My innate curiosity, coupled with my lack of psychic abilities, means I spend a frustrating amount of time trying to understand people’s motivations. Why do people eat mint-chocolate ice cream? Why does anybody find Ibram X Kendi’s ideas compelling? Why is The Bachelor popular eneough to be on its 26th season?
This is literally all part of the plan. The more they can alter people's individual thought pattern to conform to __their__ standard, the easier it is to push them to implement __their__ agenda for them.
It took me a long time to figure out that the basis of this idiotic new rule is that "field" as in "field of endeavor" or "field of study" could sound to some extremely limited minds like "cotton field."
The mind reels.
the stupidity of this is unfathomable.
On the other hand, the announcement opens with "we would like to share ..." which I find extremely offensive, "share" being used for any one of many clearer expressions, like, oh, "announce" or "tell" or "say." This is, along with such phony-warmth therapy-speak like "reach out" and "moving forward" another abuse of language and is much more directly offensive than any feigned polysemy of "field."
"On the other hand, the announcement opens with "we would like to share ..." which I find extremely offensive."
Haha, I'm completely with you. I'll start drafting a letter demanding an apology for this micro aggression.
I'm not sure what it ways about how far down this rabbit hole I am, but I picked up the issue immediately. It's just so insane though. Surely the same logic must apply to "chain", "whip," "cotton," "barefoot," "auction," the list is endless.
When I was writing on braintrust's site that almost all their job postings required living in the USA I got dinged for "negativity"; one of their people messaged me with
"I am reaching out to share ..." (the site guidelines).
I got her online and demanded to know what I had violated, which of course I had not. Half the people on there seeking work live outside the USA yet they boasted about being global.
Anyway her opening sentence made about as much sense as a canary.
I recently saw a whole article on medium insisting that no one should ever use the phrase "Low-hanging Fruit" because it refers to lynched black people. This can't possibly be true, as the song "Strange Fruit" was not written until a half century after the first recorded use of the phrase "low hanging fruit".
The crazy thing is that the author, who is black, admits that she was never bothered by the phrase until someone informed her of the "historical" connection between the two phrase--a connection which cannot possibly exist.
"I recently saw a whole article on medium insisting that no one should ever use the phrase "Low-hanging Fruit" because it refers to lynched black people."
One of the first articles I ever read on Medium was a list of words and phrases with a "gnarly racist history" including "Hip Hip Hooray" and "grandfather."
'Low-hanging fruit' has *always* referred to easy-to-accomplish tasks and dates back to 17th century England, a time period known for its brutality but not, to my knowledge, lynching black people:
Some wokeiac on Medium made a spurious connection between the phrase and the Billie Holliday song. Which is the sort of dumbass writing you lampooned awhile back with an article calling out wokies trying to find racism in everything.
Methinks the graduates of USC's School of Social Work will be spectacularly unprepared to do actual social work in the real world, if they ever manage to or are forced to burrow out of their protective academic cocoon at some point in their lives.
I, for one, do not find this sort of stupid pandering found in USC's "field" letter harmless or well-intentioned. It takes time, energy, resources, and focus from real problems; it is a distraction, and distractions can be fatal. Letters such as these burnish the author's or institution's social justice credentials, the proverbial box-checking, while further damaging the souls (and careers) of those unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of this nonsense.
This isn't innocent; this is part of the calculated destruction of the minds and spirits of the next generations who will be spit out from the maw of the academic meat grinder utterly unprepared to deal with life, unable to distinguish fact from fiction, schooled to react to certain triggers with certain behaviors like Pavlovian dogs, completely unaware that they have been led by their noses to their own self-destruction, suffocated by the mantle of universal victimhood.
"If you aren't certain of the gender of the person you are referring to, you should use th—"
(slams palm on table, startling everyone)
If this keeps up we may as well go back to grunts and groans. In some places a perfunctory "good morning" is answered with a haughty "that's a matter of opinion. Don't be so *subjective*." Not joking.
"It takes time, energy, resources, and focus from real problems; it is a distraction, and distractions can be fatal."
