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Euphemism treadmill also has a dark class-side. It takes effort to learn about the new terms, and choose the right one for your audience. It's entirely possible

Euphemism treadmill also has a dark class-side. It takes effort to learn about the new terms, and choose the right one for your audience. It's entirely possible to offend people by other people's preferred term. At the very least you'll come off as less conscious, less sensitive.

galdosdi 2y ago
Very well put. Ageism too. It's a way for the young to feel superior to the old without having to actually accomplish anything. Too lazy to study the past? Just say it all sucks anyway and even learning about it would morally sully you! Too dull to engage in complex arguments? Just slander your interlocutor based on their "outdated" language. For some, it's an intellectual version of bullying the poorer and older and less well connected for having unfashionable clothes. Paul Graham wrote in 2004 on this better than I could. "What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed." And he gave really good practical advice: "Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot." https://paulgraham.com/say.html https://paulgraham.com/say.html
- chrisweekly 2y ago
  "Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot." Keeper
  - HKH2 2y ago
    "Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself."
    - chrisweekly 2y ago
      Proverbs 26:4, according to Kagi
- Levitz 2y ago
  The worst part of this is, say you have no intent to make rehabilitating the color yellow your life goal, but you see it as the morally right thing to do. Not doing so is thus morally evil.
  - jajko 2y ago
    Hard disagree. I love dogs and animals overall. The fact that I don't spend my whole life managing dog shelters which we can all agree is a morally right thing to do doesn't make me nor anybody else automatically evil. Maybe in that saved time I am a neurosurgeon or fireman. World is not binary, people even less so.
  - 542354234235 2y ago
    Not doing so is morally not the best thing. To say it is "morally evil" is to say that morality is some binary. "Evil" isn't a term I would throw around so easily.
mlyle 2y ago
At the same time, perjoration is real-- names associated with disadvantaged groups take on a derogatory meaning. While it's maybe not your fault that "retard" has moved from a neutral, medical term to an insult, it's not great to call people "retarded" in any context. A certain amount of this is just necessary to treat other humans beings humanely.
- Grustaf 2y ago
  That's the point isn't it, that it doesn't really help to invent new words, the new word will become a slur if it refers to something people don't want to be. I mean "retard" is of course itself a euphemism.
  - mlyle 2y ago
    The new word that you're using may become a slur in 10-15 years, and you may have to change again. But I'd hardly say it doesn't help: it means that today, you've not made someone wonder if you're insulting them on purpose. We already constantly have to change so that our language doesn't sound dated. It's doubly important if it also avoids insult. I have to wonder a bit about people who really don't want to stop using terms that have become insulting, but otherwise freely pick up new usages of words in other contexts. It seems to me like they just want to be insulting.
    - Grustaf 2y ago
      The opposition is obviously not to "new words" per se, it's to words that were invented for political reasons, rather than ones that organically appeared. It doesn't help that they are almost always less descriptive, less exact, or sometimes simply incorrect. Like "differently abled", it actually means "less able".
      - mlyle 2y ago
        But a word other than "retarded" may not organically appear; indeed, it's going to wait for someone to say "wait, the word we're using has become insulting-- time to deliberately do something else." Do you characterize this as "for political reasons?"
Grustaf 2y ago
I would say this is at least partly the purpose. It is sometimes very hard to avoid the conclusion that activists came up with some of these terms in order to mark themselves out as more virtuous, not that the group in question were bothered by it and begged people to stop calling them something. Like LatinX, that definitely seems like a top-down word, that still hasn't caught on among actual Latinos.
- SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
  I'm not convinced that LatinX wasn't created as a plausibly-deniable slur against Latinos & Latinas. It insultingly ignores their linguistic heritage, in a way that anyone with even a basic understanding of Romance languages wouldn't do except to indicate a negative judgement of that heritage. It practically shouts "your language & heritage is inferior". Latine would be grammatically incorrect but at least follow the existing linguistic patterns and thus show some respect for the heritage!
  - galdosdi 2y ago
    Correct. Thank you. This is exactly how I and most other Spanish-speaking hispanics I've talked to about it take it. It's usually someone who doesn't know Spanish using it, and the implication is that something is wrong with our language and anglos need to fix it for us (and that we're so backwards that even anglos who don't know our language are more qualified to fix it for us than we ourselves our, in our poor foolish backwardness) Anyone who knew Spanish well would know that grammatical gender is vestigial and often meaningless. Why are rocks female but boats male? Why are cars male and trucks female? It's nothing to do with semantics anymore than there is an extant meaning to why in English i comes before e except after c other when said like a as in neighbor and weigh, etc. But of course, the advocates for this nonsense don't know Spanish. When I do hear someone of latin heritage embrace latinx, invariably I find the are monolingual English-speakers who were not taught Spanish by their ancestors. It's reminiscent of the "machismo" slur-- anglos using "macho" as a stereotype of toxic masculinity, even though the worst toxic masculinity I've seen is by far has been in the US, not Latin America. It's all just a way to update anti-hispanic sentiment to account for modern progressive attitudes. Of course, that sort of thing went on 100 years ago too. The progressive-for-the-day attitudes were used to bludgeon Irish and Italian and other immigrants too then, you know. If you want to "fix" my language I invite you to do so-- right after you finish learning it well enough to converse at even just a very basic 5th grade level. Until then, mind your business.

