Banning words won’t make the world more just

Side note, and this is completely off topic and I really mean this in the most positive way but you typing here has completely altered my perception of the need for following web standards for accessibility. I don't know any blind people in real life so really just assumed that accessibility standards really weren't worth the effort as they wouldn't make a difference. But here you are reading and responding in a manner that's probably better than I do. I am 100% on board now. You opened my mind today, thanks for that.

And it's odd! Because while there are certainly disabled people who prefer one form over another when they speak or when people refer to them (although again, in my experience, the overwhelming majority prefer the clarity of "disabled"), the only time I've ever run across someone making a universal dictate about how everyone should speak about all disabled people everywhere, the speaking has been non-disabled. And invariably backing a viewpoint which is tenditious at best among actually disabled people!

And to what end? It sometimes feels - certainly to my partner, hence her anger - an attempt to just sort of pretend the issue dosn't exist so that nobody has to be uncomfortable. Her disability is, at the moment, entirely incurable. She has experienced significant grief over her disability; she would love not to have it. But she does, and relabelling her as "differently abled" or a "person with a disability" doesn't suddenly remove the physical limitations she is struggling with.

It is unusual for the opinions of the minorities involved to be relevant.The language policing appears to be a power play within the majority. What you are observing is consistent with that - they aren't worried about offending the blind, they're worried about how their language will allow their peers to jostle for position.

IMO the purpose of language changing is not to improve the world; instead, it's to give the feeling of changing the world without putting any real effort.

Fun (in a sad way) fact: a friend of mine collaborates with an association that deals with diverse people. Some high-up complained that my friend's group (within the association) is "not diverse enough". Thing is: my friend is actually non-binary themselves. Go figure.

EDIT: replaced the definition of my friend from "diverse" to "non-binary", in order to be exact; the same principle stands, though!

The realization that it would be pointless, alas, came to me too late. Let me just give you a taste:

  While serving in Vietnam, American soldier Nick Parker was blinded by a mortar explosion. Rescued by local villagers, he recovered his health and, though he remains blind, was trained to master his other senses and becomes an expert swordsman.

There is an "adorable" little kid aptly named Billy, and one dimensional baddies, 'etc. The character is masterfully portrayed by one of the best b-movie actors of all time -- Rutger Hauer (best known for the best bit of Blade Runner).

Anyway I think it is a shame woke imbeciles who run movie studios would refuse to make such a thing today because when I saw it as a kid it made me realize being blind is really not the end of the world. Here you are posting on HN and your insights about society are more astute than the majority of the population. So I just wanted to say that you certainly see what is going on accurately.

P.S. - if you wish to visualize the language police people, they typically look like vogons and pull ugly faces when they speak.

A school I would visit had a native American name for their sports teams. I attended a game where they opened the season with local tribe members singing, and drumming, the dedicated it to the coach of the opposing team who died during off season. If you've never heard Native American music live in person you really should, it's like nothing else.

Several local tribes supported the school using the name, but one chose not to. The school the had to use another name, logo, etc.

It struck me how nothing seemed to be gained except distance ....

Yeah, and those "sensitive" people also don't seem to get what normal means. It just means "how the majority is supposed to be/the baseline fully functioning state regarding X". It's not a moral judgement if one is not in the normal group regarding some ability.

>Its a weird phenomenon. The longer I watch all of this, and I also mean the gender-language-hacks, I feel like this move has added to the distance between various groups, not made it smaller.

I think the smaller distance is when groups can be relaxed and casual about language - and even joke about their differences.

This is as opposed to hostile (as back in the day regarding e.g. whites against blacks) and overcautious tip-toeing around the other group.

Ironically, intersectionality adds that truth is created by identity groups (e.g. "blind", "blind females", "blind black females", etc.), and cannot be truly known by people outside that identity group. So even by their own assumptions, your claims as a member of the blind identity group ought to trump their assertions. But, this is functionally a fundamentalist religion, and the assumptions are sacrosanct. (I am using "fundamentalist" here meaning a one-dimensional ideology that is non-negotiable, which is essentially how Christian fundamentalism, for example, currently operates.) You might be able to mess with the minds of cultural believers, though.

This absolutely has increased the distance between groups, because the real goal is not kindness but activism to disrupt entrenched power structures.

In school, children get taught that when someone looks disabled, you shouldn't look at them, because staring at them is some kind of discrimination or so. I couldn't disagree more.

When I had that injury, and was kind of crip-walking, people would intuitively stare at me for a second, then -very obviously- force themselves to look away.

The injury wasn't that bad and went away after a week or two. But the way people forced themselves to look away, was much worse. I can't imagine dealing with that every day.

I'd argue that the people who make up these kind of "rules" probably aren't themselves affected by it.

This is exactly it. They have theories that spin a narrative telling them that you just don't understand why your preferred language is oppressive. Like women who just want to be housewives and stay at home with kids are suffering from internalized misogyny, or that Hispanic people almost universally hate the term LatinX but we must keep using it because gender neutrality is way more important than pissing off almost everyone.

