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Controlling the Language Equals Controlling Thought
I visited several Colonial mansions recently and noticed that the term “slave” has been replaced by “enslaved people.” I’m not sure when it occurred, but it appears to be the new approved term. We all know that “illegal aliens” has been replaced by “migrants.” “Illegal aliens” is more descriptive, but our betters have decided that it creates opposition to open borders. One person in the UK was told to remove the term “illegal alien” from an online post lest it cause offense.
As in so many areas, the Republicans appear to be asleep at the switch. We are required to use a person’s current pronoun and our language is being restricted. We will all be enslaved people if this continues unchecked.
Published in General
Now there’s a tidbit that I’d missed. Which college in Northern Indiana? (I grew up a Hoosier.)
Goshen College (ever singing….)
If you were listening to the radio in the Goshen College cafeteria it probably was tuned to a NPR station.
It should have been, but it was one of those stations you turn on when working the dish room or mopping the floor, or shampooing a carpet…
Still, it was back in the day when we didn’t sing the national anthem before basketball games because ‘worldly’ so your instinct is spot on.
Dude, who isn’t happier with an accounting major?
India to Hoosierland to Oz, that’s a true odyssey!
A friend of mine would now say “and Zafar increased the average intelligence with each move.”
606
The left specializes in this
see
Female Healthcare vs Abortion
Undocumented Immigrant vs Illegal Alien
Climate Change vs Global Warming
Federal Revenues vs Federal Taxes
Gender assigned at birth vs. sex
I remember noticing this when it came to “crippled-handicapped-disabled-differently-abled-special” etc. The word used to describe something inherently unfortunate or undesirable (no one wants to be “differently abled” if they can help it), and while it is not, itself, intended to be unkind, it takes on negative connotations. E.g. “a moral cripple.”
Since the condition originally described by the word still exists—there are still “crippled” people—a new word is coined…and then the same thing happens again.
What is awkward and sad, really, about the “treadmilling” of words used to describe racial differences (“colored” becomes “negro” becomes “black” becomes “African American” becomes “Black” and so on) is that there continues to be a condition in need of describing. Once we switched from “Oriental” to “Asian,” the process stopped, because there really isn’t much to say about Americans of Asian descent. Not really. And besides, you can always say “Chinese-American” or “Japanese-American” or whatever.
“Black” is still on the treadmill. Or maybe it’s more that it—that is, blackness— was put back on the treadmill in spite of encouraging signs in the first decade of the 21st century that the word was settling, at last, into a mere descriptor like “Asian” or “Cuban American,” an adjective denoting a characteristic of perhaps some interest but no particular negative association.
I would insist that, whatever the situation of black Americans in 2015, it had not worsened significantly since, say, 2005. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that the lives of blacks qua blacks had continued to improve; that racism in general and anti-black racism was continuing to recede and that we were, as a nation, moving towards what amounts to color-blindness. With the election of Obama being only the most obvious evidence.
And then…it is as if there was a decision made by someone, somewhere, that relative optimism, relative contentment and comfort could not be permitted. That everyone, but especially black Americans themselves, had to be forced to feel worse, to be more pessimistic, uncomfortable and upset. The re-jiggering of language isn’t just about keeping everyone off balance (though there is that) it is also understood, albeit subconsciously, as a sign that the condition being described, by whatever word, is flawed, damaged and—yep— crippled.
By the way, am I the only one who doesn’t know what it means when Zafar says “all gays are homosexual but not all homosexuals are gay?”
My hunch is that black progress stalled under Obama and began recovering under Trump.
Almost all of the ones I know are usually cheerful.
I assume he means that gay refers specifically to homosexual males, whereas homosexual females are referred to as lesbians.
Don’t dox me dude.
I meant that I am both gay and homosexual but Ted Haggard (for eg) is homosexual but not gay.
But then I googled and it’s all about ‘gay scandal’ so perhaps the words have converged?
Language is evolving at a rapid pace. Has the meaning of “dox” changed recently?
I’m using it as short for doxology. Sorry to be unclear.
And Asian becomes the utterly meaningless Asian/ Pacific Islander. What do Indians or Persians have in common, “racially” or otherwise, with Samoans, Palauans, Chukese, and Yapese?
Several humor magazines have done riffs on your “woman, two men” story.
National Lampoon once printed up a fake New York Times front page which boasted in super headline size, that “The New York Yankees Win the World Series” and the article took up most of the page.
In extremely tiny print, another headline announced “Typhoon hits coast of Japan: 10,000 died.”
I am tempted to laugh when the neo-pagans at Goshen sing 606.
I think they are called “mixed” or “uni-sex” the difference being a “mixed” connector has both male and female parts for different lines, where as “uni-sex” is where both sides of the connector are identical.
Of course, not all connectors have two accessible ends. Quite often you attach wires to one end, and the other end, the accessible end, is the male or female plug or receptacle. And Douglas is right: it would be pretty silly to call these types of connectors something ambiguous — as silly as pretending that your child doesn’t have a sex until he or she picks one for him or her self.
The master/slave thing I mentioned earlier is actually a useful distinction, in the software world, that some people are trying to change. Some have begun referring to them as client/server, rather than master/slave, but that’s a misleading alternative: in general, master/slave systems have a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship, whereas client/server system are characterized by a one-to-one or many-to-one relationship.
The desire to move away from master/slave is purely one of political correctness — and largely a US-only thing, since we’re so extraordinarily sensitive to anything having to do with race. I’m aware of no good alternative nomenclature — certainly none in general use. The whole thing seems overwrought and silly to me.
Certainly this is not the Golden Age for technical writers, though some may earn a nice income transitioning various manuals and websites to the more evolved terms.
Heh. You said “transitioning.”
Just my attempt to mimic the precision good technical writers should have.
Still don’t get it.
I ask, because we had friends staying with us this week, a gay male couple, and in one of our exciting conversations about the absurdity of tacking the “trans” thing onto the LGB thing, I’m sure I said something like “well, okay, so you’re a homosexual man just as I am a hetersexual woman, and that means both of us are attracted to actual men, not just persons who identify as men, right?” (The answer, by the way, was “right.”)
And now I’m wondering if they were just too polite to object to my using the H word.
EDIT: Looked it up. Merriam Webster says it is “sometimes” considered a slur, but gives a few examples of it being used recently in more or less the way I used it in conversation.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/homosexual
It’s the Golden Age for this here technical writer, who has returned to the business of translating engineers into English because a couple of project managers at my last employer insisted that they wanted me on the team. We have spent some time discussing the language trends that are the subject of this thread, and decided unanimously to ignore them. If someone has a problem, we plan to tell them to take it up with the Chicago Manual of Style.
I like that solution, until the language police raid the Chicago Manual of Style.