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It's definitely a crappy word out of context, and the defensiveness is probably to be expected. Who are you calling aggressive!... On the other hand, it's rout
by Cushman 11y ago
It's definitely a crappy word out of context, and the defensiveness is probably to be expected. Who are you calling aggressive!...
On the other hand, it's routinely frustrating when especially technical communities, full to bursting with misappropriations of common terms, seem especially unable to see past the letters in a word to its meaning in context. Maybe we just intrinsically don't believe that other areas of inquiry could be so complex as to need their own jargon...
- afarrell 11y agoOne problem is that most fields accept that their jargon is in fact jargon that folks have to learn. Some chunk of SJ folks don't, which is dismaying because it ignores educational privilege.
- Cushman 11y agoThat's a good point, though I don't think it's such an uncommon thing; think of the beginning programmer who has to be laboriously convinced that the first definition they learned for "type" or "function" is not the meaning of that word. I'd speculate that true appreciation for jargon comes more from multidisciplinary studies than anything else, so in any field the most passionate, least experienced members are likely to make a mess of things-- and if there's one thing the activist community has in surplus it's members with a high passion:experience ratio. Having acknowledged that issue, I'm still reluctant to excuse anyone in this case, simply because we're talking about a term that doesn't have any other meaning. If you see a word you've never heard before, and think "I can probably figure out what this refers to based on its sounds" with Google sitting right there, naah, the problem isn't the jargon. Edit: Like, seriously, would this happen if the word was "microclimate" or "microevolution"? Yeah, on the YouTube comments, but not usually on HN.