Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
(This post starts off talking about trans issues, but that's really just a jumping-off point for a question about language. I'm not soliciting people's opinions about trans issues in this thread)
I've made a lot of posts about transgenderism this year, in the course of which I've had numerous opportunities to debate with our assorted trans-affirming posters. One of my most recent top-level posts was largely concerned with the ease with which one can embarrass progressive politicians simply by asking them to define the word "woman".
In attempting to define this word, several of our resident progressives have independently converged on something like the definition below:
I will concede that, unlike many definitions proposed by trans activists, the one above has the virtue of not being circular. My main objection to the definition, however, is that no other word in the English language is defined this way. We are using the same word for "a person who is X" and "a person who isn't X, but wants to be". The word "billionaire" means "someone with a net worth of $1 billion or more"; it does not carry the secondary meaning of "someone who wishes they had a net worth of $1 billion or more". Likewise "lawyer", "doctor", "soldier" and so on (some of these are even protected terms, and you can land yourself in legal hot water for describing yourself as such without good cause). It strikes me as profoundly odd to use the exact same word for people who are X, and for people who aren't X but who wish they were X.
Yesterday, a second example popped into my head: "entitled". Wiktionary defines it as "having a legal or moral right or claim to something" (e.g. "If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with Mesothelioma, you may be entitled to financial compensation."); in other words, a person who is entitled to X is a person who deserves X. However, in common parlance, the word is often used to mean almost the converse: holding the erroneous belief that you have a legal or moral right or claim to something. (Wiktionary again: "(figuratively) Convinced of one's own righteousness (self-righteousness) or the justifiability of one's actions or status, especially wrongly so [emphasis mine]; demanding and pretentious."
So we have a curious situation where a single word means both "having a legal or moral right or claim to something" and "believing that one has a legal or moral right or claim to something, but erroneously so". In other words, when we criticise someone for being "entitled", what we really mean is that they have a false sense of entitlement. I presume what happened was that someone criticised someone else by saying "he thinks he's entitled to sth" or "he's acting like he's entitled to sth", then over time this got compressed further and further until you can say "I can't stand entitled people" and everyone understands that you mean "I can't stand people who erroneously think they deserve things they don't" as opposed to "I can't stand people who deserve things".
In effect, the word "entitled" is almost a contronym: a word with two meanings which are directly opposed, a word which is its own antonym. (Examples: "dust" which can both mean "to remove dust" [cleaning a house] or "to add dust" [adding icing sugar to a cake]; "sanction" which can mean both "to give approval" or "to impose a penalty upon".) Some of these are only examples because the same word can mean different things in British English and
English (Simplified)American English, but not always. The other obvious example is "literally" which, in common parlance, can mean both "in a non-figurative sense" and "figuratively". A possibly related example is "guilty" which refers to both "responsibility for wrongdoing" and "a feeling of regret for wrongdoing". Notably, one doesn't imply the other: plenty of people who are responsible for wrongdoing don't regret their actions, and plenty of people who haven't done anything wrong nonetheless subjectively feel guilty (so much so that there are at least two different kinds of guilt associated with people who are or may be innocent of wrongdoing).The two definitions of "entitled" aren't quite the same as the two definitions of "woman" offered by our trans-inclusive posters. The two definitions of "entitled" boil down to "he is X" and "he isn't X, but he erroneously thinks he is". For this reason, no one would ever describe themselves as "entitled" under the second meaning of the term. But the secondary meaning of "woman" proposed by trans activists concerns itself not with belief but with desire or aspiration: "woman" either means "she is X" or "he isn't X, but he wishes he was". While there are some rather batty trans-identified males who claim to be literally female (up to and including claiming to be capable of menstruating and similar), the impression I get is that the majority of trans-identified males understand that they are not female. As such, the word "woman" either means "a female person" or "a non-female person who aspires to be female".
Can you think of any other examples of words like this, where a single word in isolation can either mean "X" or "wishes to be X" or "erroneously thinks he is X"?
As an aside, I was curious if the ideological capture of Wikipedia I and others have been complaining about for years extends to Wiktionary. The website offers the following definitions of the word "woman":
None of which seem trans-inclusive on their face: there's no mention of "a person who identifies as X" or "a person with a female gender identity". The "usage notes" section likewise makes no reference to gender ideology. However, the image used to illustrate the page is a 5x4 grid of thumbnails of various people, including Mother Teresa, Marilyn Monroe, Aung Sun Suu Kyi, Oprah Winfrey... and Laverne Cox, a trans-identified male, who is not a woman according to any of the six definitions above. (Not even #4: Cox isn't married.) In effect, this means that the Wiktionary page for "woman" is not internally consistent: the image it uses to illustrate the concept of a "woman" uses a photo of someone who is not a woman according to the very definitions it espouses! Imagine if you searched "horse" and the definition was accurate, but one of the images used was a photo of a donkey.
More options
Context Copy link