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Euphemisms are best changed frequently (2016)
- michaelt 2y ago> What the cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker has artfully termed ‘the euphemism treadmill’ is not a tic or a stunt. It is an inevitable and, more to the point, healthy process [...] > The crucial thing is to be able to step back from our instinctive reactions to the way such words sound to us now [...] and to realize they’re steps on an escalator, moving slowly but inexorably Is this an ironic attempt to demonstrate notion of the euphemism treadmill, by renaming it to an escalator? Because escalators and treadmills are kinda the opposite of one another. With an escalator you do nothing, and get to where you want to be. With a treadmill, you expend lots of energy and get nowhere - and if you don't expend the energy, you get flung off the back.
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- cvoss 2y agoIt depends on which way you're going on the escalator! Since we started with treadmills, and then switched to escalators, I just assumed the author had in mind a person walking up the down escalator.
- o11c 2y agoThis misses the main point of the euphemism treadmill - to teach every new generation how horrible the previous generation is for daring to use words that were standard when they grew up, and surely everything will magically become better once they all die off.
- hprotagonist 2y agothere’s a semi famous tumblr post on this, involving words for mentally disabled students in high schools. i can’t find it offhand though, but the idea’s the same.
- adolph 2y ago@dang [2016] I wonder what the author would think of the fresh cycle of euphemism derived from platform algorithms, like "unalive." You cant unalive an idea . . . . . . but you can euphemize it Many social media websites do not allow discussions about violence, or self-harm. Some have automated bots scanning for words like, "murder", "suicide", "gun", etc. Because it can be very difficult to avoid mentioning those topics in conversations about things like history, social media influencers started using alternate words and phrases, like "unalive" for murder or suicide, and "pew pews" for guns (imitating the sound children tend to make when they're pretending to shoot guns). [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/18vdpyg/whats_going_on_with_using_the_term_unalive/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/18vdpyg/whats...
- aftbit 2y agoI've seen this on YouTube, especially around the Ukrainian conflict. Many creators are saying things like "became KIA" instead of "were killed" or even more euphemistically "loud noises were heard at XYZ location" instead of "XYZ was bombed". Perhaps related in the sense of being self censorship of restricted topics, although not liguistic, is the recent trend of firearm-related YouTube channels showing disassembly but not assembly. Of course assembly is mostly just disassembly in reverse, but one is permitted by platform terms and the other is not.
- wavemode 2y agoYep, internet censorship drives the creation of a whole lot of modern euphemistic slang like unalive, grape, pdf file... You take them as just being workarounds for having discussions online - but then you start hearing people say them in real life and realize they've actually entered the general lexicon.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoAnd I don't get it. If the intent is "we do not want people to talk about death", then surely the filters / censors would cover all different spellings and euphemisms of it as well? I'm 99% sure the organizations that do this - tiktok, roblox, etc - are well aware of the users' attempts of euphemizing around the filters, so they are OK with it. That, or it's from higher up but the legal whatsits can't keep up.
- rafram 2y agoOriginal, longer article: https://aeon.co/essays/euphemisms-are-like-underwear-best-changed-frequently https://aeon.co/essays/euphemisms-are-like-underwear-best-ch...
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- im3w1l 2y agoThere is a saying "Some people have 10 years of experience. Others have 1 year of experience 10 times." The euphemism treadmill can be a tool to accomplish that.
- pimlottc 2y agoOn a related note: semantic bleaching https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/21/how-did-rawdogging-become-part-of-polite-conversation https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/2...
- intalentive 2y agoYou can tell we made a lot of progress because we started with "colored people" and ended up at "people of color".
- kurthr 2y agoUmmm... that's PoC to you, and conveniently it now covers all of "the others". Frankly, I think these are developed by HR so that they can more easily write inoffensive copy without considering their bias or the audience. Most people I've worked with know whether they're black, indigenous, european immigrant, ESL, partially blind, suffering from PTSD, paraplegic, etc. The problem is that those things are just too specific to quickly gloss over in an anonymous uninformative screed. Easier to have a catchall phrase to abstract and dehumanize the issues.