I couldn't agree more. As I saiid to Angel, there's this narcissistic contingent of activists doing more harm than good across the board at the moment. It's infuriating.
I think these things can be both semi-well intentioned but also self-aggrandizing. Basically, I think certain groups of people are in competition with each other to discover new offenses and eliminate them. This is a way to show off their superior intellectual skills and emotional perception and social awareness, hunting out undiscovered cases of racism/sexism and pointing them out. Whoever can find more of these ‘offenses’ and come up with credible intellectual reasons (within their social group) why they are offenses is the best at detecting and eliminating injustice, or so they think. It’s a competition and a way of showing off who is the smartest but I think they think of it as doing something good for the world.
Therefore, in this narrative, in order for this activity to be good it must be needful. For it be needful, these words must be harmful. For them to be harmful, they must be hurting minorities. I don’t think these people are really thinking through the psychological consequences of the narrative they are constructing, that black people are going to get traumatized left and right by hearing the world field.
I think that is what gets me most about this mentality, no matter how much the people doing these things claim they are about other people it is always about them. Making themselves look good, making themselves feel better. Somehow even ‘centering’ everything around the newest flavor of oppression always comes back around to elevate the status of the person claiming to center others inside their work within their social group.
And I do think these people both don’t understand that and are also incapable of stopping themselves. They don’t know how to turn off the social competition button or how to stop making everything about themselves. They can’t understand the feelings of other people outside their bubble no matter how much they bang on about empathy, because they only understand that word in the academic way it’s used inside their social circle. They only understand it to mean what it is supposed to mean in their peer group, it must only lead to the results and thoughts that are approved of.
Basically tl;dr, it’s not about black fragility but elite fragility. They can’t step outside their comfort zone. This is how they were raised. This is what they are going to do. They can’t step outside themselves to see what they are doing. They were probably raised from birth to be hyper-competitive and also to network compulsively, to be in good social standing with their peers. To always be trying to sharpen their intellect. Classic rich people/elite things. Though I’m sure some of the people doing this weren’t raised rich, they are the academically gifted and ambitious who grew up mimicking the social norms of the other good students, who probably did come from better off families.
If they step out of their social lane they know they will be swiftly and intensely punished, so they don’t dare. Maybe at a certain level they know that but they think it’s for the greater good, I don’t know. People are complicated and sometimes things happen for many conflicting reasons at once. I think in this case it’s a mixed bag that probably varies from person to person.
"Basically, I think certain groups of people are in competition with each other to discover new offenses and eliminate them."
Yep, this is exactly what I think is going on. That's why it's all become so abstract. It's not intended to make anything better, it's intended to win a game. Or at least to score points. This is what I meant when I said that I can't see it as anything but self-serving.
I really wish it was this dumb, but it is a very carefully calculated systemic process created by Marxists to undermine all English speaking societies as there are no Marxist English speaking society yet, though Canada and Australia seem in a race to be first.
Some thoughts on demanding word choices that are not normal. I think back to Marine Corps boot camp where we were required to speak in the third person and the first and last words were Sir.
"Sir! The private requests permission to speak to the drill instructor, Sir!"
"Speak slime."
"Sir! The private requests permission to make a head call, Sir!"
"Is it an emergency head call?"
"Sir! Yes Sir!"
"Sound off like an emergency vehicle."
"Awwwwwwww, awawwwwww..." while running to the head.
You were constantly reminded of who you were subservient to and were stripped of your personhood. There was no I or me and Zeus help you if you referred to the drill instructor as you. "A ewe is a female sheep." The first person who called the drill instructor you became his sheep dog and was required to run on all fours to bite the next offender on the ass. Unhappy about the task, it was what must have been a painfully hard bite, and no one used the word you again.
The current word and pronoun foolishness has the same, you must submit to me or else aspect but does not have the virtue of inspiring conciseness in the parts that were the purpose of speaking, indeed, it is an Orwellian destruction of speech allowing thought in thoughtfulness of what is relevant. Think about not offending someone unintentionally instead of clear expression in the exchange of ideas. But perhaps they were on to something with the elimination of pronouns.
