grounds of being "too impolite".
  • dmonitor 4y ago
    The fact that they use a metaphor in their ban of metaphors is unintentionally hilarious
• HillRat 4y ago
  Writers always see the perceived misuse of words in apocalyptic terms, and The Atlantic is itself invested in a kind of elite moral panic over "woke culture," so I tend to look at articles like this with some skepticism. One thing is that Packer himself fails to analyze the language under consideration with precision; the examples he lays out all fall, roughly, under a few different categories, which should be considered separately: - Branding and inclusivity: Much of what he proffers as examples are not unfamiliar to anyone who's had to work with corporate style guides, where terms are favored or disfavored partially in relation to branding tone and voice, and partially to maximize clarity (idiosyncratic style being a frequent source of confusion). No one's harmed by a press release avoiding terms like "blind to" in favor of "refusing to see what's happening;" as a personal matter I prefer the concision of the former, but the latter is more plainspoken if also somewhat dull. Plodding and dull is often exactly what you're looking for in official communiques. - Specificity and Precision: Again, while using "Americans" to refer to US residents is reasonable in casual contexts, or where American citizens are under discussion (e.g., political contexts), it's also reasonable to refer to "US residents" or the like. The biggest problem is that there isn't a concise term that covers "US citizens and legal permanent residents" that doesn't make you sound like a DHS circular or a legal opinion. (An additional complication is when you're working with Mexican and LATAM entities, where "American" is strongly disfavored unless you're literally talking about the Americas broadly. Same problem when people use "North American" to refer to US-Candada exclusively.) Slicing your terms finely to clearly delineate what you're discussing, and what you're not discussing, is again a perfectly reasonable goal in organizational communications, if anathema to a talented writer who is used to bending words to the context, rather than straightjacketing terms within specific contexts. Both inclusivity and specificity are goals of most guides, particularly in journalism. (I'm not sure what style guide The Atlantic hews to, but rest assured their editors adhere to something.) Packer can argue that the Sierra Club's guide tends towards creating uninspired, workmanlike prose, but making a moral panic of that seems unwarranted. - Instrumentalism: Instrumental terms are the ones that do have a real-world impact, because they're designed to either defuse or infuse a term with emotional valence. Instrumental terms contain arguments within themselves: using the term "slave" robs the person in question of their agency, which distances policy or analytic questions from those very people; "enslaved person" changes the context to slavery as an imposition on an agentive person; likewise, my preferred term (for Black slaves in US history), "enslaved American" goes evern further, being a deliberate and implicit argument against the legality of slavery even prior to the 13th Amendment. The term "justice-involved person" instead of "felon" is risible even to me, but the negative emotional valence of the latter term has a real effect on policy and the perception of policy, which is why terms like "ex-offender" are becoming more commonly used. Instrumentalist terms can be used for good or for evil; to make arguments, defuse emotional responses, or to invoke high dudgeon (Gingrich's famed GOPAC memo is a masterclass on using instrumentalist terms to whip up public emotion). Whereas the worst you can say about branding and precision terms is that they're frequently clumsy and bland, instrumentalist language can affect the real world in often direct ways, and it's well worth interrogating the use of those terms to make their impact clear. Unfortunately, Packer fails to distinguish between the context of different kinds of language (it should be unsurprising that a policy paper uses clear if clumsy language, while a literary nonfiction book uses poetic and impactful imagery), and lumps all kinds of language style requirements under a general "equity language" heading, which is unhelpful and arguably misleading.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• teucris 4y ago
  This article goes way overboard. While some of the things referenced are ridiculous, the author is really misinterpreting many of the guides here, to a point where it feels like willful misinterpretation. For instance. > If we don’t know how to end racism, we can at least call it structural. The guides want to make the ugliness of our society disappear by linguistic fiat. If anything, using the term “structural” helps associate much more context about racism, its causes, and its ugliness, not less. Also, these guides aren’t targeting literature. They mostly meant for situations where you don’t want to evoke emotion in your writing.
  • crazygringo 4y ago
    > Also, these guides aren’t targeting literature. Considering the news that Roald Dahl's books are now being altered in precisely some of the ways described, we are very, very clearly seeing literature start to be targeted.
• 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
  Those whose focus is on controlling language are not primarily concerned about controlling your words. They're primarily interested in controlling you. I'm old enough to remember when the word 'retard' was the politically correct term before it became "mentally handicapped" then "challenged" and so on. Same goes for 'cripple' which also accurately and concisely describes a particular class of physical impairment. Then it became "handicapped" and "mobility impaired". These are all euphemisms that do nothing but infantalise those affected while allowing those intent on using them to feel morally superior in doing so.
  • low_tech_love 4y ago
    I agree with you that the purpose is to control the person, not the language—the language here being just a tool or means of control. This was made very popular in 1984 (I feel stupid just mentioning this reference but it seems impossible not to). However, one problem here is that, when faced with this affirmative-that these people are trying to control you-I think many well-meaning persons will say ”you’re exaggerating”. That’s because I think that most of the time, the people who propose these rules (and the more passive ones who agree with them blindly) actually really believe they are doing a good thing-they strongly believe that they know better than you what you should say. I have to assume this because, if not, if I assume they are only just trying to control me, period, I’ll feel like I am wearing the same aluminum foil hat that they are using. As such, it is important to understand that yes, they are trying to control you, and no, maybe they don’t realize this, because their moral superiority complex is just too deeply rooted. By understanding this you can be more broadly aware that these attempts of control will come from other directions than language (artistic taste, sexual preferences, behavior in general, political beliefs, etc.) What really screws up the entire thing is that, their belief is so deeply rooted that, the next step of their logic then becomes: if they were so nice to inform you and educate you about the right way to behave, then why is it that now that you know the truth you still insist on not practicing it? The only conclusion is that you must be ill-intentioned on purpose.
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    They think truth is subject to power. Look at how they describe hierarchies. And as no surprise, they power hungry authoritarians. By their own description, that’s just how the world works.
• TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  [flagged]
• low_tech_love 4y ago
  ” But the people in Behind the Beautiful Forevers know they’re poor; they can’t afford to wrap themselves in soft sheets of euphemism. Equity language doesn’t fool anyone who lives with real afflictions. It’s meant to spare only the feelings of those who use it.” Ouch. Bull’s eye.