- nomel 2y ago> write inoffensive copy without considering their bias or the audience. I think it could be simplified to: the euphemism treadmill is driven by fear of how those, other than the persons involved, will react to its use. "Latinx" is a great recent example [1]. https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/us/latinx-gallup-poll-preference-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/us/latinx-gallup-poll-prefere...
- cortesoft 2y agoNope, it is BIPOC
- EnigmaFlare 2y agobecause they need to exclude Asians and Indians who don't fit the disadvantaged criterion - which is why they're being identified in the first place.
- renewiltord 2y agoWait, Indians and Asians are not in BIPOC?! I thought it was a union of the adjectives, not an intersection. Like LGBT you know, you don’t have to be all of them to be LGBT. TIL Uh oh. I’ve been using it wrong for a while, whoops.
- Terr_ 2y agoThere's also the rare situation where guarded euphemisms abruptly vanish off the end of the treadmill without a successor taking over. This lengthy 2018 video on the phenomenon [0] discusses two examples, where: > When "Illegal Immigration" comes up [...] one of the candidates says he wants to tighter the border because "Mexico is sending us rapists and thieves." I'm sorry, what? What just happened!? [...] > Now they're talking about "The War on Terror" [... ] but then that same candidate pipes up that, if elected, for the sake of security, he wants to create a "Muslim registry" and--what the hell is going on? [...] > The guy seemingly tanking his candidacy by appealing to extremists is the one who finally secures the nomination. You realize with some shock that in each of these cases you are witnessing the death of a euphemism. The death of a euphemism is a rare celestial event. Politicians only let a euphemism die when they don't need it anymore. This does not imply good things for Mexicans or Muslims. ________________ [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dBJIkp7qIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dBJIkp7qIg - "The Alt-Right Playbook: The Death of a Euphemism"
- EnigmaFlare 2y agoIsn't that just normal not-using-the-euphemism for exactly the reason somebody wouldn't - to not try to hide the offensive idea behind it? Same way if you wanted to insult a handicap, you could call them a cripple.
- guerrilla 2y agoThe point is that that is only possible in an environment where such hate has become possible where it previously wasn't. Regardless of your opinion on euphemisms, that is not a good thing.
- EnigmaFlare 2y agoIt's not a good thing to not want rapists, thieves and terrorists entering your country? Pretty much every country has immigration restrictions that aim to stop those kinds of people and catch a lot of innocents with their broad classifications. The US has a visa-waiver program to enable easy access to people from western or developed countries. No doubt it's because those people are lower risk. It's not hate to trust Singaporeans more than Russians.
- bullfightonmars 2y agoGeorge Carlin has a great bit on euphemism where he makes the case that euphemisms are used to soften the meaning of things that are painful to the point of being meaningless, e.g. shellshock -> ptsd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc The author of this article pointed our some similar examples: welfare -> cash assistance -> TANF.
- Dylan16807 2y agoPost-traumatic stress disorder is a much more accurate term. You can get it with no shells, after all. And "trauma" is not a very soft word. Is the problem just shortening it because it takes too long to say?
- YurgenJurgensen 2y agoInitialisms in common speech are the linguistic equivalent of a code smell; people are right to react negatively towards them (and the appropriate degree of negative reaction increases with the length of the initialism in question).
- lazyasciiart 2y agoNo they aren't. RSVP, DIY, PhD, ASAP, BYO, TMI... there's no reason to dislike them any more than there's a reason to dislike adjectives.
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- lumenwrites 2y agoAn extremely interesting and in-depth post about the subject: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-...
