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Comment by bedhead | Hacker News Reader

"Declaring the economy in or out if recession does not help anyone outside of propagandists and journalists."

Correct. This is exactly why the people who are altering the definition are entirely propagandists (sometimes known as politicians) and journalists. In this case, they work in unison because they happen to be on the same team at the moment, so journalists are hoping and begging the government to change the definition so that it provides them sufficient cover so that they don't have to write on their front pages that the economy entered into a recession, which is obviously bad for the cause. It's the tacit "Help me help you!" situation. Their approach is that if the government says it, by journalists' standards (for the moment, of course) that's good enough by itself to validate it. Voila!

This is all stupid anyway. Call it anything you want at anytime, it doesn't change reality.

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It's fascinating how far this unison reaches. Merriam-Webster changed its definition of "sexual preference" to mark it as offensive after Amy Coney Barret used the term in a congressional hearing. Not even dictionaries are safe.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200928131548/https://www.merri...

https://web.archive.org/web/20201014032220/https://www.merri...

Words change in their meaning over time.

“Aesthetic” is my current bugbear.

Sometimes that change is more sudden than others. On September 28th, 2020 (the closest preceding archive) it was not yet offensive. On October 13th, she used "sexual preference" in her congressional hearing. The very next day, on October 14th (the 1st subsequent archive), Merriam-Webster already had the new, "offensive" definition in place.

The fluidity of language really is fascinating to behold.

Back in the day I too thought that it's all about the fluidity of language, language as a living "thing" that evolves with time.

Then I read Orwell's Politics and the English Language, and 1984.

After that, the fluidity of language appears to me to be more and more in the hands of lexicographers as Newspeak developers who work hand-in-glove (with Them, whom else? :P ) to form the new way of thinking. No more romantic notions of lexicography as the track record of a civilization's linguistic endeavours.

It's perhaps unsurprising that LGBTQ community's longstanding objection to the implications of "sexual preference" in discourse gained recognition after a high profile news story involving a high profile person using, receiving objections to and then apologising for it.

Ironically, it's the exact same media attention phenomenon that meant that some people who have longstanding and entirely sincere objections to undue emphasis placed on US institutions in Wikipedia rocked up this week to the Recession article to question whether the NBER definition has been given undue prominence for the last 15 years, and not some other time when the definition of recession wasn't a major news story with unfortunate implications for a certain political figure.

> LGBTQ community's longstanding objection to the implications of "sexual preference"

So longstanding that not a peep of complaint is heard when Democracts use it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsYGOAVqmQI

Or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a 2017 interview: "Our society has come to respect people, whatever their sexual preference," Ginsburg said. - https://freebeacon.com/courts/barrett-shredded-for-saying-se...

But I'm sure there's a very sophisticated, nuanced distinction I'm missing, that explains the different treatment as totally not partisan gaslighting. Starting with an explanation for why "preference" is considered changeable - I can't make myself prefer one food over another, but maybe I'm an exception.

I mean, here's a media style guide from 2003 citing the American Psychological Association to warn against the "problematic" use of "preference". https://web.archive.org/web/20120813022744/http://www.colby....

Perhaps it was the work of time travellers desperate to create the impression that Amy Coney Barrett is not a born again liberal, or perhaps, if the extent of your knowledge of the debate is restricted to gotcha videos involving Democrat politicians from the Washington Free Beacon, you're not particularly qualified to tell people with a personal stake in the debate that they actually invented all the longstanding objections to "preference" to criticise a foreign judge's comments they were barely even aware of, that they're the ones indulging in partisan gaslighting...

Well if this was so widely know since 2003, it's odd how it took 17 years before any politician took objection to it, until that confirmation hearing, isn't it? That was the exact moment everyone got the memo?

Call it a "gotcha" video all you want, but it's clear to everyone else what it is - a plain as day demonstration of double standards.