"The current word and pronoun foolishness has the same, you must submit to me or else aspect"
I think what offends me most about the current foolishness is that it demands that I say or support thins that I believe are false and/or stupid. I really do try to be kind with my words, but nobody gets control of my tongue to that degree.
There was an article in Washington Post about some "nonbinary" fool who buys used copies of Rowling's books and takes them apart, rebinding them with her name removed.
O Brave New World.
It was unreadable. The writer dutifully referred to him as "they" and it was like text written by hitting word suggestions on a cell phone message app.
I am trying to imagine being so deranged to devote days, weeks, of one's life defacing books because the writer wrote something "hurtful" about "trans." I saw a side-by-side of what Rowling actually tweeted and the hate-posts she got for it. Her statements didn't budge the meter, they were scientifically accurate; the responses were murderous. If I were stuck in an elevator with one of those people responding to her, only one of us would get out.
That you (inadvertently?) use "believe" suggests that you're already infected.
You're talking about things we know to be false or stupid. For example to accept that gender impersonation is actually a transformation is at the level of creation myths or geocentrism.
You bring back memories of my own sojourn at Parris Island all those years ago…
I only did 4 years, and have memories good and bad but looking back at it with a benefit of a few decades of hindsight, I must say that my time in the Marines was where I best saw real diversity and inclusion put into practice in a meaningful way, probably not even intentionally, and certainly not for virtue signaling purposes. The drill instructors had to take people from all over the world and every walk of life of different religions and cultural backgrounds and melt them into a single cohesive fighting force. They would hurt some feelings along the way but I think they did a damn fine job of it and we all learned to get along and work together regardless of any of our multiple identities.
Semper Fi back to you brother. I just did four years too, but they were in decidedly formative years of my life.
In Vietnam a dark green Marine who didn't especially like light green Marines went in harm's way for me as a brother without regard for the tint of our green. More meaningful in those turbulent years than any diversity training I received years later.
Man you are bringing back memories...I had totally forgotten about dark green and light green....but yes, we achieved real diversity, real unity, real brotherhood without having it shoved down our throat by a bunch of academics who think it's a good idea in theory...from their gilded castles where they live out their segregated lives.
Blessings to you for a long, prosperous, and healthy life!
PS:My brother-in-law, Dennis Malvasi, served two tours in Nam with the USMC infantry. The first was hell....his unit largely obliterated; the second one comparatively a cakewalk. I have learned a lot from him.
This treatment of new recruits goes back thousands of years.
I live my life here in a language without pronouns. There is one for "I" (tôi) that is the default and at my age I am safe using it all the time but a child would almost never use it. As with Chinese, most "pronouns" are words like uncle, nephew, son, grandmother .... and there are others. I am called brother or grandfather. The generic "you" as in advertising is bạn, friend. One's own first name or nickname can be used as 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person.
My teacher in the USA didn't know his own father's actual name until he was fourteen.
In Thai the word Pee is placed before an elder's name (older brother or sister) and Nung for younger brother or sister. It is not literally brother or sister; I am addressed as Pee Dave by people unrelated. Thanks to the more comfortable life my wife has lived in America she aged better than her sisters and people who don't know tend to call her younger sister pee saao and my wife noong saao, much to her sister's chagrin.
The language is full of words formed around relationships of age or status. Men always put the polite word krap at the end of a sentence. Women put khah. A sexual gender reference to themselves. Leaving that out is often considered rude, especially when speaking to someone who is not close in relationship rather than absurd like trying to make Spanish genderless with the word Latinx.
This is cool; I'm not surprised that relative age and status are part of the Thai language, this is so for every Asian language I know anything about. But the spoken period is news to me, like when I send a text message talking to my watch; "where are you question mark." "I'll call in an hour period."
I took a year of Cantonese before I learned Vietnamese, not very fluent in the former but I learned a lot of phrases and I can go to a Chinese restaurant and use the idiom that means I can eat real Chinese food and I am comfortable with chopsticks. But as with Russian and Italian, it's fading away.