- exclipy 2y agoAnother article on the topic: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/11/07/362273449/why-we-have-so-many-terms-for-people-of-color https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/11/07/362273449... When it was written, "African-American" was the politically correct term but now it seems it has regressed to "Black"
- swayvil 2y agoIs "person of color" still a thing? It always struck me as too close to "local color". It's just clumsy writing.
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- zjp 2y agoIt can be useful to cycle through words for concepts that are stigmatized, if only so you can use the new shibboleth that means "I have no ill will or prejudice against the concept", but it's still annoying to see no progress be made on destigmatizing the underlying concepts. That's where my ire lies. Not with the new euphemism per se but the admission of defeat.
- YurgenJurgensen 2y agoWell, what the new shibboleth actually means is “I have expended more effort keeping up with the current vocabulary than other people. And those people are bad for not having spent that effort.” The intent is not destigmatisation but counter-stigmatisation.
- smogcutter 2y agoIf you frame changing vocabulary as a shibboleth that point of view is inevitable, but that doesn’t make it accurate. This is a view of other people on the same spectrum as accusing them of “virtue signaling”, and is equally worth ignoring.
- saghm 2y agoNot only are accusations of "virtue signaling" generally a sign of a conversation not being worth my time, I'll even go a step further; I think there's a genuinely useful phenomenon where some takes are so common from people I consider to be trying to discuss in bad faith that someone not even being willing to pretend not to have them is a legitimately useful way for me to filter out conversations that wouldn't end up having any value for either side, and this honestly does seem to fit the meaning of "virtue signalling". If I'm tacitly asking for "virtue-signalling" by not being willing to discuss politics with, say, relatives who have binged too much Fox News over the past decade, then so be it.
- girvo 2y agoI know its a bit of a tangent, but its wryly humorous to me that someone referring to something else as "virtue signalling" is, in itself, a way of signalling some specific "virtue" (an incredibly negative and gross one) wrt. the way they think about the world. Its quite useful, means I can safely ignore any opinion they have on the topic at hand.
- alpinisme 2y agoThis seems to miss one of the key roles euphemism plays (and why it courts controversy) it is interventionist and draws attention to a pattern of thought in order to get you to think differently about it. Part of the role a phrase like “differently abled” plays is to estrange your base assumptions about disability and to signal the existence of and your membership in a group of people concerned to change the conditions around disability (note that this is not the same as signaling “virtue” although it may do that as well—what I’m talking about is the construction and renewal of group identity around a social project). Accordingly, you need new words whenever the old ones become standard, since at that point they no longer serve the estranging/interventionist role.
- lynx23 2y agoWhat you describe is pretty much straight virtue-signaling. And as a disabled person, I can tell you, I need nothing of it. Especially this "your membership in a group of people concerned to change" part, which is virtue-signalling at its best. I have NEVER met someone using alternative language like "differently abled" who actually did something substiantial for the community or for a particular person. Almost all cases have a touch of patronisation. I need nothing of it. If you cant call me disabled, you are part of the problem, not the solution.
- smegsicle 2y ago[flagged]
- lynx23 2y agoSuffering... I could tell you something about suffering, but I leave it at that. Lets suffice that I find it pretty funny that you, a non-disabled person, tries to tell me that the way I prefer being called is "old-fashioned" and "bigoted", therefore invalidating my own preference. I let this stand as it is. Readers can decide who is bigoted here. Besides, its nothing new that non-disabled people tell the disabled how things are supposed to work. Thats called patronisation. And you are a great example of people I really dont want to be around.
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- roenxi 2y ago> It is an inevitable and, more to the point, healthy process, necessary in view of the eternal gulf between language and opinion. I don't know if this is a "healthy" process. Inevitable it may well be. But it doesn't change attitudes, it doesn't help the people involved and one issue I don't see talked about is that the quality of the language itself seems to drop through this process. "Crippled" has a certain pithiness and is a distinct word. "Differently abled" has many more syllables and verbal overlap with words like "different" and "able". We're shrinking the ability to describe things in a process that might literally be Orwellian.