I think public opinion polling might actually solve the problem, because the actual group has greater moral authority than language police activists. I suspect people might not cite this Atlantic article during a discussion of whether their organization should adopt language policing for fear of coming across as a reactionary old fogey. But if you were citing a poll of the group in question, that's a level of moral authority that's hard for a language police activist to argue against.

Basically the hypothesis to test here is that a latinx-type reaction is fairly common, it just doesn't generally reach public consciousness the way it did in the case of latinx.

Always reminds me of the George Carlin bit on language euphemisms used to distance us from reality (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc).

But it's simply less risky and less work to just call it "main".

It doesn't matter, and nobody gains anything from calling it "main" -- but if we call it "master" someone might get offended or waste my time arguing over it.

There is no incentive to insist calling it "master". So similarly, I guess we'll end up calling you "photonically disadvantaged" :)

Or maybe we can give it a positive spin and call it "darkness unimpaired"? (Just kidding of course)

Personally though people using extra syllables to describe me when a more terse way to describe me gets the point across always comes off as condescending. People seem to be utterly obsessed with the connotation of words and if a word starts having a bad connotation they will just replace it with a different usually inferior word and consider themselves heroic for doing so. Blind becomes “visually impaired” making 1 syllable into 5 and ironically making language more complex and less accessible (since the entire point of such language is that it’s so awkward that nobody who isn’t woke will use it allowing it to have a signalling purpose). In reality what such people attitudes come off as is “you’re such weak shit everybody around you should be like me and constantly expend effort to protect your feelings”.

It’s the language of “allyship”, not the language of the disabled most of the time. If people need such terms to feel comfortable with the disabled, I’ll humour them I guess, but I just hope people understand that this language mostly exists for the sake of people who are immensely uncomfortable with the concept of disability and those people tend not to be disabled.

When people see something bad-discrimination against disabled- they want to improve the situation but don’t know what to do. So they do something, anything without considering if the action is effective or if the best course is to do nothing.

So making a list of words to use or not use is doing something. There’s no way to measure if it makes things better or worse, but at least it’s something.

If they don’t make a list, and do nothing then that might be confused with not recognizing the problem.

So I think it’s well meaning people who want to help and do something stupid rather than not doing something.

I wonder if just releasing a statement of values is more appropriate for noting that an organization is against all these injustices but not advocating for lots of dumb little changes.

That and I think these lists naturally suffer from collaboritis. Where someone makes a document and circulates it for edits. All the obvious stuff is already on there so people want to help and think up any edge case and add it to the document. It’s hard to argue for parsimony for fear of being called out as a bigot. And it’s hard to suggest removing an item for the same reason.

People need to stop being intensionally offensive instead of using then banning more and more words doing that. The words are the symptom not the cause.

So the reasoning behind such language might be to include people who are not technically blind, but still require similar consideration, assistence, infrastructure and so on.

Language is odd here. The public used to call neurodivergent people "retarded" till the word had developed such a negative connotation that you wouldn't be able to use the word when adressing actual neurodivergent people without feeling like you are swearing. Of course that negative connotation didn't come out of nowhere, it is an expression of the way society looks (or looked) at the people it described. Of course people who live with mentally disabled people (or mentally disabled people themselves) often self-label themselves as "retarded" very bluntly and not without some sense of humour. But a bit like with race there are certain things you can say when you are part of the minority, that might not be okay to say when you are part of the majority.

When I was a kid people would constantly call something or someone "retarded", my niece's generation talks about how that is not okay. And they don't do it out of political correctness, but because they truly don't think neurodivergent behavior is something anybody should have to be ashamed of.

But of course there are also people who don't go that deep and just want to not offend anyone (good luck with that). They are the people who will feel uncomfortable when they describe something that isn't part of their perfect little world.

I think it’s pretty common phenomenon, like the people who call themselves “black”, those who are called “black” but hate it, and everyone in the middle usually not knowing what’s the position of any specific person’s on the issue.

I don’t think there even is a correct answer, as long as there are many people in different situations with different perceptions of what the words mean, there’s no way we get a consensus on this. At most we could get a majority sharing a common sensibility and bully the rest into submission, as it happened so many times in history.

Have you ever listened to the tv show Avatar the last air bender? There's a character who's blind named Toph and she always goofs on her friends who aren't blind throughout the series. It's quite amusing since it's not done in a manner that insults her for being blind but that they sometimes say things which might be insensitive which she makes fun of in her own way.

I don't think there is anything nefarious about it, just that "people" always co-opt the motives in the end and make it muddled for their own benefit. Overthinking it I guess. I know it when I see it, but it's hard to articulate it to something that works for everyone.

When I was a child, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. This is now malady non grata: For one thing, it's been folded into autism spectrum disorder, the DSM-5 being more on the lumper end of things than previous DSMs were, and, for another, it has a checkered history, with Hans Asperger using his position as a doctor in Vienna during the Second World War to choose which children were saved and which were murdered in camps. His collaboration with the Nazis and odious views have resulted in a backlash against the diagnosis.