• hprotagonist 4y ago
  As a practical matter, I strongly doubt whether a guy who has four small kids and makes $12,000 a year feels more empowered or less ill-used by a society that carefully refers to him as "economically disadvantaged" rather than "poor." Were I he, in fact, I'd probably find the PCE [Politically Correct English] term insulting---not just because it's patronizing (which it is) but because it's hypocritical and self-serving in a way that oft-patronized people tend to have really good subliminal antennae for. The basic hypocrisy about usages like "economically disadvantaged" and "differently abled" is that PCE advocates believe the beneficiaries of these terms' compassion and generosity to be poor people and people in wheelchairs, which again omits something that everyone knows but nobody except the scary vocabulary tape ads' announcer ever mentions---that part of any speaker's motive for using a certain vocabulary is always the desire to communicate stuff about himself. Like many forms of Vogue Usage, PCE functions primarily to signal and congratulate certain virtues in the speaker---scrupulous egalitarianism, concern for the dignity of all people, sophistication about the political implications of language---and so serves the self-regarding interests of the PC far more than it serves any of the persons or groups renamed. "Authority and American Usage"
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    This reeks of criticizing others for your own faults. Someone who makes 12k is poor. If this is offensive to someone then clearly they have a low opinion of poor people. Yet everyone else is reprimanded for it.
    • bilalnpe 4y ago
      I don't have an issue with using the term poor to describe people lacking money but it has other definitions and uses. The second and third definitions I get from define:poor on Google are: - worse than is usual, expected, or desirable; of a low or inferior standard or quality. - (of a person) considered to be deserving of pity or sympathy. I suspect these might be why the term is discouraged.
      • noah_buddy 4y ago
• neonate 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/8TnxC https://archive.ph/8TnxC
• jsemrau 4y ago
  A word doesn't change the fact it describes.
  • 1letterunixname 4y ago
    English words rarely describe absolute facts: adjectives and adverbs especially. They are often ambiguous if not regionally- and personally-tinted with a history of meanings that vary between people by background and culture.
• friend_and_foe 4y ago
  > Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. They haven’t emerged organically from the shifting linguistic habits of large numbers of people. Yes, that's sort of the point. The goal here is not only to force people to behave and even think in a certain way, but it is simultaneously a loyalty test and a flex. If it were to happen organically it wouldn't serve these purposes.
• farnsworth 4y ago
  Only tangentially related but I think it's interesting that just as we popularized the word "Ms.", and I think it makes perfect sense not to refer to women primarily by their marital status, we sort of worked around the issue by... largely just not using title/last name anymore. Right? I don't think I've referred to anyone by a title since my grade school teachers, and at least in my industry and corner of society, it's a complete non-issue.
  • flangola7 4y ago
    There's always Mx too.
  • crazygringo 4y ago
    Was there a time when adults referred to each other by Mr. and Mrs. in regular spoken conversation? Like if you were asking a work colleague where another colleague was, it was normal to say "Where is Mr. Smith?" rather than "Where is Mark?" Since in my lifetime I've only known calling everyone by their first name (except, like you say, teachers in childhood), I'm curious when the change occurred and how.
    • rendall 4y ago
      There are older Americans who insist that calling a stranger by their first name is rude. That was never my culture so I was taken aback to hear this.
      • vixen99 4y ago
        For some the use of the first name assumes a familiarity which probably does not exist. The universal rule is that appropriate levels of interaction are both accepted and used in common parlance by everyone. Thus it's rare for a speaker at a press conference to be addressed by their first name though the speaker might well respond using a first name if they know the journalist. 'Anthony, how did your chat with Sergey (Lavrov) go?' is not something we're likely to hear. Of course it's down to preferences with ordinary conversations as in 'please call me Joe' or whatever.
• rayiner 4y ago
  The Sierra Club guide is hilarious: https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/default/files/sce-authors/u12332/Equity%20Language%20Guide%20Sierra%20Club%202021.pdf https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/default/files/sce-authors/u.... > People of color” has in the past served as a collective term for people who are not white. A preferred term today is “BIPOC” referring to Black, Indigenous and people of color, which provides a unifying term for ease of use while still acknowledging the reality that Black and Indigenous people in the United States are impacted by structural and individual racism in a different way than other people of color. I love the “first among equals” aspect of BIPOC. It’s literally just white people creating hierarchies of the other races. Again.
  • jrmg 4y ago
    Are you aghast at the number of points? It’s referring to two points from “The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation”, which is understandably (I hope), a large (and respected!) guide.
    • whatshisface 4y ago
      Taken out of their respective roles in the context of the conversation, comparing the Chicago Guide to the Catechism is, admittedly, a really funny comment.
    • rayiner 4y ago
      Yes, that went over my head.
  • ShredKazoo 4y ago
    NAACP stands for "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People". Interesting how "Colored People" was an enlightened term in 1909, but "Colored People" is now out and "People of Color" is the new way to go.
    • zuminator 4y ago
      Colored People and People of Color are two different things. Colored People was the polite term for blacks 60+ years ago. People of Color means nonwhite. Also, side point, the founders of NAACP included both black, white, and at least one person (Mary Church Terrell) that we would in 2023 consider mixed race. And initially it was predominately led by white Americans.
• diedead 4y ago
  Some very fun ones relating to the IT/tech industry (To me, some of these are reasonable, but "whitespace" and "brown-bag", seriously??) https://itconnect.uw.edu/guides-by-topic/identity-diversity-inclusion/inclusive-language-guide/ https://itconnect.uw.edu/guides-by-topic/identity-diversity-... https://www.it.northwestern.edu/about/it-projects/dei/glossary.html https://www.it.northwestern.edu/about/it-projects/dei/glossa...
  • messe 4y ago
    "Sanity check" is flagged there as well. That's a first for me.
    • SyzygistSix 4y ago
      I recently had a comment on another site flagged by a bot for using ableist language when I used the world "insane". It was a first for me as well. Will go with "batshit" next time.
      • exodust 4y ago
        It's insane there's backroom string-pullers trying to take out words like insane. Rick from Pawn Stars uses the word, so it's good enough for me! He often describes certain amazing facts or objects as insane. Because he likes those things. It can be positive. Is the motivation to onboard "use this list or be on wrong side of ethics and get nasty reviews"? there's an element of that. Microsoft 360, all that new stuff, surprised to find shiny new morality-checker sitting alongside the spellchecker. Watching over my every word. I unchecked 5000 checkboxes to disable it all. Auto-nicer-word enforcer is not for me.
        • SyzygistSix 4y ago
          It was more like "If you want to participate in this obviously PC online community, here's how we talk." They didn't ban me or even threaten to.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  This language got popular not because people thought really hard and all arrived at it independently, through cold-blooded analysis, but because they heard it was what the better class of people did now, and there was peer pressure around it. Because it never had a firm foundation, never really made sense when you thought hard about it, it can easily change to something else. In other words, it's a fashion, and fashions change.
  • hedora 4y ago
    Honestly, I think it got popular for the same reason slowly backing away from the dude playing with a switchblade at a bar is popular: It’s generally better to avoid taking the bait when someone is trying to pick a fight with you.