- hungie 2y agoNot every attempt is a good attempt. I'm disabled, not differently abled. But I'm also not crippled nor retarded. If, a decade from now, someone comes up with a better term I might be whatever that is. But I still am glad we've moved on past early 20th century labels and are trying new ones on. Some might not fit nicely, but they are progress generally.
- fwip 2y agoI think the author misstepped by using "different abled" as their leading example - I don't think it really has any support in the disabled community.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoThis article is from a while ago. I do recall differently abled being proposed at some point though it has not caught on.
- hungie 2y agoIt's commonly used by parents towards their children. It's considered quite infantilizing among many disabled communities.
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- hungie 2y agoThe author here uses "differently abled". As a member of the disabled community, I've never met a disabled person who uses "differently abled". But also, don't call us crippled. (Some people with disabilities do reclaim that term.) Likewise, I call myself queer, but don't call me queer unless you are also queer. Language like this fascinates me, because not only does it evolve, there is insider and outsider use. The cishet community can use lgbtq+, and that describes the same group of people as queer, but it means something quite radically different. Queer is steeped in radical implication in a way lgbtq+ is not. Nothing in my post is meant to judge you, reader, more to say, "wow! Language is fucking wild!" I'm excited to see where it goes over the remainder of my life.
- togib 2y agoAnd please don't call me cishet, unless you are cishet yourself. I really don't like being called cishet.
- hungie 2y agoSure, what language do you prefer to indicate non trans, heterosexual when I refer to you?
- mjh2539 2y ago[flagged]
- avaldez_ 2y agoNot the commenter you're answering to, but... what's wrong with the words you did just use?
- StevenWaterman 2y agoNon-trans is quite "othering". It implies that being trans is the default In the same way that we say queer instead of "non-straight"
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- m463 2y agoUnfortunately tech has done this too. surveillance and dossier building - advertising behavioral data gathering - telemetry I'm sure there are more for recurring charges, dark patterns, predatory pricing and all the cleaned-up names associated with enshittification.
- dang 2y agoWe changed the URL from https://languagehat.com/mcwhorter-on-the-euphemism-treadmill/ https://languagehat.com/mcwhorter-on-the-euphemism-treadmill... to the article it points to, but interested readers may want to look at both.
- wizardforhire 2y agoMy favorite: Writing is a euphemism for thinking.
- shadowgovt 2y agoAll I know is 'main' is fewer characters to type, so I'm glad we changed that one.
- burnished 2y agoAgreed, people get bizarrely up in arms over how git's 'master' doesn't have a matching 'slave' but also set max line width to 80 characters. I don't know if you ran into this one but I was convinced to use 'allow list' and 'block list' over white/black list purely on the basis that its just a bit more descriptive. I sort of wish we could clean language up like this more regularly, just imagine a world where we didn't maintain the notion of an electrical current that flowed opposite to the flow of electrons. So tidy.
- Ekaros 2y agoMaybe we should replace positive and negative when talking about electricity. After all later certainly carries negative connotations... I suggest protonic and electronic with sähkö going from electronic terminal to protonic one. Sähkö is nice and easy to write and much simpler word than electricity...
- burnished 2y agoI think your suggestion has much merit, though I think the positive/negative thing may have value due to coincidentally lining up with the math used to describe the forces that act on those particles. Though 'protonic terminal is positive, electronic is negative' isn't any more difficult or arbitrary.
- shadowgovt 2y agoI used to have this memorized and I've lost the details... So Benjamin Franklin established the standard for charges being positive and negative (based on a theory he was operating under that electricity was a fluid that flowed from place to place, and too much fluid was a positive charge and too little was a negative charge). He declared that glass rubbed by cloth was positive and the charge from rubbing fur or rubber was negative, and we were off to the races. (Worth noting: something I picked up while trying to reboot my memory on this is that from an electrical engineering standpoint, it's actually not super-useful to think about current as "flowing electrons" unless you're dealing very specifically with a situation where electrons are jumping through air or a vacuum and it matters. In a battery, the flow is ions; in a hydrogen fuel cell, the flow is protons; in wires, sure, the flow is electrons, but the fact that what's really moving around and causes phenomena is charge concentration matters and, conveniently, conceptually covers all these cases, and as long as your concept of charge concentration is consistent it doesn't matter if you're considering the concentration to equalize by flowing from positive to negative or negative to positive, there's a symmetry to charge density minimization.)