Later still, the very word "Autism" seems to have faded out of polite speech, with people like me being referred to as "on the spectrum" with no explicit mention of which spectrum. This is, as far as I'm concerned, a straight-up euphemism treadmill: The DSM-5's lumping of Asperger's into autism spectrum disorder is something that can be defended on its scientific merits, but moving away from any mention of autism is purely down to the word's use as an insult. OK, so be it. The treadmill rolls on.

The final point is person-first language and why I don't use it: I am an autistic person. I don't say I'm a person with autism because I can't possibly be without autism. Is someone who identifies as a man a "person with gender" or is anyone a "person with race" or "person with ethnicity"? No. Some things are fundamental enough to how we experience the world that saying we're a person with that thing, which implies we could be without it, is wrong.

I like to call normal people "Normies", and with all the terror and hardship they've brought to the world (being the vast majority of the population), while self-righteously pointing their fingers at other people, assigning 100% of the underlying causality to them (usually based on heuristics or blindly accepting the mainstream narrative explanation) it only increases my enjoyment when I'm insulted and downvoted/rate-limited in response.

"We have met the enemy and he is us".

> Its a weird phenomenon. The longer I watch all of this, and I also mean the gender-language-hacks, I feel like this move has added to the distance between various groups, not made it smaller.

I often wonder if this is purely accidental/organic.

What I had seen is that these use of banning words and using different words, mostly just makes it more difficult to communicate properly, rather than actually helping anyone. (Occasionally some specific change is helpful in some contexts, but often it just makes it worse.)

I think that all of these changes are rather excessive. Sometimes they do make an improvement, but often they don't, and may make it worse. Sometimes it is an improvement in some contexts, but it should not be applied to contexts in which it is inappropriate.

I also don't like such words like "visually challenged", etc. It is better to use words such as "blind", although it can depend on the context. Sometimes "unable to see" might be more appropriate (since, just because you are unable to see something does not necessarily mean that you are blind; e.g. maybe you are looking at something else at the time, or your eyes are closed, etc).

"Disabled" is OK (using words such as "people with disabilities" or "differently-abled" or "people living with disabilities" or whatever, does not help), but usually it is better to specify the specific disability (e.g. "blind" or "deaf"), which is usually much more helpful than writing "disabled". (Although, in some contexts, it may be sensible to write "disabled", because it isn't about a specific kind of disabilities. Even in some cases, "differently-abled" may be appropriate, possibly.)

Accessibility features can be helpful whether or not you are blind, deaf, or other kind of disabilities. For this reason, it is helpful to not restrict their usefulness or to claim that they are only good if you are disabled in this way. (For example, many people can use captions on TV even if you are not deaf, although they are also useful if you are deaf, which should not be disregarded.) I think that many kinds of features can be useful whether or not you are blind/deaf/etc, if the system is well-designed.

In some cases, there just aren't any good words to describe some unusual situations clearly, though.

It helped to make connection with these people and we needed that, because I was developing some app that main audience was blind people and to actually understand their needs and problems you need to make a connection with them.

People appropriating your disability to excuse their bullying has led to what is effectively PTSD dealing with the groups whose voice was appropriated.

That’s sad — and has impacted not only disabled people, but race and gender relations.

I miss 10-20 years ago, when people were people rather than defined by protected class.

This ideology is usually espoused by people who have only have a couple of years life experience as an adult yet believe they are best positioned to tell everybody else how to think and behave.

That which makes cooperation and altruism possible also causes some strange glitches that sometimes reveals the motivating emotions are always self referential.

Which to most people, is what being woke is.

But I guess if you are on team non-woke and some kind of a minority then things get complicated quickly.

i have gotten into developing real estate in this place and i have had a lot of theft. naturally, i thought that because the state is red, constitutional carry and stand your ground i would be able to confront someone committing a crime. i thought that if that person attacked me, i would be well within my rights to defend myself. one day i did catch someone trespassing, looking for something to steal. i did confront him and he did try to attack me. luckily, drawing my gun was enough to make him change his mind. it was a whole incident. and what happened next shocked me to my core and changed my understanding of what is going on in this country. the police treated me like the criminal. they didnt charge me but they were really mean and aggressive with me, as if i were not the victim of a crime, and they lied to me. they said i should have just called and not followed the man. i said if they hadnt taken 20 fucking minutes then i wouldnt have needed to keep him in sight. i said if it takes you 20 minutes to show up to me following the guy, it would have taken you an hour to get here otherwise. and i said that the guy would have gotten away. if people follow your advice the criminals will get away every fucking time. how the fuck does that work? his response, from a midwestern cop, was that i should just let insurance cover the losses. the insanity of that statement is shocking. but not as shocking as this: people in the community didnt support me. nobody was in favor of me confronting criminals. these people, who are often victimized and stolen from, are not just apathetic about crime but look down on me because i was involved in a violent interaction. these people wont confront criminals or be associated with people who do because they dont want to reduce their social status. thats what it is, its snobbery. these people "support the police" and there are blue porch lights everywhere, and they claim to be tough on crime, but they are no different than los angeles liberals when it comes to actually confronting crime. and people wonder why we have crime in this country. its because people are fucking retarded. they have no fucking principles.