    • Penyngton 4y ago
      I agree with you, but this is how bullies get their way.
• beebmam 4y ago
  Frankly, I don't care as long as government isn't involved. Companies (and other organizations owned by individuals) should have every right to hire/fire people based on the language they use, no matter what language that is. Same with companies that decide who they want to sell to and who they don't want to sell to. I'm very much against the idea of governments limiting speech or forcing behavior on private individuals, with some exceptions in the case of the tragedy of the commons (like with environmental protections, overextraction of renewable resources, etc).
  • eldritch_4ier 4y ago
    Would you say the same thing about lifestyles one lives? Or what if that language is something like "I like Trump" or "Black Lives Matter"?
    • beebmam 4y ago
      I think so. Individuals shouldn't be forced to hire/fire people or work/not work with people whose lifestyles they profoundly agree/disagree with.
• stordoff 4y ago
  > The guide also rejects the disabled in favor of people living with disabilities FWIW, as someone with a disability, I just don't care about this - your intent and actions matter so much more, as I've commented before[1]: > I've had people who've obviously been trained to use person-first language be actively unpleasant (often the classic "you don't look disabled" and questioning the authenticity of my documents), and people who've used clumsy, borderline-offensive language go miles out of their way to help me (and the other way around). [...] I will say "disabled person" stands out to me less, as "person with disabilities" can come across as a little forced[, though it's probably because I've heard the former more often]. Notably, however, the Sierra Club guide doesn't seem to actually call for that as far as I can see - it directs you to refer to the National Center on Disability and Journalism’s Disability Language Style Guide[2], which currently states: > In the past, we have encouraged journalists and others to use person-first language (such as, "a person who has Down syndrome" rather than "a Down syndrome person") as a default. Even with the caveat that this does not apply to all, we have heard from many people with disabilities who take issue with that advice. For us, this really emphasizes the fact that no two people are the same — either with regard to disabilities or language preferences. And so we are no longer offering advice regarding a default. The one part of the Sierra club guide I would strongly agree with though is: > Similarly, we should avoid making light of things like PTSD, anxiety or OCD, by using real medical diagnoses as a metaphor for everyday emotional experiences. It's frustrating to hear people cry "My OCD!" when, for example, they can't tidy something up even though it clearly doesn't bother them a few seconds later, as it feels like it is trivialising the problems this condition can cause, and doesn't even match up with many manifestations of the disorder (my own irrational obsessions cause me to be way _less_ tidy than the average person). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29732405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29732405 [2] https://ncdj.org/style-guide/ https://ncdj.org/style-guide/
• flangola7 4y ago
  This author sounds really offended and sensitive.
• ARandomerDude 4y ago
  > Urban, vibrant, hardworking, and brown bag all crash to earth for subtle racism. I'm seriously trying to figure out the riddle of how any of these terms are remotely racial.
  • amluto 4y ago
    I’ll give it a try, not necessarily successfully: Urban, in the sense of urban or inner city youth, might be a reference to black children. (Or it might not. And one might actually be referencing urban things in the sense of not suburban or rural.) Vibrant: makes, ahem, people living with color blindness feel marginalized. Hardworking: I’m struggling to come up with something even as credible as the last two. Maybe it’s ableist: some people can’t work hard. Brown bag: I’m guessing this is in a similar category to “tarball” from the rather regrettable list out of Stanford recently: it has nothing whatsoever to do with equity or inequity, but one might imagine an alternative etymology in which it has an inequitable meaning, connotation or origin. So brown bag could somehow be about brown people, even though as far as I can tell, neither the origin of the phrase nor any common uses are at all related to skin color. At this rate, we risk running out of English words. Fortunately, English has a lot of words :)
    • superfrank 4y ago
      > Hardworking: I’m struggling to come up with something even as credible as the last two. Maybe it’s ableist: some people can’t work hard. I'm guessing the logic is something similar the absolutely ridiculous (IMO) graphic I've linked below from the National Museum of African American History & Culture which lists a lot of aspects of white culture in the United States. One of the many items on their list was the "Protestant Work Ethic" and a few bullet points about how hard work equals success. https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1283372233730203651?s=20 https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1283372233730203651?s=2...
      • throwawayacc5 4y ago
        The first time I saw that I was convinced it was a 4chan troll. I was so sure it was an elaborate 4chan ruse that when shared by someone else at work I instinctively told them it's a racist 4chan meme and they shouldn't be sharing that at work. It took some back and forth with links from the actual museum before it hit me that it was real. I was speechless.
• m3kw9 4y ago
  Or better to say covering your eyes from the sky doesn’t make it disappear, always gonna be there
• dimva 4y ago
  The ever-changing euphemistic language seems to me like mostly just a new way to be a hipster. The new vocabulary is a shibboleth to distinguish people who got the right sort of education from the right sort of places. Your knowledge of all the proper euphemisms to use sets you apart from the uneducated rubes. The problem is, it sets you apart from the people you're allegedly trying to help, given that the marginalized are rarely those who got an elite education at an elite institution. This is how Republicans, a coalition of rich tax-avoiders and poorer people resenting the contempt of the elites, stay in power. And their political program - slashing benefits, cutting social services - hurts marginalized people the most. By creating a way to be a "good person" that only the most hip and educated people can follow, the language policers are creating a rift between themselves and the people they are trying to help, preventing a political coalition from forming that would be able to pass helpful policies.
  • echelon 4y ago
    > shibboleth to distinguish people who got the right sort of education from the right sort of places I don't think you're right. We're being told our words are wrong on a daily basis. I think that this started with Tumblr in the early 2010's and has grown into a movement sometime during the Trump presidency.
    • zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
      The Tumblr kids went to college and corporations
    • dimva 4y ago
      Does this fundamentally disagree with anything I wrote? Before Tumblr became a place where some people showed off their inscrutable social justice terminology, it was mostly a place where hipsters showed off their inscrutably cool aesthetics.
• kepler1 4y ago
  The funny thing to me is that it felt like this whole field of pronouns, over-sensitivity, not wanting to call things straightforwardly, was propagated by white female journalists and HR directors.
• zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
  While we're getting rid of words we consider offensive, let's get rid of "consumer." I find it particularly offensive when politicians refer to the public as consumers.
  • blt 4y ago
    Totally agree. It's insulting.
  • ginko 4y ago
    I hate that word.
  • JohnFen 4y ago
    I'm on board. While we're at it, let's also restrict the use of the word "content", at least when it's only referring to a single type of media.