- noduerme 2y agoWhat's remarkable about the treadmill isn't that it exists or that ultimately words become slurs over time. That's predictable. What's remarkable is the rapidity with which language changes are superimposed in top-down societies. To the degree that one could probably measure the authoritarianism or top-down nature of a society based on how quickly verboten words are removed from its published vernacular.
- vintermann 2y agoOne thing I like to point out, is that some fairly recent, openly racist societies were completely on board with language policing. You did NOT say the K word in apartheid SA. They had hate speech laws, and they prosecuted people over them too!
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- ggm 2y agoIsn't this the China Winnie-The-Poo experience? The euphemistic label for "leader I don't like" has to cycle at a frequency somewhat higher than the rate of word-bans but somewhat lower than the minimum acquisition time for ordinary people.
- lynx23 2y agoWell, being deliberate with words is definitely a great attribute. However, I came here to say that, as a blind person, I cringe whenever someone calls me "visually challenged" or in any other way tries to crawl around the seemingly bad word and does all sorts of linguistic hoops to avoid calling me what I am. This tendency is totally counterproductive, since it creates yet another barrier between the disabled and "normal" people. I am blind. If you dont like that, stay away. But it is even more hurtful if I can feel your uncomfortableness through the language.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoOne of the big issues, I think, is that people outside of the group decide what people inside the group should be called; I believe that's called virtue signaling. But since it's people outside of the group making up the words, they are effectively excluding the people involved. Speaking over them, if you will.
- lynx23 2y agoThat. My partner (blind) recently met a teacher on a train ride. After a bit of awkward conversation, she told my partner that she is currently trying to find a new word for disabled, together with her class. When my partner answered that she thinks there is no need for that, the teacher totally ignored her opinion and continued to press on. This pretty much confirms your post. Mind you, no disabled people involved. Just a teacher that decided she needs to play language police. Thats systemic patronisation. And the worst thing is, she wouldn't listen to the opinion of a disabled person. She just stubbornly continued on her path of patronisation.
- nitwit005 2y agoThe assessment that the process is "healthy" is dubious. Frequently we rename things to something fundamentally dishonest. The Department of War sounds so mean. It's the Department of Defense now.
- philwelch 2y agoThe Department of War was not renamed the “Department of Defense”. Up to and during the Second World War, the Department of War and Department of the Navy were both cabinet level departments, with the DoW having control of the Army and the DoN having control of the Navy. The National Security Act of 1947 reorganized the US military by splitting the Department of War into the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force and making those two departments, as well as the Department of the Navy, subordinate to an overall Department of Defense. (This was also when the Air Force became a separate branch from the Army.)
- nitwit005 2y agoYou're forgetting it was initially the National Military Establishment, which was later renamed to the Department of Defense, because they liked that name better.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoWords shape meaning though. "Defense" changes how people (including those on the inside) think about the job.
- nitwit005 2y agoThis article is discussing the treadmill. People just got used to the new term.
- croes 2y agoSo we create euphemism that doesn't create the automatic emotional and cognitive response the original word evokes until we are used to the euphemism and it creates the same automatic emotional and cognitive response as before. Like the whole "unalived" instead of "killed" thing.