this mind virus has taken over the entire country. and its all connected. these are the same people who allow themselves to fumble over language, who bend over backwards to not call a spade a spade. people who stumble over not offending a blind person, as if it would make them less blind, are the same people who shy away from confronting crime. in both cases, there is a total lack of critical thought, a total blindness to the bigger picture.

the simple and plain fact is that society cannot be good or even exist unless everyone makes a little sacrifice every once in a while. people have to stand up to crime every once in a while or else crime will become rampant. and it has. people have to say what they think every once in a while even if it makes you look bad or else the truth, our only guiding light, will become extinguished. but all these idiots avoid any and all risk to their own wellbeing no matter whats at stake. these people wont even accept the tiny, tiny little loss of face involved in unintentionally offending someone. literally any loss of face or status, any tiny little deviation from the script, is simply too much for these people. its fucking disgraceful. everyone knows that the country has become much more crime ridden, much more seedy, much more crappy in recent times. especially when you control for technology. its cultural for sure, not economic.

and since we are on the topic, let me just say it: fumbling around when calling a black person black or a blind person blind is more insulting than not! when you dance around and fumble and so on, you are making a huge and embarrassing insinuation that the condition of the person you are referring to is problematic or undesirable. you are screaming in that persons face that you see them as less than and you are trying really hard to not portray them as such. thats what really cements these people in the category of "idiot." they are selfishly helping themselves by toeing the line and not helping anyone else despite the fact that the entire justification for that dogma is being selfless and helping others.

This. I recently ran up against a filter on Reddit where I used a phrase that I was completely unaware of. My account was flagged for hate speech. The comment had no ill-intent.

The problem with language is that we want individual words to have inherent meaning but as people adopt phrases to identify a movement, those meanings get carried along for the ride. eg: until recently, I would have just curiously nodded along to the phrase "It's ok to be _____" but learned that it's actually a dark dog whistle thanks to Scott Adams.

I suspect the unease you perceive with people using different terms for blindness are unease with their own attachments to those words. Fighting to keep using words with established meaning is laudable IMO. I still use "literally" as not "figuratively" despite the media-dulled connotation.

"Hearing challenged" definitely sounds a bit daft though for sure.

In that case, we should immediately ban bread, cars and stop using clothing. Because, Nazis ate bread, used cars and wore clothes.

What the hell...

Are you sure they weren't a certain shade of orange?

After all, not all black people have the same concerns and priorities, and there are diverse communities that sometimes butt heads. Combining that group into another reduces the voice even more.

It also permits ignoring the actual community in question for the beliefs of an outsider representative who identifies as BIPOC rather than as just one subgroup. And allows silencing people who disagree with being lumped together by declaring the lack of solidarity a form of racism itself.

Also, since we are exposing the silliness of all of this -- aren't "black" and "poc" discriminatory to "people who are experiencing albinism" ?

Of color black, of color brown, etc

It’s referring to two points from “The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation”, which is understandably (I hope), a large (and respected!) guide.

Worse, this violence often goes unaccounted for with impunity, without penalty, because people are terrified of the consequences of criticizing these groups, whether that's losing friends, family, or jobs that are too closely attached to these justice movements, while quite blatantly refusing to acknowledge that these movements have grifted the crap out of our world, as we find that their leaders and spokespeople are everything from: disingenuous scammers using donation money entirely for self-serving purposes that do not advance their cause, all the way to being convicted child sex traffickers (Fox: BLM, reports from 2020).

But to condemn these movements for these reasons is nearly suicide in a society obsessed with staying in line with the "current thing", without scrutiny.

Oh is Turning Point USA not a social justice group

They're legally required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its consequences. Let me explain:

The act prohibits discrimination on several protected characteristics, and the Supreme Court has expanded that to cover even things that merely correlate with those characteristics, unless an employer can convincingly show those characteristics are required [1].

But how can employers shield themselves from the legal risk of a discrimination lawsuit, when "discriminating" is so vaguely defined? By showing they engaged in "best effort" not to discriminate, which means mouthing all the right platitudes, employing ever-evolving "best practices", and having departments devoted to the cause (first HR, now DEI).

It's a red queen's race to be the most progressive and anti-racist, plus positive-reinforcement as the alumni of these institutions take up influential positions in society, and these are the results after 60 years of it. Any corporation, school, or university that goes against it, that merely tries to stay neutral, will fall behind and be made a legal and PR example of [2].

[1] To see how harsh a test this is, requiring an IQ test for management positions is prohibited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

[2] https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-j...

However, one problem here is that, when faced with this affirmative-that these people are trying to control you-I think many well-meaning persons will say ”you’re exaggerating”. That’s because I think that most of the time, the people who propose these rules (and the more passive ones who agree with them blindly) actually really believe they are doing a good thing-they strongly believe that they know better than you what you should say. I have to assume this because, if not, if I assume they are only just trying to control me, period, I’ll feel like I am wearing the same aluminum foil hat that they are using.