Anyway I've seen Chinese who meet someone do a quick almost ritualistic exchange to establish how they address each other. Their faces go completely expressionless while they do it. I'm pretty sure Vietnamese do it too; in my case they ask my age, I answer "sáu mươi tám tuổi" 68 years old, and I get "ông," grandfather. Thanks a lot. Anyone younger can be "em" though I have some leeway there. It's all relative to your own age, not by the other's age as I used to think.
There are two words for uncle, depending on whether the other is older or younger than your father. Ho Chi Minh is Bác Hô, older uncle, not grandfather, more familial than maximal deference. It sounds complicated but it becomes second nature after a while.
I think the idea of replacing "field" with "practicum" is that academics feel the need to play mind games to ensure that their work is completely incomprehensible unless you've paid for the ticket & joined the club.
I'm just waiting for someone to try growing something useful (carrots, perhaps?) in a practicum...
Growing up with a severe stutter (now largely gone) I was in constant pain of humilation and sought to compensate by drawing attention to my intellect. I would take every chance I could to display how smart I was, and later I hated myself for doing things like that and made a point of always choosing words for accuracy, never to impress.
And as many here doubtless know, we tend to despise most in others what we despise about ourselves; Wm. F. Buckley probably had the most dog-eared thesaurus in history, and on Firing Line his eyebrows would shoot up every time he managed to work in an unfamiliar word. I hated him.
But don't think this dumb-as-hell name change is to sound smart. I think it comes from the same moronic "inclusiveness" that gives us gems like "euronormative phallocentricity" and "cisnormativity."
Idiots. Idiots. Idiots.
I will defiantly go on using the generic "he" to compensate.
My mother couldn't stand Buckley either, and always referred to his "$64,000" words. She was no dummy either, she read a lot and had a much better vocabulary than most Americans, but she wasn't a pretentious ass about it.
Neither have I, but okay, let's embrace it... "'Practicum' slaves were different from 'house slaves' in that the former performed backbreaking work in the practica picking cotton and singing spirituals about how hard it was to work in a practicum.
I'll be practicuming <----Beavis & Butthead snigger--- questions later. Please join us for next week's lecture by a physicist who will address the newer question in woke scientific corners: Is Unified Practicum Theory Racist? Including its implications for gravity and magnetic practica.
I've never found Carlin to be bearable as a standup comic. He was much better at quotable quips; I never watched one of his standup routines all the way through, though it only takes one to see why he had heart attacks.
That one was in grotesquely poor taste, just a string of racial epithets and not funny at all. Yes some young black people refer to each other with the N word but it's absolutely verboten in anyone else's mouth. I wish they would stop.
"He was much better at quotable quips; I never watched one of his standup routines all the way through, though it only takes one to see why he had heart attacks."
Yeah, this is a good point. Actually I don't think I've ever watched one of his specials in its entirety either. And while I'd seen the second half of this before, I hadn't seen the list of slurs at the beginning. Pure shock-bait. Pretty disappointing really.
I'm with you on Carlin, he was better in small bite-sized humor chunks. He was, in his day, more like a fouler-mouthed Jerry Seinfeld when he wasn't talking about politics.
A few weeks ago I saw a list of forbidden words from Stanford. Most of them were completely absurd. It struck me that there are a lot of people who will dutifully follow such lists and will sound like complete idiots, and this at the recommendation of a university that costs $70,000 a year to attend,
I have no desire to electively hurt others’ feelings but this stuff has gone way too far. And when it extends to abhorrent grammar like “they” for a single person, I absolutely refuse to go along. Yet there are workplaces where I could be fired for that.
It was in 1967 living in Spain that my mother remarked about Spaniards referring to a “disabled” person as a “cripple.” This stuff didn’t start all that recently.
A little of this is okay; I have never used the N word, never will, but rigorous application of these silly rules deprives language of texture.