- mogueone 2y agoThis reminds me of an incident that happened recently on a visit to Grandma and Grandad's house. I was talking to my elderly Dad about an issue he was having at his club. To summarise his point he used an almightly slur, which knocked me backwards, especially as my two young boys were sat nearby. I didn't react as I didn't want to draw attention to it. Anyone who has young kids will know how they love to pick up new words they shoudn't use. Fortunately it went right over their heads, but, for me, this is exactly why we should move language forward.
- dgb23 2y agoEuphemisms are often used to disguise classist arrogance with clean language.
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- boredhedgehog 2y agoI think there are two different processes at work that create euphemisms, which should be more clearly distinguished. One is indeed a natural feature of language development, in which a word slowly acquires more metaphorical connotations. The other process is strictly political, in which somebody in a position of power demands a thing to be renamed. The processes can be distinguished both by their speed and their effect on the mind of the speaker. The natural process is slow, to be measured in decades and centuries, and creates no intellectual conflict. The old and new word exist simultaneously for a period, until the old word is slowly forgotten and loses its meaning. The political process is rapid, to be measured in years, and creates anxiety within the speaker. He wants to use a certain word; he knows exactly what the word means, and he knows his listeners know as well. He chooses the new word merely because he fears negative consequences if he doesn't. I think all the examples from the article can be neatly categorized along these lines.
- smallnix 2y agoI understand the categorization but what applications do you propose?
- RecycledEle 2y agoIf the term that accurately describes my group is now an insult, I need to reconsider how my group affects society.
- burnished 2y agoThis must be why some of my friends have started to pathologize neurotypical behaviors, so the healing can begin.
- amiga386 2y agoThis discussion of societal euphemism would not be complete without a reference to George Orwell's Politics and the English Language https://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/ https://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/ > In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. This is why I dislike the euphemism treadmill (although it's impolite to start a dysphemism treadmill!) - to use them at all is to shy away from truth, because the truth is often brutal. What kind of society would we have if we were open and honest with each other?
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- ralferoo 2y agoIt's interesting as I agree with the points the article makes, but come to the opposite conclusion. Euphemisms don't need to be changed, because it's not the words themselves that are a problem, it's the thoughts and stereotypes that people have about others that are the issue. Wholesale renaming of something from A to B, doesn't very little to change perceptions of the root issue. It just stigmatises people who haven't got the latest linguistic memo. I remember about 30 years ago, there was a fad of renaming disability to dysability and anyone who dared use the old term was considered to being completely insensitive to their needs, regardless of actions. Interestingly, that seems to all but vanished in the years since and there seems to be little trace of it left on the internet. I think the real problem with euphemisms displacing the original words, is generally they're vaguer. One example is "person of colour" should literally mean everybody, but it's just used as a drop-in replacements for the words before it that are now considered offensive. Substituting one phrase for another does nothing to adjust people's prejudices or intentions when using a word. So, the real issue is how we change societal attitudes towards other (people generally don't seem to consider any of these older terms offensive if the speaker is in the same group) in the subset of people who use these words pejoratively, rather than just creating linguistic minefields for everyone else to traverse.
- Joker_vD 2y agoThe thing is, nobody wants to be crippled (sorry, disabled): as the saying goes, it's better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick, you know. Similarly, nobody wants to be stupid. Or unable to navigate social interactions in the current socially acceptable way. While one can adopt to being any of those things, it's additional (sometime herculean) effort which only brings you back to the baseline. And things people don't like to be, they don't like to be called/implied that they are either: so e.g. every time there is a new euphemism for stupidity or mental disability, it inevitably, as it becomes wider known, starts being used as an insult. Which is the root problem IMHO: people often insult each others, fully intentionally. Remove that human trait, and the need for euphemisms will evaporate. But that'll never happen, of course.