Of course politicians being self-serving hypocrites isn't news, or limited to Democrats, as the Republicans demonstrated when they argued it isn't appropriate to make a Supreme Court appointment near the end of Obama's term, only to find it very appropriate when they got to appoint a judge.

What is news is that now dictionaries cooperate in their hypocrisy.

I mean, no, it's not really at all odd that a phrase that raised niche and context-specific objections for years got its first objection publicised well enough for you to be aware of it when it involved a forensic examination of Supreme Court appointee's interview statements, and not some other people making less scrutinised remarks that weren't also allegedly evading upholding Obergefell as settled precedent. It's also perfectly reasonable to think this might be a little unfair on said jurist who had little reason to have traced the history of the uses of "sexual preference".

What is novel is your insistence that it makes more sense to assume dictionaries conspiring against conservative jurists are a more logical explanation for Merriam Webster adding an advisory warning to a definition other authoritative style guides cautioned about in 1991, 2003, and 2013 than it was headline news today, and lots of people asked so we looked into it. Some might say making a change three decades after others wasn't that rapid...

> lots of people asked so we looked into it.

And what did they find? That the term was routinely used within the LGBT community and never remarked on as offensive [1,2]? Or did they neglect to apply even the minimum of scrutiny, and simply took the word of grievance experts and hypocritical politicians as gospel, and presented it as a majority, widely-held belief in their dictionary?

I should note even the implication that 'preference' implies choice is utterly made up - I prefer chocolate to carrots, and blues to polka, yet I cannot choose to change those preferences. Whereas I am currently oriented south, and it is trivial to change that and re-orient myself to face west instead.

> some other people making less scrutinised remarks

Not just "some other people" - Joe Biden used the term while running for president. A presidential candidate's statements are usually closely scrutinized.

You are fooling nobody who does not want to be fooled.

[1] https://www.dailywire.com/news/lgbt-websites-now-say-sexual-...

[2] https://thepostmillennial.com/sexual-preference-is-not-an-of...

What they most likely found was that the American Psychological Association first cautioned against using the term as a synonym for sexual orientation in the 1990s, the APA style guide has said so since 2003 if not earlier and the NYT and Associated Press followed suit in 2013. But perhaps chronology is also part of the conspiracy against some withdrawn and promptly-forgotten comment of Amy Coney Barrett's. A person who US liberals obviously had no other objections to whatsoever!

You can quote all the "anti-woke" attack blogs you like (I hear there's a subgenre dedicated to quoting words that rappers use to argue that everyone else should use them too!), but when you insist that the issue was invented to trap Amy Coney Barrett some thirty years later, you're only fooling yourself.

(as an aside, it's amazing that when you start putting sexual orientation on an equal footing in terms of mutability and importance and civil rights implications to your preference for chocolate you can't grasp that might actually be the bit gay people don't like...)

Agreed, in general. I suppose the larger argument is "Who gets to decide what words mean?"

Is it the case that because Merriam-Webster or the Oxford University Press decide arbitrarily to change the meaning of a word that we all have to concede to that authority? Is there room for another dictionary forum to exist? At what point does language diverge into different dialects because of this phenomena?

Would you expect any different? Those who self-select into a language police force come from mostly overlapping classes of people working in politics, journalism and dictionary editing (but I repeat myself). Not everyone has time to worry about that sort of thing, and of those who do, not everyone wants to. So naturally the people who commit the most time to policing and redefining the language appear to have an outsize effect on (your perception of) the language. They’ve literally made it their career.

That doesn’t mean we have to listen to them. It is not rational to disambiguate truth from fiction based on words you read on the internet. It’s especially irrational to trust the words more when they’re on website served from a domain name of a company that paid an employee to write them according to some quarterly editorial calendar and Trello board.

If you’re altering your behavior in response to changes in a reality you interpret based on the words of a 2015 Columbia journalism major, then you have bigger problems than whether your most-frequented news sites tell you we’re in a recession.

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