I become legally deaf in the 7th piano octave which means that I can still enjoy the fundamental frequencies of most musical instruments but often find it difficult to understand human speech, so I usually have closed caption turned on. The closed caption censors also find some words worse than others. In keeping with the original thought of this commentary, you might find their apparent criteria interesting if you didn't have CC on when you watched it.
I must also mention that this is golden, "It's a feature of a lot of activism right now that a few narcissists do more harm than good for everybody else unlucky enough to share a demographic with them."
And autocomplete on cell phones will never suggest such above-the-fold words as "shit" much less "fuck," no matter how many times I use them, and I use them a lot.
I could see these being disabled by default but it defeats the whole purpose when I keep having to change ship and duck back to what I clearly intended.
That's strange, I find those words popping up in my auto correct even when I don't use them. I was terrified that someday I might miss it when that happens, and accidentally send an obscene message to a female student. (which would probably have gotten me fired.) On the other hand it once changed a message from my wife saying "you can thank me later" to "you can fuck me later", which was a pleasant bit of banter.
Having tonsilitis three times a year until I was 25 left me hearing-impaired as well; unless the latter is near the bottom of its range, I can no longer distinguish an oboe from an English horn. Yours however might be worse, masking the overtone difference between an oboe and a clarinet.
My right ear is useless for understanding speech and a few times in my life people have thought I was giving off some attitude because they would speak to me on my right and thought I was ignoring them.
I read lips very well, and when I was studying Cantonese I would even understand its speakers on the other side of a noisy room. But if I don't see a speaker's face my comprehension drops sharply.
I don't read lips that well but the pandpanic showed me that I do rely on it. I don't know how many times I've said "I'm sorry but I have no idea what you are saying" over the past couple of years thanks to the muzzles.
This is literally all part of the plan. The more they can alter people's individual thought pattern to conform to __their__ standard, the easier it is to push them to implement __their__ agenda for them.
It took me a long time to figure out that the basis of this idiotic new rule is that "field" as in "field of endeavor" or "field of study" could sound to some extremely limited minds like "cotton field."
The mind reels.
the stupidity of this is unfathomable.
On the other hand, the announcement opens with "we would like to share ..." which I find extremely offensive, "share" being used for any one of many clearer expressions, like, oh, "announce" or "tell" or "say." This is, along with such phony-warmth therapy-speak like "reach out" and "moving forward" another abuse of language and is much more directly offensive than any feigned polysemy of "field."
"On the other hand, the announcement opens with "we would like to share ..." which I find extremely offensive."
Haha, I'm completely with you. I'll start drafting a letter demanding an apology for this micro aggression.
I'm not sure what it ways about how far down this rabbit hole I am, but I picked up the issue immediately. It's just so insane though. Surely the same logic must apply to "chain", "whip," "cotton," "barefoot," "auction," the list is endless.
When I was writing on braintrust's site that almost all their job postings required living in the USA I got dinged for "negativity"; one of their people messaged me with
"I am reaching out to share ..." (the site guidelines).
I got her online and demanded to know what I had violated, which of course I had not. Half the people on there seeking work live outside the USA yet they boasted about being global.
Anyway her opening sentence made about as much sense as a canary.
I struggled with that too. I had to look up the word, decide that I would never have a use for it.
I reflect sometimes as the years wind down about my watashiato, thinking about how many I once knew are no longer with us.
I am filled with etterath.
But, inconclusively, I am left with only agnosthesia.
I'll see your practicum and raise you one kuebiko.
The tome for reflective and sorrowful lexophiles: https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Obscure-Sorrows-John-Koenig-ebook/dp/B08VJMFFRB/ref=sr_1_1
I figure they'll have to outlaw 'house' next, because if they really knew...
I'm voting for "cotton." I'm shaking just seeing the word on my screen.
Get your cotton-picking hands off that keyboard!