• imgabe 4y ago
  Wait, brown bag is subtle racism? Somebody needs to explain this to me because I know for a fact I’ve taken lunch to school in paper bags that were literally brown and I have no idea what else this could possibly refer to. Edit: Looked it up: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/theres-more-seattle-brown-bag-racial-controversy-meets-eye-flna6C10836263 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/theres-more-seattle-bro... > "the phrase 'brown bag' does bring up associations with the past when a brown bag was actually used, I understand, to determine if people's skin color was light enough to allow admission to an event or to come into a party that was being held in a private home. Yeesh, If someone hears a common phrase (and literal physical description) and immediately jumps to the conclusion that the speaker is referring to some obscure historical factoid in an attempt to slight them...that person needs to get a life. I refuse to believe a single person is actually offended by this rather than just stirring shit up because they crave attention. There's no way.
  • randomdata 4y ago
    > I’ve taken lunch to school in paper bags that were literally brown Are you sure they weren't a certain shade of orange?
    • AbusiveHNAdmin 4y ago
      [dead]
    • imgabe 4y ago
      I'm no graphic designer or artist, they look brown to me. They still sell them at Walmart: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Self-Standing-Lunch-Bags-Brown-100-Count/186661182?athbdg=L1102 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Self-Standing-Lunch-B...
      • Version467 4y ago
        I could be wrong, but I think the parent comment is just a reference to the fact that brown doesn't exist. There's no wavelength that our brains map to brown. Instead what we perceive as brown is just orange, but less bright. And wether we see it as brown or dark orange depends entirely on context.
• ftxbro 4y ago
  a meta comment but look how much engagement the culture war posts get in here
• DubiousPusher 4y ago
  This has got to be one of the most over-anxiated, one side arguing with itself sociological phenomena since the white slaver panic that afflicted upper-class ladies in the late 19th century. There is some magazine wash lib, crucifying themselves on this hill on the HN front page every other day. Yet there is practically no one arguing back. Except of course on Twitter. Which apparently some large set of journalists believe reflects some significant portion of public opinion and influence.
  • gnicholas 4y ago
    I can't tell if you're referring to the phenomenon of banning words, or the phenomenon of criticizing banning words. The first sentence makes it seem like you're referring to the word-banning, but the second sentence is about magazines, which makes it seem like you're referring to The Atlantic (which is criticizing the word-banning).
    • DubiousPusher 4y ago
      The free speech panic. I'm all for free speech but we are like defcon 100 from anything resembling an actual clampdown on speech and it's extremely tiresome to watch people with editorial boards and national readerships act as if they are being brave for saying what pretty much everyone already believes.
      • Svip 4y ago
        > defcon 100 So everything is fine? DEFCON 5 is the _lowest_ threat level, it's DEFCON 1 people should worry about.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON
        • DubiousPusher 4y ago
          Yes everything is fine. Norms around language change. 50 years ago you could lose your job for impugning most major religious, governmental or other "respectable" institutions in writing. You probably weren't going to jail for it but you just didn't talk that way about the Catholic church. At the turn of the century, the same kind of uber-libs who are so jealous of their speech today were getting anyone who even tangentially endorsed labor organization kicked out of college econ departments and black-balled. One econ professor had some good things to say of The Knights of Labor which was the most ubiquitous and one of the most moderate labor organizations in the country, The Nation called into question his economics chair. Godkin himself tried to have the man fired from Johns Hopkins. Many economists who didn't tow the classically liberal line found themselves dealing with unhappy boards of trustees. Two wrongs obviously don't make a right. But this is not new. The people claiming it is just have very little familiarity with history. And they take for granted that they have just never been on the wrong side of language norms. Have the woke language grammar police gone too far? Probably. Does it warrant these interminable sanctimonious soap boxes from the Atlantic and their like? No.
• ShredKazoo 4y ago
  I acknowledge that language shapes the way people think. But the replacement of cost-benefit analysis and evidence-based debate with arguments regarding the connotations that different words pull in has been a huge mistake in my view. There might have been a point at which language policing was done in good faith. But I strongly suspect that the replacement of the word felon with the term justice-involved person is essentially attempting a fait accompli on a debate regarding the extent to which convicted criminals should be considered culpable for their crimes. The problem with this mode of debating is that winning correlates with the ability to wield social power, not with having facts on your side.
• eli 4y ago
  Who is banning words? I feel like people are deliberately misunderstanding what a style guide is.
• Sunspark 4y ago
  In my life, I have been deaf, hearing impaired, hard of hearing, hearing challenged. I suppose at some point I will be acoustically disadvantaged. You know what? At the end of the day, I'm still deaf. It's true. I have limitations that others take for granted. If I can't see someone speaking or if I'm out of batteries, we aren't going to be communicating well. That's pretty deaf. I won't be offended, it's just reality. Changing language does not, and never did, give me preferential treatment. People are always always going to discriminate and pretty words won't stop them. Character and intent is what matters.
  • imoverclocked 4y ago
    > Character and intent is what matters. This. I recently ran up against a filter on Reddit where I used a phrase that I was completely unaware of. My account was flagged for hate speech. The comment had no ill-intent. The problem with language is that we want individual words to have inherent meaning but as people adopt phrases to identify a movement, those meanings get carried along for the ride. eg: until recently, I would have just curiously nodded along to the phrase "It's ok to be _____" but learned that it's actually a dark dog whistle thanks to Scott Adams. I suspect the unease you perceive with people using different terms for blindness are unease with their own attachments to those words. Fighting to keep using words with established meaning is laudable IMO. I still use "literally" as not "figuratively" despite the media-dulled connotation.
    • josephg 4y ago
      > I suspect the unease you perceive with people using different terms for blindness are unease with their own attachments to those words. Nah. I think people are just terrified of coming across as a jerk for not knowing the latest non-offensive term for things. Black? African American? Oh black is ok again? Will I get in trouble with HR/Twitter for calling you blind? And if so, what word do I use instead? Do I ask? Is that awkward? Am I making it awkward?? It feels like a minefield, where the location of the mines change every few months and stepping on a mine could cost you big time. The language police keep finding new things to get offended by, too. The Stanford “harmful language list” includes things like “user”, “tribe”, “client” and “addict”. Pleasing these people is exhausting. [1] https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguage.pdf https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguag...
• JenrHywy 4y ago
  My 11yo came home from school today: "Dad! We can't get rid of any of our Roald Dahl books. They're changing the words in them. My class talked about it and we all think it's stupid". A few months back, my 16yo was telling me about a class conversation about their futures, and what everyone wanted most was a stable relationship, a job they enjoyed and to be able to afford a modest house. It's reassuring that in a seemingly insane world, the kids who are coming up seem have their heads screwed on straight.
  • lukeramsden 4y ago
    > and what everyone wanted most was a stable relationship, a job they enjoyed and to be able to afford a modest house. > It's reassuring that in a seemingly insane world, the kids who are coming up seem have their heads screwed on straight. One might say that the reason is because this is seemingly becoming harder than ever in Western countries.
