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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15627 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Also on Stanford's list: "abusive relationship" should be replaced by "relationship with an abusive person", because:

The relationship doesn't commit abuse. A person does, so it is important to make that fact clear.

Firstly, they are breaking their own guide of "Person-First", which is the section just prior to that entry. According to the heading,

"The use of person-first language helps everyone to resist defining others by a single characteristic or experience if that person doesn't wish to be defined that way.

So, shouldn't that be something like "relationship with a person who occasionally makes an action that is perceived as abusive"?

And secondly, in my experience, it really is the relationship that's abusive, where the spiral of negative reinforcements for obsessively pushing each other's buttons cannot be laid at the feet of a single partner.

And secondly, in my experience, it really is the relationship that's abusive, where the spiral of negative reinforcements for obsessively pushing each other's buttons cannot be laid at the feet of a single partner.

This is what gets me. I've seen 0 abusive relationships in real life where it was just a single person doing the abusing. Plenty in movies of course!

The function of these shibboleths is to act as weapons in the culture war. In early stages via identifying friend and foe, in later stages by keeping the plebes in check by forcing them to use one's own convoluted language - as per Havel, a humiliated person is less likely to rebel. As is the person who has been made an accomplice.

So of course person-first language only applies to friends, not foes. It's rapists and racists, not People Who Rape or Person of a Racist Persuasion.

And give it a couple years and the terms du jour will have fallen out of favor.

I'm reminded of the fad for "black bodies" a couple years ago, which remains one of the most dehumanizing things to come off of the euphemism treadmill, which usually just produces ungainly mouthfuls that no one is really asking for.

Yes, that's another aspect of it. It gives those in the know an advantage over the plebs. It is similar to fashion. If we once and for all decided which colours are hip and trendy and which aren't, even the most common rube could be fashionable and that would take away the fashionista's edge.

And just like we can't have fashionable rubes, we can't have moral commoners either. How would our priest caste lord over them?

It goes like this:

-> Invent new euphemism -> zealots use it to gain status among other zealots -> zealots use it to identify allies -> commoners are pressured into using it -> dissidents who won't use it are ostracised -> invent new euphemism.

Highly useful, that.

deleted

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