As such, it is important to understand that yes, they are trying to control you, and no, maybe they don’t realize this, because their moral superiority complex is just too deeply rooted. By understanding this you can be more broadly aware that these attempts of control will come from other directions than language (artistic taste, sexual preferences, behavior in general, political beliefs, etc.)

What really screws up the entire thing is that, their belief is so deeply rooted that, the next step of their logic then becomes: if they were so nice to inform you and educate you about the right way to behave, then why is it that now that you know the truth you still insist on not practicing it? The only conclusion is that you must be ill-intentioned on purpose.

I don't know who are "those", but I think they're primarily interested in controlling backlash and preventing conflicts. They don't want lawsuits or twitter outrage.

they have no qualms in oppressing and showing intolerance towards cultures that won't play ball with those linguistic impositions, especially when they cannot just ignore them as foreign

they will impose actual systemic intolerance and litmus tests to force their cultural supremacy

the people who say disagreement is invalidating someone's existence will actually deny the existence of the culture they spun from, violently so if necessary

Some discussion here: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-01-27/op-ed-latin...

And absolutely everything in this World should be about someone oppressing someone else.

I mean someone named them in the first place. The people of Latin America didn't ask to be called Latinos, it was assigned to them, purportedly by a French man.

Language at some level is really about the speaker, in terms of their background, knowledge or lack thereof, what they want to communicate and so forth. Sometimes I think what this equity language betrays is some desire to convey moral or intellectual status, or even some assertion of social power, but sometimes it reflects a genuine attempt to respect the wishes of the subjects of what they're saying.

The problem as you point out is different groups might see things in different ways, and maybe even want to be seen in different ways in different settings or at different moments. Maybe they want to be seen as strong or resilient in one setting, and maybe in another they want to discuss the injustices they have to be resilient against. I think this is only a natural part of human nature.

So it makes sense that these edicts about proper language aren't just morally problematic because they reflect some power motive on the part of the speaker, at the expense of the subject of the speech, but because in doing that, they deny some flexibility in how certain topics and persons can be portrayed or portray themselves.

The example of the passage from Behind the Beautiful Forevers is compelling in how it illustrates how equity language can be disenfranchising and therefore counter to its own stated purposes. The passage works because it is meant to convey something about the parents' perspective and to cause us to wrestle with that. The author is channeling the parents' language. In a different context, maybe the same situation might be described differently, more positively. It's not just that the language in the second version is intellectualized and distanced, it's that it denies choice of language from those who potentially are in the best position to say something about it.

There might be a worthwhile transition to a new framing that makes sense. I've heard people rip on using the metric system because supposedly its proponents wanted 10-hour days and 10 days a week, etc, which was taking tenets to ridiculous points. The problem now is trying to frame some changes in grander terms because you might well get ridiculous outcomes ( and in current society definitely will).

https://thinknow.com/newsite/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/thin...

It is not that large, but the tiny number of respondents who identify as Latinx has been stable. It's crazy that this label is still being pushed.

That's part of the point: it's a costly signal that demonstrates that you're a true ally. See also: gang tattoos.

A few years ago I quit a job at a large tech company after spending most of a year sanitizing text documents to use politically correct language. This isn't marginal.

It affects me daily because "look on master" became "look on the main branch" for no advantage to absolutely anyone.

I think "list" is a much more non-inclusive term than that, since you are either on the list, or you're not. /s

Really wish we'd take the hint and do some language house keeping, maybe clean up the discrepancy between electrons and current.

One might say that the reason is because this is seemingly becoming harder than ever in Western countries.

That is not the case though.

I don't think you're right. We're being told our words are wrong on a daily basis.

I think that this started with Tumblr in the early 2010's and has grown into a movement sometime during the Trump presidency.

Being able to code switch between them, or simply avoid jargon from your own Alignment Language and understand the jargon from others is a critical communication skill when you need to work with people who have radically different values than your own.

This is not true at all. The absolute trainwreck that is "écriture inclusive" is spearheading those inclusivity initiatives, and we have also incorporated a lot of the other words mentioned here in the language.

It feels more like a minefield than a joke. A minefield that gets new mines added every so often just to keep everyone on their toes. When I was younger, I used to feel like I could keep up with all the new taboo words, but it seems like it is happening faster and faster these days.

You can unintentionally say something that turns out to be taboo, and you're done for. Some years ago, I causally used the "r-word" and didn't even think anything of it, and blam! big mistake. We used to toss that one around all the time back in the 80s and 90s, felt kind of like a jerk when you used it in the early 2000s, but in the 2010s it's become totally lingua-non-grata. We learn the hard way from these experiences, but it does feel like a growing minefield.

Worse, when something innocent we write/say today becomes a slur in 2040, future people will dig back in time and judge us by the words we wrote in 2020. Do you know what will be a slur in 20 years? I don't.

The wikipedia article for Linguistic Relativity[0] states:

> Research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting linguistic relativity, and this hypothesis is provisionally accepted by many modern linguists.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

The project of the guides is utopian, but they’re a symptom of deep pessimism. They belong to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions, argument is no longer desirable, each viewpoint has its own impenetrable dialect, and only the most fluent insiders possess the power to say what is real.