- amiga386 2y ago
- PaulHoule 2y agoIn my backyard there is this ugly situation https://www.ithaca.com/news/tompkins_county/bipoc-community-garden-owner-files-lawsuit-against-neighbor-for-alleged-discrimination/article_833f21c6-5a6e-11ef-8593-cfbb5611655c.html https://www.ithaca.com/news/tompkins_county/bipoc-community-... where some people have opened a BiPOC garden and faced persistent harassment from a neighbor. As somebody who goes to museum ships and stuff like that I like the idea of a garden that interprets the impact of colonialism (people in Canada have to fight "Canada Thistle" that was brought by settlers) and features plants that were important to indigenous people here and to black people when they lived here and when they were in Africa and that are important to people in the global south now. I even like the story about the person that its named after: https://www.rootworkherbals.com/bipoc-community-garden https://www.rootworkherbals.com/bipoc-community-garden So far so good, I'd like to see it, am I welcome? As a space committed to healing from legacies of colonial violence on land and the liberation of all people, we believe the garden must center the needs of the most marginalized among us in overarching white supremacist, capitalist systems. We center and celebrate our Queer, Trans, Disabled Chronically Ill, Mentally Ill, Femme, Poor, Immigrant, Refugee, Fat and Darkskin community. So if I showed up the first thing I'd try is "Fat" because even though I wear it well my BMI is a bit in the "obese" range. I suspect I'd be told I'm not fat enough so then I would go the "chronically ill" category because I have a few of those starting with the easy ones like hypertension and working towards the embarassing ones like an enlarged prostate and problems related to that which I hope would be good enough. Then I would try "Mentally Ill" because my schizotypy has sure screwed up my life at times. Is "gay" or "lesbian" good enough or do you have to be "queer?" What exactly do they mean by "Femme" (e.g. presenting the image of a women?) What about immigrants and refugees who come from places with conservative values? I get the inclusion of "ill" because of their emphasis on herbalism and healing, but according to the government about 73% of people are fat and about 52% have a chronic condition https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti... https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2020/20_0130.htm https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2020/20_0130.htm When a list like that gets longer and more complicated it becomes less meaningful and it's a problem for movements like that which are going to discover that skinny Queer people don't give a damn for straight fat people, no refugees show up and nobody in the group has a good idea of the challenges they face in the community, etc. They'll show up and hold a banner a few times but when the barricades go up they'll scatter, I wouldn't even count them to show up and vote because they think the Democrats are fascists because they support Israel or they funded a police department or something.
- lo_zamoyski 2y agoEuphemism is often a way to conceal and obscure truths, but also to lie. They aren't neutral. "Differently abled" asserts something that isn't true. If I have lost my legs, I am not differently abled, I am not now a fish who can swim, I lack the use of my legs which are manner in which human beings move around by nature. We see the same thing in autism circles, where autism is described not as a disorder or deficit, but as "neurodivergence", as if autism were something like hair color or even a special ability to take pride in. This isn't good for society. I understand that words can accumulate baggage, but that alone doesn't explain euphemism or excuse its use.