galdosdi 2y ago

Very well put. Ageism too. It's a way for the young to feel superior to the old without having to actually accomplish anything. Too lazy to study the past? Just say it all sucks anyway and even learning about it would morally sully you! Too dull to engage in complex arguments? Just slander your interlocutor based on their "outdated" language. For some, it's an intellectual version of bullying the poorer and older and less well connected for having unfashionable clothes. Paul Graham wrote in 2004 on this better than I could. "What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed." And he gave really good practical advice: "Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot." https://paulgraham.com/say.html https://paulgraham.com/say.html

chrisweekly 2y ago
"Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot." Keeper
- HKH2 2y ago
  "Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself."
  - chrisweekly 2y ago
    Proverbs 26:4, according to Kagi
Levitz 2y ago
The worst part of this is, say you have no intent to make rehabilitating the color yellow your life goal, but you see it as the morally right thing to do. Not doing so is thus morally evil.
- jajko 2y ago
  Hard disagree. I love dogs and animals overall. The fact that I don't spend my whole life managing dog shelters which we can all agree is a morally right thing to do doesn't make me nor anybody else automatically evil. Maybe in that saved time I am a neurosurgeon or fireman. World is not binary, people even less so.
- 542354234235 2y ago
  Not doing so is morally not the best thing. To say it is "morally evil" is to say that morality is some binary. "Evil" isn't a term I would throw around so easily.

mlyle 2y ago

At the same time, perjoration is real-- names associated with disadvantaged groups take on a derogatory meaning. While it's maybe not your fault that "retard" has moved from a neutral, medical term to an insult, it's not great to call people "retarded" in any context. A certain amount of this is just necessary to treat other humans beings humanely.

Grustaf 2y ago
That's the point isn't it, that it doesn't really help to invent new words, the new word will become a slur if it refers to something people don't want to be. I mean "retard" is of course itself a euphemism.
- mlyle 2y ago
  The new word that you're using may become a slur in 10-15 years, and you may have to change again. But I'd hardly say it doesn't help: it means that today, you've not made someone wonder if you're insulting them on purpose. We already constantly have to change so that our language doesn't sound dated. It's doubly important if it also avoids insult. I have to wonder a bit about people who really don't want to stop using terms that have become insulting, but otherwise freely pick up new usages of words in other contexts. It seems to me like they just want to be insulting.
  - Grustaf 2y ago
    The opposition is obviously not to "new words" per se, it's to words that were invented for political reasons, rather than ones that organically appeared. It doesn't help that they are almost always less descriptive, less exact, or sometimes simply incorrect. Like "differently abled", it actually means "less able".
    - mlyle 2y ago
      But a word other than "retarded" may not organically appear; indeed, it's going to wait for someone to say "wait, the word we're using has become insulting-- time to deliberately do something else." Do you characterize this as "for political reasons?"

Grustaf 2y ago

I would say this is at least partly the purpose. It is sometimes very hard to avoid the conclusion that activists came up with some of these terms in order to mark themselves out as more virtuous, not that the group in question were bothered by it and begged people to stop calling them something. Like LatinX, that definitely seems like a top-down word, that still hasn't caught on among actual Latinos.

SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
I'm not convinced that LatinX wasn't created as a plausibly-deniable slur against Latinos & Latinas. It insultingly ignores their linguistic heritage, in a way that anyone with even a basic understanding of Romance languages wouldn't do except to indicate a negative judgement of that heritage. It practically shouts "your language & heritage is inferior". Latine would be grammatically incorrect but at least follow the existing linguistic patterns and thus show some respect for the heritage!
- galdosdi 2y ago
  Correct. Thank you. This is exactly how I and most other Spanish-speaking hispanics I've talked to about it take it. It's usually someone who doesn't know Spanish using it, and the implication is that something is wrong with our language and anglos need to fix it for us (and that we're so backwards that even anglos who don't know our language are more qualified to fix it for us than we ourselves our, in our poor foolish backwardness) Anyone who knew Spanish well would know that grammatical gender is vestigial and often meaningless. Why are rocks female but boats male? Why are cars male and trucks female? It's nothing to do with semantics anymore than there is an extant meaning to why in English i comes before e except after c other when said like a as in neighbor and weigh, etc. But of course, the advocates for this nonsense don't know Spanish. When I do hear someone of latin heritage embrace latinx, invariably I find the are monolingual English-speakers who were not taught Spanish by their ancestors. It's reminiscent of the "machismo" slur-- anglos using "macho" as a stereotype of toxic masculinity, even though the worst toxic masculinity I've seen is by far has been in the US, not Latin America. It's all just a way to update anti-hispanic sentiment to account for modern progressive attitudes. Of course, that sort of thing went on 100 years ago too. The progressive-for-the-day attitudes were used to bludgeon Irish and Italian and other immigrants too then, you know. If you want to "fix" my language I invite you to do so-- right after you finish learning it well enough to converse at even just a very basic 5th grade level. Until then, mind your business.