Though I wonder if this diagnosis is actually too optimistic, in that it assumes people are 1) aware and care about the real problems and 2) willing to put in effort to enact meaningful change. Perhaps this is too cynical, but I think most people who adopt this sort of symbolic gesturing are pretty detached from the root issues of power and wealth inequality. "Virtue signaling" is a product of vanity, not pessimism/powerlessness.

By increasing the silliness, more and more people observe "Wow these folks are ignorant lunatics, unaware that they're driving the perception of themselves as immature, ignorant hypocrites whose identity is built upon political trends."

What do you mean by this? Hasn't linguistic relativity been studied and demonstrated quite extensively?

I don't disagree with your overall point, but found this surprising.

Furthermore, there are nonzero people in groups who object to victim monikers like Latinx and over-sensitive terminology as demeaning. If it were me, since I can only speak for myself, I would want to be treated as equal without ceremony, pity, or unfair advantages. Alterations of language where there is little or no offense (asking the targets rather than the busy bodies) seem like token thoughts and prayers and inconvenience to the many rather than direct, positive help to anyone. Solve real concerns rather than pearl clutch the next unfashionable word.

I received a letter in the mail from official sources, ordering me to use:

"skin appropriating mammals & pseudo-mammals of complexions including greyscale shades from #FFFFFE to #000000"

(pseudo-mammals is important so as not to exclude platypus & echidna identifying peoples)

It's ok though-- I will let it slide this time.

Next time though, it will be reported to the Commissar. And they will listen to me-- Because I am half skin appropriating mammals & pseudo-mammals of complexions including greyscale shades from #FFFFFE to #000000 (anything more than a quarter is considered full validated and verified via the official channels)

You missed a couple at the beginning of your list. A really significant one in particular.

It's "theirsxn of sholor". Please respect this and stop the violation and violence against theirsxns of sholor which is incurred when you use othering phrases.

(not thereson-- because it has the word "son" in it, which is offensive to non-sons. sholor because it's closer to shalom which means peace.)

/le jokes

Calling my wife a "birthing person" just made her feel like some gross vessel for having a baby. We purposefully chose providers that didn't use that language.

"Chestfeeding" is another one that's cropping up and makes zero sense. Men have breasts, so breastfeeding is already gender-neutral. But it's seen as female-centric so out the door it goes.

There seems to be this weird erasure of women taking place at the moment. To the extent that it's now controversial to ask "what is a woman?"

An academic, in order to stay relevant, needs to keep pushing the invisible and mostly inexistent boundaries that they perceive in whatever field they are involved in. If they’re faced with a set vocabulary today, then tomorrow they’ll have to come up with an ”aha! Found a new offensive word” to position themselves as a relevant, meaningful part of this strange, ethereal movement. It’ll never end, because the movement itself needs its members to keep also pacing forward and motivated in order for itself to remain existing.

The exact same could be said of any academic movement; the difference is that, in most cases, it mostly does not spill into reality. Other than a bit of research funding money, meaningless academic ideas don’t hurt society much. In this case, however, the academic movement is dead set on spilling all over everything, using the most aggressive possible strategies of shaming and reputation murder in order to push down its opposition.

Shall I now say I have to call a “person who performs plumbing work” to fix my drain because calling them a plumber indicates that they have no worth outside their job? No, that’s not how language has ever worked.

Basically for “people-first language” to exist, you have to create a problem that didn’t exist before to come up with it as a solution.

Well, that's entirely up to you and me isn't it?

I think what bothers me is not so much the word police (ignore them) but everyone else that allow them to set the agenda.

I talk the way I've talked my entire life and I don't care what people think about it.

Why is that? I’m genuinely curious. Who should be offended by the word slave? Is it I, the Slav? The etymology of the word concerns my heritage, and yet I’m not offended. It’s not as though people toying with language today is going to bring back my relatives who died as slaves, nor will it undo the suffering they endured.

The troll argument here is: now that we're saying "birthing people" instead of "women", it's time to acknowledge that abortion is not actually a "women's issue".

The attempt to make certain thoughts unthinkable by removing the words that denote those ideas.

That one in particular, I was almost offended when I learnt during a DEI training that it could be construed as insensitive/racist of me to use that idiom.

English is not my native language, and is not an official language of my country. I work for a local branch of a large US tech company, and the working language is English, which I'm perfectly fine with. But when we get subjected to DEI training material which was very obviously made for an American audience, even though nobody in this office is a native English speaker, I think it goes too far and ironically becomes slightly insensitive in its own way.

Sometimes I wonder if some interests are not all too happy to see people fight about who they might have to share a public bathroom one day in their entire life rather than issues actually affecting them.

“Mother” could be inadequately specific in situations involving same-sex relationships, surrogacies, and/or adoption. For example, Washington state offers up to 6 weeks of medical leave to the birthing parent, in addition to the 12 weeks of bonding leave that are offered to both parents.

Policy language needs to be specific and able to accommodate minority or edge cases.

I completely understand the “gender is social and not biological” concept, and I believe it is true to a large degree. But this is not the case: if you are able to bear a child, then by definition you are female and a woman in the biological sense.

