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> Unless you believe that Mastodon woke lefties are representative of the broader American English zeitgeist A year ago I would have thought those people some

> Unless you believe that Mastodon woke lefties are representative of the broader American English zeitgeist A year ago I would have thought those people some weird online-only fringe. But not after travels around the USA for a couple of months last year, followed by time spent in Baja and interacting with Americans who came down there. So many young Americans are very concerned with pronouns and their proper usage, and the attitudes of early-millennium activist movements like Antifa seem to have made inroads into the wider culture. Of course, American society is polarized and there is a whole other camp. I suspect that “fascism” is increasingly a popular slur even for Americans who aren’t so terminally online, and because a word’s meaning is popularly determined by its usage, that means that it’s pointless to complain that they are “using it wrong”.

tsimionescu 3y ago
> I suspect that “fascism” is increasingly a popular slur even for Americans who aren’t so terminally online, and because a word’s meaning is popularly determined by its usage, that means that it’s pointless to complain that they are “using it wrong”. If you're right that it's becoming such, than I would agree it's simply changing its meaning, I'm not a presciptivist. However, from my experience, which is limited to online content, I've only seen accusations of fascism being used by left-wing speakers against right-wing (or perceived right-wing) adversaries. So, my theory is that the term actually retains most of its original meaning even by those throwing it around willy-nilly. It is then not a wrong use of the term nor a novel use, but in fact a sign of increasingly extreme language. That is, people who call you fascist for not caring whether you add alt text to an image aren't using fascist to mean generic bad person, they actually intend to compare your actions to Hitler. It's similar to how "socialist" is used by right-wing pundits. When they call a boss who raises employee wages "socialist", they are not using that as a generic insult, they explicitly mean to compare that boss with Stalin or Chavez or other such boogeymen. I think it's all a sign of increasingly more extreme discourse. I would actually be much happier to find out that you are in fact right and fascist is just a more generic insult now.

tsimionescu 3y ago

> I suspect that “fascism” is increasingly a popular slur even for Americans who aren’t so terminally online, and because a word’s meaning is popularly determined by its usage, that means that it’s pointless to complain that they are “using it wrong”. If you're right that it's becoming such, than I would agree it's simply changing its meaning, I'm not a presciptivist. However, from my experience, which is limited to online content, I've only seen accusations of fascism being used by left-wing speakers against right-wing (or perceived right-wing) adversaries. So, my theory is that the term actually retains most of its original meaning even by those throwing it around willy-nilly. It is then not a wrong use of the term nor a novel use, but in fact a sign of increasingly extreme language. That is, people who call you fascist for not caring whether you add alt text to an image aren't using fascist to mean generic bad person, they actually intend to compare your actions to Hitler. It's similar to how "socialist" is used by right-wing pundits. When they call a boss who raises employee wages "socialist", they are not using that as a generic insult, they explicitly mean to compare that boss with Stalin or Chavez or other such boogeymen. I think it's all a sign of increasingly more extreme discourse. I would actually be much happier to find out that you are in fact right and fascist is just a more generic insult now.