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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 c
by 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 agoThis 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 agoI 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 agoIn ten years, the shoes become economically disadvantaged too
- schroeding 4y agoIn German the word for poor ("arm"), while there is some connection to pity like in English (one can be "arm dran", "poorly off"), can't be used to describe bad / undesirable quality. It was still replaced with "sozial schwach" (literally "socially weak", but actually means financially weak, people who don't have much money) in many contexts, especially by politicians and journalists. (Thankfully, there is a push against "sozial schwach", to use "arm" again - it's a horrible phrase)
- usrbinbash 4y agoSo what? Natural language is complicated, because a) It does something very complicated, and b) it is the result of a complex process. Yes, many words have more than one meaning. That's one of the many reasons why we need formal, context-free, specialized languages to communicate our will to machines effectively. But humans are not machines. We can do context, and we can use words that mean more than one thing. We can also deal with misunderstandings much better than an automaton. And this newspeak even fails at the goal of providing an unambiguous: Unless context is provided, a person who makes 6 figures a year is "financially disadvantaged" when compared to a billionaire. But noone would mistake someone earning 6 figures with someone who is poor.
- ThunderSizzle 4y agoAre you seriously asserting when people say "poor people", they do so in a non-poverty manner and use it instead to describe people as inferior? Also, people in poverty should be deserving of sympathy and charity. Is that now suddenly offensive that people should want to help others that are less fortunate than themselves? If you are in a position where you need help, part of your responsibility is to humble yourself and let people help you (while not eradicating you're personal responsibility either). Someday you may be the one to give charity, and it's also just as insulting and disheartening when your charity is rejected out of pride.