In fact, they took it so far that it is now in the realm of fan fiction.

Language cannot be legislated, and meaningful change requires more than a new literay style of expression.

Social progress in real, measurable ways is possible and important. Workers' rights, pay equity, access to education, public health-care, affordable living, good care for our elderly... These are good things that measurably grow happiness in community.

Hurt-Feelings Fan Fiction is a section of the book store that I will never visit.

“enslaved people” is not people/person-first language.

“People who are enslaved” is people-first language.

“enslaved people” is “situation first” (more commonly “identity first” or “disability first”, but neither strictly applies to “being enslaved”) language, just as “slaves” is. (In the disability context, “the disabled” and “disabled people” are textbook examples of “disability first” language, to which “people first” or “person first” language is contrasted.)

EDIT: Yes, I realize that this is an example of "people-first" language given near the opening of this opinion piece. It says something that in this rant about "equity language", the example given of the application of a particular form ("people-first language") of equity language is basically a textbook example of what that form seeks to avoid rather than what it prescribes.

> For example, it seems like we can’t say “mother” anymore in medical settings.

You can absolutely use “mother” to describe a specific person who, in fact, is a mother in medical settings. Because people of non-feminine gender identity can give birth, it is sub-optimal and exclusionary as a generic term for a person giving, or who has given, birth.

> I support trans people living however they want, but my mother was a mother

Literally no one has a problem with your mother being described as a mother.

> At work, a “women in engineering” group got renamed to something bland like “gender minorities in tech”.

Presumably, it got renamed that because whoever made decisions for it decided the mission was broader than women. “Gender minorities” isn’t a bland alternative to “women”, it has a broader scope.

Considering the news that Roald Dahl's books are now being altered in precisely some of the ways described, we are very, very clearly seeing literature start to be targeted.

Since in my lifetime I've only known calling everyone by their first name (except, like you say, teachers in childhood), I'm curious when the change occurred and how.

Not in isolation, but in full context there may be some practical merit. In the earlier age where these titles were used, women adopted their husband's entire name. A woman who married Mr. Robert Smith would become Mrs. Robert Smith. This provides feedback that her given name isn't Robert. Ms. Robert Smith would be ambiguous. Is her given name actually Robert or is she married to Robert? Who knows?

But, indeed, in the modern age nobody cares about titles. We have heavily curated Instagram feeds, or whatever it is the cool kids are into these days, to serve as a status indicator instead. That's the thing about status indicators: They only serve to display status for so long until it becomes commonplace and those with status have to move on to new indicators to stand out.

Did you notice this section?

>Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. The American Cancer Society has one. So do the American Heart Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Recreation and Park Association, the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and the University of Washington.

>....

>Public criticism led Stanford to abolish outright its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative—not for being ridiculous, but, the university announced, for being “broadly viewed as counter to inclusivity.”

Even if no one is arguing back, it seems like the language police are winning.

It’s generally better to avoid taking the bait when someone is trying to pick a fight with you.

It seems to me that enslaved people have much bigger problems than to worry about this, and if they don’t anymore, then the wording doesn’t matter. They are either ”former slaves”, which emphasizes the severity of the situation they were put through, or they are still slaves, which again——emphasis. I could argue that the new wording diminishes the seriousness of the predicament (but I won’t as I don’t believe that, given the horrors of slavery, the word matters at all here).

I don't get this, at all. It makes at least one fallacy, namely assuming that people are born free. They are not. Every newborn is restricted by parents, society, environment, etc. We must accept that: we can't think, act or sustain ourselves until much older. Thus, we loose our restrictions slowly, and we don't loose them all. Some people were actually born as slaves. That's the horror of it: to be born as property.

Agency has nothing to do with it: suggesting that it does implies the possibility to avoid it, and ipso facto that staying enslaved is the slave's problem. The appeal to a made-up brain process doesn't improve your case.

Nitpick: synecdoche would be if someone called you "America". You can imagine a teasing "Hey America, get out of the way" toward a tourist who encapsulated their views of Americans. "American" is just a regular adjective.

Urban, in the sense of urban or inner city youth, might be a reference to black children. (Or it might not. And one might actually be referencing urban things in the sense of not suburban or rural.)

Vibrant: makes, ahem, people living with color blindness feel marginalized.

Hardworking: I’m struggling to come up with something even as credible as the last two. Maybe it’s ableist: some people can’t work hard.

Brown bag: I’m guessing this is in a similar category to “tarball” from the rather regrettable list out of Stanford recently: it has nothing whatsoever to do with equity or inequity, but one might imagine an alternative etymology in which it has an inequitable meaning, connotation or origin. So brown bag could somehow be about brown people, even though as far as I can tell, neither the origin of the phrase nor any common uses are at all related to skin color.

At this rate, we risk running out of English words. Fortunately, English has a lot of words :)

South Africa would pose a similar conundrum, where people are called South Africans, but they aren't the only people living in Southern Africa.

Particularly because I'm not sure I've ever come across a case in my life when a speaker or writer wanted to include people from both continents as a single group. It's just not a label that's useful for much of anything.

