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Comment by daughart | Hacker News Reader

People don't call civil rights or women's rights "agendas," they call them "movements." Agenda is pejorative, pertaining to "underlying intentions"; whereas movement directly refers to the act of changing, and in other fields such as music indicates a progression or forward dynamic. Portraying gay people in media could have an advertising "agenda" (e.g. they have an intention of selling things by appearing gay friendly or progressive with respect to modern culture rather than an intention of advancing gay rights), but are still progressive in that media portrayals of gay people actually is a change, or forward progression, for a minority group.

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Edit: Woah, my mistake! I thought you were responding to my statement above. My apologies. What is the etiquette on HN for this? Is it editing out my comment, which, given my misunderstanding of the context, is irrelevant to your statement?

[ Did you read (critically) the comment I was responding to?

I mostly agree with your statement, except for the implication you may be making that agenda always has this pejorative meaning. It simply doesn't. If you want to understand people, you should not assume that it always does. And we should not police people for choosing to bring the non-pejorative acknowledgement of the fact that groups have purposes and goals.

If LGBT groups did not have agendas, they would not be worth supporting. ]

Hey, no problem. My issue is one of language itself. As someone who takes the english language very seriously, I don't ignore when someone makes the choice to use a particular word. Between our two comments, we have used the following set of words to roughly address the same concept (advancement of LGBT rights): [agenda, movement, purpose, goal]. Of these, only "agenda" has a secondary definition referring to underlying intentions or motives (even consider the word motive - "a reason for doing something, especially one that is hidden").

Writing is an act of art, and reading is an act of interpretation. These secondary definitions come into play when determining what someone means. Agenda is not purely pejorative, and it's true LGBT groups have agendas - they have plans of things to be done - they have motives - reasons for doing something. However, these attributes of LGBT groups could also be described with words that do not have any negative aspects, such as goals, plans, purposes, etc.

>If you want to understand people...

I assume people understand the words they use and intend to use them. If people use words without precision, how can they expect to be understood?

As for etiquette... no idea ha. Made the same mistake myself.

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