- pessimizer 2y agoThis is a typical article from the school of thought that ignores power relationships in order to intentionally equivocate between decisions people have made as individuals, and decisions power structures have enforced from above. If I'm not mistaken, the earliest form of this dilemma comes from the place where most contemporary cultural controversies spring, from the black civil rights struggle in the US[0]. 1. The people formally known as "Negroes" or "Colored," in the mid-1960s at the culmination of a struggle that ended in legal equality, as a group mostly decided they wanted to be called "black" as a way to put them on the same level as "whites." This was the first "politically-correct" thing that I can recall, if you define that as words that have to be said, regardless of the attitude behind them. "Negro" would from then on be seen as hostile, although black people and the most aggressive antislavery and anti Jim Crow whites would have exclusively used "Negro" just a few years before. If you were always a moral paragon when it comes to black issues and just had been out of the loop for a few years, when you returned to the conversation you ran the risk of being yelled at for an innocuous, or even kind and insightful statement that contained the word "Negro." 2. But to illustrate imposition from above, the next change was from "black" to "African-American." This was a term engineered by a small group of "pan-African" activists that managed to find purchase within the Democratic "Rainbow/PUSH Coalition" led by Jessie Jackson in his bid for the Democratic Nomination in 1984. The concept of the Rainbow Coalition (as a campaign) was to transfer Jackson's success as a black civil rights activist to a concept of the nation as a federation of minority rights activist groups, with Jackson becoming the head coordinator of all of these groups as POTUS. Jackson had made his living as a negotiator between businesses/institutions and the black public during controversies, either after communication had broken down or even preemptively. His basically decent politics, and his authority from having stood next to MLK, and from saying positive things that rhymed in a preacher's voice, would calm the public down, and he would tutor the companies on the magic words to say to make black people feel better while making trivial concessions. "African-American" (as influenced by the pan-Africans) was the magic word that came out of the Rainbow Coalition (later, in 1989), and it was simply proclaimed to be the new respectful word for black people. White people adopted it immediately. The New Democrats, who had famously introduced themselves to the world by destroying the Rainbow Coalition, grabbed onto the word as a means to feign affinity with the concerns of the campaign they'd just destroyed. This was entirely a top-down mandate. It is still a top-down mandate. Although it is an absolute requirement to use in professional in institutional circles, to the extent that in the 90s and early 00s people in the UK were accidentally calling black British people "African-Americans" and people were referring to Africans themselves as "African-Americans." You can say "black" if you're a white person, but it can give off an air of being overly familiar, smarmy and faux-chummy (like "folks" along with it.) Black Americans currently do not prefer African-American.[1][2] In 1991, when the term had nearly already been made standard, "black" was preferred to "African-American" 72% to 15%.[3] I've been black all my life (never even met a white person who wasn't a teacher until I was 13) and I've rarely met a black person who referred to themselves as African-American. Yet, when institutional media talked about the term "black" in 2012, they discussed the fact that black people seem to prefer it as if they were talking about people who were riding penny-farthings and wearing pocketwatches. > The labels used to describe Americans of African descent mark the movement of a people from the slave house to the White House. Today, many are resisting this progression by holding on to a name from the past: "black." [4] Attacks on language are generally authoritarian impositions, coming from government and other powerful institutions. Attacks on language about minorities also seem to be, like so many other things, everybody in the world seeing themselves in the black civil rights struggle and thus relegating the black civil rights struggle to a metaphor for the real struggle - which is their own, against whatever annoys them personally at the time. ----- [0] The world follows the US, and the US is obsessed with its slaves and their descendants, it's just a historical accident. [1] https://news.gallup.com/vault/315566/gallup-vault-black-americans-preferred-racial-label.aspx https://news.gallup.com/vault/315566/gallup-vault-black-amer... [2] https://atlantablackstar.com/2021/08/11/new-poll-shows-black-people-prefer-to-be-called-simply-black-over-african-american-hispanics-arent-keen-to-newly-formed-label-latinx/ https://atlantablackstar.com/2021/08/11/new-poll-shows-black... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/29/us/poll-says-most-blacks-prefer-black-to-african-american.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/29/us/poll-says-most-blacks-... [4] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna46264191 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna46264191
- SAI_Peregrinus 2y agoAnother big use of euphemisms is as "dog whistles" to insult people without being explicit about the insult. These uses also naturally change as people not intended to understand the slur begin to recognize it for what it is. "Those people", the "bad ones", derogatory use of "special", etc.
- vishkk 2y agoNot entirely related to the article, George Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By is quite interesting. How, over the years, the words we use have become associated with the context in the past, or borrowed from other contexts, literally or figuratively. For example, IIRC, the book mentioned that all, or most of the words we use with time are related to money -- we spend, waste, lose, invest. Words related to arguments come from war/battle language -- defend, attack, counterattack. I wonder if euphemisms have some metaphorical overloading that changes over the time, or so.
- romanobro56 2y agoWhy would anyone speak the phrase ‘cash assistance for the differently abled’? Welfare for the disabled works just fine.