I recently saw a whole article on medium insisting that no one should ever use the phrase "Low-hanging Fruit" because it refers to lynched black people. This can't possibly be true, as the song "Strange Fruit" was not written until a half century after the first recorded use of the phrase "low hanging fruit".
https://medium.com/afrosapiophile/do-your-colleagues-use-the-phrase-low-hanging-fruit-f8d1e7f8ae3b
The crazy thing is that the author, who is black, admits that she was never bothered by the phrase until someone informed her of the "historical" connection between the two phrase--a connection which cannot possibly exist.
"I recently saw a whole article on medium insisting that no one should ever use the phrase "Low-hanging Fruit" because it refers to lynched black people."
One of the first articles I ever read on Medium was a list of words and phrases with a "gnarly racist history" including "Hip Hip Hooray" and "grandfather."
'Low-hanging fruit' has *always* referred to easy-to-accomplish tasks and dates back to 17th century England, a time period known for its brutality but not, to my knowledge, lynching black people:
https://digitalcultures.net/slang/low-hanging-fruit/
Some wokeiac on Medium made a spurious connection between the phrase and the Billie Holliday song. Which is the sort of dumbass writing you lampooned awhile back with an article calling out wokies trying to find racism in everything.
People gotta stop believing everything they see on Da Internetz.
Methinks the graduates of USC's School of Social Work will be spectacularly unprepared to do actual social work in the real world, if they ever manage to or are forced to burrow out of their protective academic cocoon at some point in their lives.
I, for one, do not find this sort of stupid pandering found in USC's "field" letter harmless or well-intentioned. It takes time, energy, resources, and focus from real problems; it is a distraction, and distractions can be fatal. Letters such as these burnish the author's or institution's social justice credentials, the proverbial box-checking, while further damaging the souls (and careers) of those unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of this nonsense.
This isn't innocent; this is part of the calculated destruction of the minds and spirits of the next generations who will be spit out from the maw of the academic meat grinder utterly unprepared to deal with life, unable to distinguish fact from fiction, schooled to react to certain triggers with certain behaviors like Pavlovian dogs, completely unaware that they have been led by their noses to their own self-destruction, suffocated by the mantle of universal victimhood.
May God have mercy.....
"If you aren't certain of the gender of the person you are referring to, you should use th—"
(slams palm on table, startling everyone)
If this keeps up we may as well go back to grunts and groans. In some places a perfunctory "good morning" is answered with a haughty "that's a matter of opinion. Don't be so *subjective*." Not joking.
Or the default pronouns can be what I show for my own on Twitter: Hey/You!
Ok that’s funny, but before I bailed off Twitter I blocked most people with profile pronouns and everyone with they/them.
"It takes time, energy, resources, and focus from real problems; it is a distraction, and distractions can be fatal."
I couldn't agree more. As I saiid to Angel, there's this narcissistic contingent of activists doing more harm than good across the board at the moment. It's infuriating.
Rather a lot like some Millennials today. The 'self-esteem' generation...
Field?!? This says to me we could find almost any noun or adjective offensive to someone. Indeed the language game is becoming absurd.
I think these things can be both semi-well intentioned but also self-aggrandizing. Basically, I think certain groups of people are in competition with each other to discover new offenses and eliminate them. This is a way to show off their superior intellectual skills and emotional perception and social awareness, hunting out undiscovered cases of racism/sexism and pointing them out. Whoever can find more of these ‘offenses’ and come up with credible intellectual reasons (within their social group) why they are offenses is the best at detecting and eliminating injustice, or so they think. It’s a competition and a way of showing off who is the smartest but I think they think of it as doing something good for the world.
Therefore, in this narrative, in order for this activity to be good it must be needful. For it be needful, these words must be harmful. For them to be harmful, they must be hurting minorities. I don’t think these people are really thinking through the psychological consequences of the narrative they are constructing, that black people are going to get traumatized left and right by hearing the world field.
I think that is what gets me most about this mentality, no matter how much the people doing these things claim they are about other people it is always about them. Making themselves look good, making themselves feel better. Somehow even ‘centering’ everything around the newest flavor of oppression always comes back around to elevate the status of the person claiming to center others inside their work within their social group.