    • SyzygistSix 4y ago
      I was going to say just that. I don't recall people thinking like that when I was 16 because it was assumed that is what people did.
    • JenrHywy 4y ago
      That's certainly part of it, but also I think that, in the face of infinite gender/relationship/careers possibilities, they're (rather sensibly) leaning on tradition for guidance.
  • DeathArrow 4y ago
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• lynx23 4y ago
  What was it, 10 to 20 years ago, people started to be noticeably nervous when they were coming near a description of my disability. It used to be so simple. I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short. But all of a sudden, people external to the community started to fumble around with "visually challenged", and all the nonsense variations of that in my native language. It is so weird, because it adds yet another layer of distance between "us" and the "normal" people. You can almost feel how the stumbling-word is making communication even more awkward. I (and almost all of my friends with a similar disability) make a point of letting people know that we actually prefer the word blind over everything else, and not even that does put people at ease. It sounds a bit provocative, but it feels like that: The language terror they were subjected to has made them so unsecure that they actually dont want to hear that blind people have no issue with being called blind. They somehow continue to argue, sometimes not wanting to accept that and going on to use weird language. Its a weird phenomenon. The longer I watch all of this, and I also mean the gender-language-hacks, I feel like this move has added to the distance between various groups, not made it smaller. It is so condescending to believe your own language-police more then the person you are talking to. Yet, the peer pressure seems to be so high that this actually happens. Sad.
  • ShredKazoo 4y ago
    Interesting, thanks for chiming in. I wonder if the best way to push back against language policing is to simply poll various groups, see which language they prefer, and publish the results. The deltas could be interesting as well, e.g. even if most blind people dislike the term "blind", it would still be interesting if they are more likely to prefer the term "blind" than a member of the general population. I think public opinion polling might actually solve the problem, because the actual group has greater moral authority than language police activists. I suspect people might not cite this Atlantic article during a discussion of whether their organization should adopt language policing for fear of coming across as a reactionary old fogey. But if you were citing a poll of the group in question, that's a level of moral authority that's hard for a language police activist to argue against. Basically the hypothesis to test here is that a latinx-type reaction is fairly common, it just doesn't generally reach public consciousness the way it did in the case of latinx.
• AbusiveHNAdmin 4y ago
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• yibg 4y ago
  This seems like pretty on point: "The whole tendency of equity language is to blur the contours of hard, often unpleasant facts. This aversion to reality is its main appeal." Language can and should be provocative at times, because reality can be messy. Sterilizing language like this besides being completely untenable also removes the power of language, both as a positive and negative force.
• zuminator 4y ago
  Who's banning whom, though? If I decide to call a pregnant woman a "person with pregnancy" and someone jumps down my throat and screams, "she's a PREGNANT! WOMAN!!" who's doing the language policing here? If I've adopted some trendy equity lingo, that's on me. I'm not telling you what to call her, why are you insisting that I call her by the god-given American apple pie Christian traditional term? I mean, I can fairly guess why, because "person with pregancy" probably sounds icky, performative, and vaguely dehumanizing to you. But if you are a Defender of Free Speech, then you should be supporting my right to utter the terms I prefer from my own mouth, as long as I don't try to force those words into yours. And yes I know there are plenty of "progressive" types that will try to force people to use socially correct speech, but Packer's article is complaining about equity language guides being used by corporations, an entirely different phenomenon. Why is he bent out of shape about this? I don't have a problem with Sierra Club enforcing stylistic etiquette in their own writings, as long as I myself not being compelled to conform with their corporate judgment call. Polite language changes over time, and it's reasonable for companies to adapt to that. I'm old enough to have heard tales of when "pregnant" wasn't used in polite company at all, and people instead said, "she's with child." Packer recognizes this on some level, stating, "The battle against euphemism and cliché is long-standing and, mostly, a losing one." But I think he's a bit off with his next assertion: "What’s new and perhaps more threatening about equity language is the special kind of pressure it brings to bear. The conformity it demands isn’t just bureaucratic; it’s moral." No, euphemism has always been moral. What's new now is that everyone's a publisher now thanks to social media. So it's not just Emily Post, The Hays Code, the US Congress, and other big gatekeepers determining by fiat what counts as offensive, and the rest of us passively falling into line. Now every loser gets to proclaim to the world how offended they are, and due to the nature of social media, the more controversial and theatrical their level of offense is, the more engagement they will receive. Couple that with modern tribalism where people have to prove their loyalty by completely accepting all tenets of their tribe and utterly rejecting all tenets of the opposing tribe. Personal anecdote: I was raised to believe that "the n-word" was inherently offensive. It was never spoken in my house, and to this day I don't use it in casual conversation. But I also loved the work of John Lennon. He had an album which featured a song entitled "Woman is the N*** of the World." The word was spelled out on the album cover and sung in the lyrics. When I was young I would feel hot and embarrassed listening to that track, so I would generally skip it. But I understood and appreciated the sentiment behind it. Even at a young age I could separate his laudable intentions from the potential inappropriateness of his methods. Anyway, it would never have occurred to me to stop listening to Lennon entirely just because of one cringey song. Much less to call radio stations or whatever and try to get them to stop playing his music. It's not that I don't get highly offended over people saying the N-word. I do. I just believe that, although we should strive not to be needlessly offensive, in the hierarchy of things that are wrong with the world, "getting offended" is pretty far down. Thus I can't get behind hair trigger "social justice" warriors who want to destroy the lives of everyone who in their estimation holds shitty personal beliefs. But what's even worse are the "free speech" warriors who with no sense of irony will attempt to enact laws banning the speech and ideas of their opponents.
• deleted 4y ago
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• quickthrower2 4y ago
  Orwell only got the date wrong
• usrbinbash 4y ago
  <sarcasm> Whaaaat? I thought so many lives were improved by making devteams replace all usages of "black/whitelist" with "block/allowlist". </sarcasm> Well, except for the lives of the users, on-call engineers, 1st and 2nd level tech support, the product owners, and everyone else who had to deal with sudden, unexpected, hard to track bugs resulting from such BS changes. <sarcasm> Oh, ofc I apologise for my use of the word "list", which may be historically charged, and also non-inclusive to people who prefer unordered data. </sarcasm>
  • burnished 4y ago
    Hey not all change is bad, that one in particular is just less ambiguous. Really wish we'd take the hint and do some language house keeping, maybe clean up the discrepancy between electrons and current.