"North or South American" isn't a particularly meaningful or relevant concept at all. In contrast with e.g. "Latin American" which is very useful/meaningful.

And if people from the United Mexican States are Mexican for short, it's an easy shorthand to similarly call people from the United States of America, well, American.

While we're at it, let's also restrict the use of the word "content", at least when it's only referring to a single type of media.

A person who has parented children is a parent.

A person who has won a championship is a champion.

A person who has graduated is a graduate.

A person who has been convicted of a felony is a felon.

The response to attempts to dismantle obvious and useful language constructs seems perfectly valid.

That's because we can't fire the bottom 10% of cops. Who gets to decide who the bottom 10% are? There are deeply engrained cultural issues, systemic perverse incentives, in most police departments in the country. If you ask them to fire 10% of their forces, it's more likely to be the people who speak out against the Clan Police than it is the "bad apples" you're thinking of.

Besides, while maybe only a small minority would brutally murder a man by kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and 43 seconds while he cries for his mother, almost every single police officer on the force would stand there next to him and protect him while he did it. If you ran up and pushed the murderer off the man he's killing, trying to save his life, the other cops would beat you, possibly to death. Not 10% of them. 90% of them. You would be beaten and arrested. It's 90%. At least.

Whereas we can reduce funding to police departments; that is within the power of elected officials that the "defund" movement can help get elected.

Even if there was an objective way to measure the bottom 10% of cops that wasn’t subject to the same structural/institutional biases that are the main problem that “defund” is about, that would be a temporary solution that wouldn’t address the fundamental problems.

As it is, the structural problems means that any “Fire the bottom 10%” initiative in practice would reinforce, rather than mitigate, the problems, since the structural biases would factor into the evaluation.

As for "defund the police" I think I'm the only one who remembers the Reaganite "defund the left" slogan

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/11/opinion/defund-the-left.h...

which "defund the police" seems to be modeled after. Thatcherism (the British strain of Reaganism that was just a bit meaner) became so ingrained that the fish who swim in it can't even recognize it. Today there is such a poverty of the imagination that the left can't imagine anything else.

It's almost as if the underlying issue is independent of political leanings.

So then time, energy, and goodwill gets wasted by having to explain to people what they "should" be calling themselves. The people she's talking to thinks the whole thing is just stupid, and is a thing that only white people care about.

But she also mentions that the younger generation of LatinX people do care, and often prefer the term. It's all a big mess and makes compassionate communication more difficult.

Latine and LatinX both originate in (different geographical parts of) the spanish-first-language non-binary community, originally for use in Spanish, neither (AFAIK) by “well-paid academics”.

Latinu and Latin@ I’m less sure about, but wouldn’t be surprised if they are the same. While there’s legitimate debates about their use, the “created by white English-speaking academics and imposed on the people labelled by them” narrative is itself White-centering myth.

(OTOH, the anglicized, instead of mixed, pronunciation of LatinX is probably a White anglophone invention, the original is like latino/a with the final vowel removed, and with the english name of the letter “X” in its place.)

There's already a centuries-old gender-neutral word for Latino/Latina that is, surprise, "Latin". Or "Latin person" if you will.

I was born in South America, and I really reject being called a "Latinx". It sounds dehumanizing.

Like many other things in politics.

Hispanic means from a Spanish-speaking country.

Spanish people are Hispanic, but not Latino.

The idea isn't to design a new armband that you require people of a particular group to wear each week - the idea is to ask those people what they want, and then respect them when they answer you.

If someone says they identify as Latinx, then you identify them as Latinx. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. It's not about the enforcement of identity, *it's about the deconstruction of traditionally enforced identities in the first place*, it's about exploring the creation of new identities outside of the bounds of conservative tradition.

I guess most immigrants don't need to learn the shibboleths, unless they suddenly get into money and want to join the upper class. It's about discriminating between the commoners and the rulers, that's why it constantly evolves, too. Need to regularly release new ciphers if you're communicating in the open with a trivial cryptography.

I am so sorry if this pedantic, but I think it's an important distinction to make.

Both Hispanic and Latino are not races but rather an ethnic group. The race of people who belong to the Hispanic and Latino ethnic groups varies by country and even at the individual. One can have predominately African ancestry, predominately European ancestry, or predominately indigenous ancestry, while all belong to the same ethnic group of Hispanic or Latino.

I do not bring up this point to try and detract from the legitimate discrimination and oppression that many individuals and groups in the Hispanic and Latino community face.

People of Jewish heritage belong to what is known as an ethno-religious group. The idea that "Jews are a race" was either first proposed, or at least heavily perpetuated by the Nazis, and it is still considered offensive to refer to people of Jewish heritage as belonging to a different race.

Regardless, the idea of race is a social construct with absolutely zero biological or scientific basis behind it. There is only one "race", and it's the "Human Race."

In an ideal world, we would not even need to make these distinctions because we are all Homo Sapiens -- we have no subspecies. Maybe one day we can achieve this world if we stop the pathetic, needless, and disgusting hatred for our fellow man.