    • usrbinbash 4y ago
      > that one in particular is just less ambiguous. 1) Please show me an engineer who mistakes the meaning of the term "blacklist" in, say, an ACL system 2) The newspeak terms are no less ambiguous. Are the items on the list allowed exclusively or are they just granted special privilege like source IPs from which no authentication is required? Without context, which is provided by the surrounding system in any case, "block/allow" is just as nebulous as "black/white" Plus, it's one example among many. What ambiguity did "master" branches in repos confer? 3) Problems with ambiguity were not the reason given to introduce such changes. The reason given was that using the newspeak would someohow improve the lives of people experiencing racism, a claim for which I am still waiting for any concrete examples showcasing its validity > Hey not all change is bad As shown above, the change didn't solve any problems or provide tangible improvements, so it becomes change for changes sake, which is bad, always, under all circumstances, period.
      • burnished 4y ago
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  • 4y ago
• ruszki 4y ago
  The case of swearing discredits this whole article. It’s banned from places, and it’s still used widely. There are people who don’t like it, there are people who use them constantly. Just like the topic of this article. Another thing is that this topic is a discussion in law in the past 100 years in different forms. Just because the public didn’t care until now it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t discussion. There were a lot.
  • InCityDreams 4y ago
    I'm currently in a non-English speaking country and listening to the radio - and the lack of censorship regarding 'bleeps' is hilarious - and somewhat sad, too.
• herewulf 4y ago
  > battle and minefield disrespect veterans Came here to say that as a veteran, I promise you that we're not too stupid to differentiate figurative use of these words from the literal. The US Army uses the word "battle" so flippantly that it barely has any meaning: battle rhythm, Battle Staff, battle desk, Battle NCO, Battle Captain, Battle Command Systems, battle rattle, and on and on. Seriously, fuck off. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be crawling across the earth, meticulously probing a buried-explosive-practicum with a plastic stick.
• khazhoux 4y ago
  What pisses me off is that bullshit like this drives just enough people to vote Republican, and then we can't get proper healthcare or energy legislation. This is why we can't have good things.
• nicbou 4y ago
  Counter-point: we used to call lousy things gay, and made up a whole sexuality for men who took care of their appearance (metrosexual). Perhaps it wasn't as bad as the Nazis' "useless mouths", but it certainly wasn't great. Nowadays we call white immigrants "expats" and other immigrants "immigrants". Words have power. The problem is when people start using words to create a sort of password game. It keeps some people busy, makes them feel better than others for knowing the passwords, and does little for anyone else.
• otikik 4y ago
  Relevant: George Carlin on “Soft Language” https://youtu.be/o25I2fzFGoY https://youtu.be/o25I2fzFGoY
• blackhaz 4y ago
  At last, the ray of common sense in this ocean of bullshit.
• reportgunner 4y ago
  This is common sense for people who agree. People who disagee don't do it to make the world more just.
• deleted 4y ago
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• realjhol 4y ago
  They are "putting the woke away" now. Alienating your population isn't a winning strategy for the regime, especially if you're going to need their kids to fight your wars. Notice how Black History Month was dialed right back this year. The woke will go away, but none of the equally and speech laws that lead to this mess are going anywhere.
• andrewstuart 4y ago
  The right wing censor by banning books. The left wing censor by rewriting books.
• deleted 4y ago
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• iLoveOncall 4y ago
  > "elevate voices" replaces "empower" Doesn't sound very inclusive towards mute people, does it? Those morons are not even good at their own bullshit.
• mrhektor 4y ago
  `Equity language doesn’t fool anyone who lives with real afflictions. It’s meant to spare only the feelings of those who use it.` This perfectly describes what's going on. Rather than working on the actual problem, the people gunning for purifying language are yak shaving. I think we all recognise the good intentions, but how do we convince the people with good intentions that they're solving the wrong problem? Sounds like the classic case of a startup not talking to their customers :)
• BrandoElFollito 4y ago
  I am French so the wording part did not reach us yet (we still have one word for deaf and blind, and handicapped (disabled)). What unfortunately is present is the way disabled people are perceived, intellect-wise. I can talk of two examples: a wheel-chaired guy in my team, and my wife who got progressively disabled due to MS. The way they are addressed is different from the way others are addressed; It seems that people will be less inclined to argue with them (because god knows what can happen to these feeble people, who should also be shielded from this because of their physical disability that also affects their intellect), but also treat them more child-like. This is infuriating because they are progressively pushed away from the normal interactions in life (for their own good, poor beings) and there is not much they can do to avoid this. My wife still has the character she had but somehow cannot express it anymore because her interactions get so washed down that it is disturbing to watch. Her disability is not that visible yet so she still has some time, but the guy in my team is really fed up with that.
  • iLoveOncall 4y ago
    > I am French so the wording part did not reach us yet This is not true at all. The absolute trainwreck that is "écriture inclusive" is spearheading those inclusivity initiatives, and we have also incorporated a lot of the other words mentioned here in the language.
    • BrandoElFollito 4y ago
      écriture inclusive is basically non-existent in France, whee did you see it except on some university pages that wanted to be "ahead of their time"? It is BTW forbidden by the ministry of education. Which other words have we incorporated? Un handicapé is a disabled person. We do not have any "mobility challenged" words. Aveugle is blind, malvoyant is vision impaired (which is not the same, one being an extreme of the other). There was an attempt to use iel as il+elle (he+she). The only places you can read it is in articles that debate whether it is a good thing on not. It is completely absent elsewhere. Now - my comment was about everything except that intro line.
      • 4y ago
• low_tech_love 4y ago
  When I first read this post and commented on it, it had the same title as the underlying article. Why was it changed to something else that is not in the article at all?
• christmm 4y ago
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• divan 4y ago
  > won't make the world more just For whom? Here is a comment of one of the members of roller skating community on the renaming "mohawk" and "choctaw" terms in figure skating. https://www.reddit.com/r/Rollerskating/comments/jn7ewi/comment/gb09j2s/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/Rollerskating/comments/jn7ewi/comme... It's pretty clear this change makes world more just, but not for the majority. Which is kind a whole point.
• deleted 4y ago
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• DeathArrow 4y ago
  >When the San Francisco Board of Supervisors replaces felon with justice-involved person, it is making an ideological claim—that there is something illegitimate about laws, courts, and prisons. Wouldn't it be more appropriate, thoughtful and sensible to use the term "justice oppressed person instead"?
  • goatlover 4y ago
    I'm going to guess this wasn't done for the benefit of felons, who would probably laugh and roll there eyes, or get pissed at the thought that changing a word to a phrase helps their situation in any sort of way. In general with this sort of thing, how is a phrase preferable to a word? You're increasing the cognitive load and time to write it out.
• dandare 4y ago
  I am glad to see that toxic masculinity, male gaze, patriarchy, mansplaining, man flu and manspreading are still safe to use! /s
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  Language controls thought. Those who want to control the language want to control how people think.
• myshpa 4y ago
  The road to hell is paved with good intentions
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  If we continue like this, a child born 10 years from now won't understand a book published 10 years ago. We would need to translate "Old English" to "Woke English".
• iamnotsure 4y ago
  Not to have the last word.
• subpixel 4y ago
  On a related note, I feel certain that mandating new words (or capitalization of existing words) does not make the world more just or the lives of its inhabitants more harmonious.
• iamnotsure 4y ago
  How about recovering forgotten words.
• ranting-moth 4y ago
  People start using the "new" words as a derogatory slur. For example, to belittle people, you don't call them retarded. You call them mentally challenged. Now being "mentally challenged" has the same politically incorrectness about it as being retarded.
• fleddr 4y ago
  We should spend less time on the crazy outcomes of these institutes and more time on why they can even exist in the first place. They are somehow funded yet not accountable to anyone. Nobody asked for this, it doesn't help anyone, and it cannot survive the most basic scrutiny of the public or market. And yet it exists and even grows. Rather than playing whack-a-mole with outcomes, the underlying mechanism should be explored. My unscientific take on it is that it is not a matter of real belief, instead a matter of fear. Case in point, businesses do not really care about things like DEI, but a series of impactful lawsuits has scared them senseless. Hence they dress up the optics of DEI to stay out of trouble. Similarly, universities are under pressure to appear "on the right side of history" by aggressive student activists, fueled by the flames of BLM, MeToo, whichever other social justice outrage. Hence, they dress up an extensive administration and force it upon all staff as part of their performance review: demonstrate the 3 ways in which you contributed to the cause this year. It doesn't matter if you believe in any of it, just do it regardless. Since none is equipped to do anything actually useful (livable wages, accessible healthcare and housing, etc) the next best thing is some imagined micro aggression. A factory of bullshit and optics driven by fear.
  • docmars 4y ago
    Not to mention, the amount of violence committed by members of these outrage groups against whoever stands in their way - primarily towards the "offending" group or class they're prejudiced against, particularly whites, males, and straight sexual orientation. Worse, this violence often goes unaccounted for with impunity, without penalty, because people are terrified of the consequences of criticizing these groups, whether that's losing friends, family, or jobs that are too closely attached to these justice movements, while quite blatantly refusing to acknowledge that these movements have grifted the crap out of our world, as we find that their leaders and spokespeople are everything from: disingenuous scammers using donation money entirely for self-serving purposes that do not advance their cause, all the way to being convicted child sex traffickers (Fox: BLM, reports from 2020). But to condemn these movements for these reasons is nearly suicide in a society obsessed with staying in line with the "current thing", without scrutiny.
    • 4y ago
• pibechorro 4y ago
  Banning words, burning books, shadowbanning, etc.. history shows us where it goes and what kind of people get behind it. The path to hell is paved with good intentions.
• maxrev17 4y ago
  Lol seems like a reductio ad absurdum long game on trying to make people be nice to each other. I might use the 'wrong' word or an offensive one but I sure as hell don't mean it to be and that is easy to spot. Interestingly the people who push these crazy (lol) agendas are normally nowhere near the intended 'offendees' of the terminology.
• civilized 4y ago
  Contemporary word fixation is a distraction. People should get off the social media hamster wheel, take a walk, and dream up a more meaningful way to help their fellow man (human / hxmxn / whatever). It's blown up to the extent that we must now write essays about it, but it would have been better if we had never gone there in the first place. This stuff is very not new. George Carlin did a rant about it over 30 years ago [1]. Seems like the only real effect is class signaling; those who invest in staying "with it" signal their willingness to pay lip service to the latest ideological fads. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc
• Aidevah 4y ago
  >Traditionally, Prescriptivists tend to be political conservatives and Descriptivists tend to be liberals. But today’s most powerful influence on the norms of public English is actually a stern and exacting form of liberal Prescriptivism. I refer here to Politically Correct English (PCE), under whose conventions failing students become “high-potential” students and poor people “economically disadvantaged” and people in wheelchairs “differently abled” and a sentence like “White English and Black English are different, and you better learn White English or you’re not going to get good grades” is not blunt but “insensitive.” Although it’s common to make jokes about PCE (referring to ugly people as “aesthetically challenged” and so on), be advised that Politically Correct English’s various pre- and proscriptions are taken very seriously indeed by colleges and corporations and government agencies, whose institutional dialects now evolve under the beady scrutiny of a whole new kind of Language Police. >From one perspective, the rise of PCE evinces a kind of Lenin-to-Stalinesque irony. That is, the same ideological principles that informed the original Descriptivist revolution — namely, the rejections of traditional authority (born of Vietnam) and of traditional inequality (born of the civil rights movement) — have now actually produced a far more inflexible Prescriptivism, one largely unencumbered by tradition or complexity and backed by the threat of real-world sanctions (termination, litigation) for those who fail to conform. This is funny in a dark way, maybe, and it’s true that most criticisms of PCE seem to consist in making fun of its trendiness or vapidity. This reviewer’s own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just silly but ideologically confused and harmful to its own cause. - David Foster Wallace, Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage, 2001 https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-04-0070913.pdf https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-...
• naasking 4y ago
  > Public criticism led Stanford to abolish outright its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative—not for being ridiculous, but, the university announced, for being “broadly viewed as counter to inclusivity.” Ha, that's a great point. The language meant to broaden inclusivity actually erects barriers to inclusivity by excluding those who have never heard the words or the arguments justifying them, and the people excluded are largely marginalized groups to begin with (poor, uneducated, etc.). So basically, inclusive language is classist at the very least. I also think a lot of equity language is a barrier to communication, and that's its biggest problem. Possible offense should not be an impediment to clarity, as long as we're all being charitable. The loss of the default assumption of charity is the real problem here.
• 0dayz 4y ago
  I'm actually a bit torn on this. On the one hand it does seem to be very silly but also ironically enough excluding certain groups (religious and social outcasts). On the other I think there is a valid point in looking over how language is used and what implications it has. But to try and over correct it with new words is like trying to add another layer of paper to make the boat not leak. Since instead of saying you are a retard, now you just say: person with mental challenges. It has the same result when used as an insult, it stigmatizes people with "retardation" and it still insults the other person.
• andrewclunn 4y ago
  Look into the entomology of the word "retarded." They keep changing the word, but whatever they replace it with becomes a pejorative, because the thing it's describing is intuitively understood to be negative. Preying upon people's sense of justice to promote censorship in the name of justice is... oh what's the word...
• fourseventy 4y ago
  I refuse to rename my git master branch to 'main'.
• fundad 4y ago
  I’m dying picturing someone with the skills to work at Sierra Club and totally believes climate science but inclusive language is a dealbreaker.
• yrdmb 4y ago
  Isn't theatlantic one of the leading proponent of censorship?
• eimrine 4y ago
  In my language there are three wordforms: masculine, feminitive and middle. If you want to harass someone you can just missplace a letter in any verb about some person and he will be insulted! English is enough good by not having such a word formation, why does somebody need to insist of euphemisms?
• deleted 4y ago
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• monetus 4y ago
  Language is fluid and dictionaries aren't that old historically. I wish more people thought about this. Go with what you feel is useful and respectful. Brevity is useful, rephrasing of those words in common use will trigger people, and getting angry at someone's desire to be respectful is going to trigger someone. Don't like it, come up with your own words. Shakespeare did. when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time - is bs when used to preclude the ideas of change and compassion, or shut down communication. I'm guessing that likely wasn't its original intent, language is fluid.
• jmull 4y ago
  I hope people realize The Atlantic is baiting us to outrage. For the clicks, of course. No question, these language guides are pretty absurd (at least to someone my age) and have very doubtful moral value... but these are internal guides, for their own communications. It's the Sierra Club's job to figure that out what language their donors/members (potential or current) want to hear. I have no idea if they are getting it right here, but few of us do, because that's highly domain-specific knowledge and tricky to nail down. It's downright dishonest and sensationalistic to apply one of these guides to a book like Behind the Beautiful Forevers. What does a communications guide have to do with book authorship? The article is really just an extended straw man argument. BTW, the first sentence of the Sierra Club guide explains it's intended purpose: > One of the most visible ways the Sierra Club can demonstrate our commitment to equity, justice, and inclusion is by using respectful, thoughtful language in all of our communications. But delving into that isn't going to drive a lot of click so they went another way.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • CarbonaNotGlue 4y ago
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  • strix_varius 4y ago
    I found the article interesting and timely. A few years ago I quit a job at a large tech company after spending most of a year sanitizing text documents to use politically correct language. This isn't marginal.
• dqpb 4y ago
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• vannevar 4y ago
  While I think a lot of these efforts are over-zealous, so is the response overblown. Take one example, the term felon. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors apparently recommended using the term "justice-involved person" instead. In response, the author writes: "When the San Francisco Board of Supervisors replaces felon with justice-involved person, it is making an ideological claim—that there is something illegitimate about laws, courts, and prisons." Huh? That's a huge leap. I think it's a lot more likely that the intent was simply to separate the person's state (having been convicted of a crime) from their identity as a human being. Labels like "felon" imply an essential, unchanging quality rather than a transitory state. Lots of people convicted of felonies later go on to live exemplary lives. I agree with the idea of not painting them all with the same brush. There are probably better substitutes than "justice-involved person", granted. But saying that term illegitimizes the court system is hyperbolic.
  • strix_varius 4y ago
    Uh what? A person who has parented children is a parent. A person who has won a championship is a champion. A person who has graduated is a graduate. A person who has been convicted of a felony is a felon. The response to attempts to dismantle obvious and useful language constructs seems perfectly valid.
    • vannevar 4y ago
      By your logic, then, we are all children, because at one time we all experienced childhood. While "felon" may be useful in some cases, like describing someone who is currently serving time for a felony, it's a lot less useful as time goes on. And this goes for a lot of language that is used to describe a transitory state but ends up labeling the individual and making a separate class of them. This is why you see the shift from "the homeless" to "people experiencing homelessness." It may seem unfamiliar and cumbersome, but it's also more accurate and humane.
      • strix_varius 4y ago
        It's crazy to me that you're arguing about the definitions of common, useful, specific words, for some kind of virtue signaling I suppose? The word "child" and the word "felon" both have easy-to-find definitions: https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+child https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+child https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+felon https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+felon
• ckemere 4y ago
  My takeaway from the article was that rather than spending lots of cognitive effort/ capital on language, we should invest in improving access for the disabledn and marginalized, actually stand up for the poor, etc. For people like me that come to look at the discussion. Quick TL;DR - lots of "I agree, too much wokeness" from people that chose not to get the point. BUT also exciting conversations like "how can I start in trying to make my web material more accessible for the blind." HN community has some really great contributors.
• glonq 4y ago
  Besides the fact that equity language makes your writing "mushy", my biggest problem is that it alienates part of your audience, including potential allies. In the mid 2010's America tried to become "too woke, too fast" and the backlash inflicted trump and proud boys and a whole lot of socio-political conflict upon the country. Equity language has the same polarizing effect. There are good smart decent honest people who are immediately turned off when they get bombarded with these semantic shenanigans.
• lovemenot 4y ago
  The large majority of reasonable people seem to agree that intention is important when determining whether language use might be abuse, or not. Intention is fuzzy and unprovable. People can sometimes lie, evade and troll. Unlike intention, words are black and white, so words can be subject to restriction by motivated people. My question to the HN community is whether it would be feasible to create an effective classifier for intention? For instance if this sentence contained not "N-Word", but the signifier of that euphemism, it should pass the classifier, since my intention was benign.
• jeegsy 4y ago
  This reminds me of a scene in my favorite movie, "The Big lebowski". IIRC, the dude is complaining about a 'chinaman' peeing on his rug. Walter goes on one of his rants and ends with "By the way, Asian-American is the preferred term". It always struck me as curious that the peeing guy, that Walter is presumably advocating for wasn't even present in the scene. All this hullabaloo and most times, the affected person isn't even there. Indeed, pronouns are instructions for how people must refer to you when you are not present!
• Aleksdev 4y ago
  Of course, banning words doesn’t work. You can’t ban speech. As in you literally can’t make humans not say certain words. It’s like banning certain thinking. Just won’t work.
• jasfi 4y ago
  Words can have significant weight in some cultures, especially when used historically as hate speech. When that word disappears from the culture because of a ban it can have a very positive effect. Note that I'm specifically talking about hate speech, and not any word you don't happen to like.
• mathgladiator 4y ago
  Has anyone compiled a complete list such that people can build the inverse mapping to maximize 'offense'
• nitwit005 4y ago
  The obsession with language directly relates to the fact that it doesn't matter. They want a safe, meaningless, issue. Real problems are difficult and scary. No one wants to deal with homelessness, drug use, gang violence, or whatever else. If you're willing to engage in a little self deception, why not "solve" a pretend issue instead? Go home feeling like a hero because you told people to stop using the word blind as a metaphor. Safe, easy, fulfilling.
• mannyv 4y ago
  This doubleplusgood!
• gcatalfamo 4y ago
  Farenheit 451.
• quattrofan 4y ago
  [dead]
• dventimi 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Probably off topic
• 10g1k 4y ago
  Humans are incapable of learning from history.