And I do think these people both don’t understand that and are also incapable of stopping themselves. They don’t know how to turn off the social competition button or how to stop making everything about themselves. They can’t understand the feelings of other people outside their bubble no matter how much they bang on about empathy, because they only understand that word in the academic way it’s used inside their social circle. They only understand it to mean what it is supposed to mean in their peer group, it must only lead to the results and thoughts that are approved of.
Basically tl;dr, it’s not about black fragility but elite fragility. They can’t step outside their comfort zone. This is how they were raised. This is what they are going to do. They can’t step outside themselves to see what they are doing. They were probably raised from birth to be hyper-competitive and also to network compulsively, to be in good social standing with their peers. To always be trying to sharpen their intellect. Classic rich people/elite things. Though I’m sure some of the people doing this weren’t raised rich, they are the academically gifted and ambitious who grew up mimicking the social norms of the other good students, who probably did come from better off families.
If they step out of their social lane they know they will be swiftly and intensely punished, so they don’t dare. Maybe at a certain level they know that but they think it’s for the greater good, I don’t know. People are complicated and sometimes things happen for many conflicting reasons at once. I think in this case it’s a mixed bag that probably varies from person to person.
"Basically, I think certain groups of people are in competition with each other to discover new offenses and eliminate them."
Yep, this is exactly what I think is going on. That's why it's all become so abstract. It's not intended to make anything better, it's intended to win a game. Or at least to score points. This is what I meant when I said that I can't see it as anything but self-serving.
I really wish it was this dumb, but it is a very carefully calculated systemic process created by Marxists to undermine all English speaking societies as there are no Marxist English speaking society yet, though Canada and Australia seem in a race to be first.
Some thoughts on demanding word choices that are not normal. I think back to Marine Corps boot camp where we were required to speak in the third person and the first and last words were Sir.
"Sir! The private requests permission to speak to the drill instructor, Sir!"
"Speak slime."
"Sir! The private requests permission to make a head call, Sir!"
"Is it an emergency head call?"
"Sir! Yes Sir!"
"Sound off like an emergency vehicle."
"Awwwwwwww, awawwwwww..." while running to the head.
You were constantly reminded of who you were subservient to and were stripped of your personhood. There was no I or me and Zeus help you if you referred to the drill instructor as you. "A ewe is a female sheep." The first person who called the drill instructor you became his sheep dog and was required to run on all fours to bite the next offender on the ass. Unhappy about the task, it was what must have been a painfully hard bite, and no one used the word you again.
The current word and pronoun foolishness has the same, you must submit to me or else aspect but does not have the virtue of inspiring conciseness in the parts that were the purpose of speaking, indeed, it is an Orwellian destruction of speech allowing thought in thoughtfulness of what is relevant. Think about not offending someone unintentionally instead of clear expression in the exchange of ideas. But perhaps they were on to something with the elimination of pronouns.
"The current word and pronoun foolishness has the same, you must submit to me or else aspect"
I think what offends me most about the current foolishness is that it demands that I say or support thins that I believe are false and/or stupid. I really do try to be kind with my words, but nobody gets control of my tongue to that degree.
There was an article in Washington Post about some "nonbinary" fool who buys used copies of Rowling's books and takes them apart, rebinding them with her name removed.
O Brave New World.
It was unreadable. The writer dutifully referred to him as "they" and it was like text written by hitting word suggestions on a cell phone message app.
I am trying to imagine being so deranged to devote days, weeks, of one's life defacing books because the writer wrote something "hurtful" about "trans." I saw a side-by-side of what Rowling actually tweeted and the hate-posts she got for it. Her statements didn't budge the meter, they were scientifically accurate; the responses were murderous. If I were stuck in an elevator with one of those people responding to her, only one of us would get out.
Just savage, violently angry shit.
Oh my Zeus! That is deranged.
Dilbert cartoon satirist Scott Adams infamously remarked that facts don't matter. Sadly, in the 21st century, he seems to be correct.
That you (inadvertently?) use "believe" suggests that you're already infected.
You're talking about things we know to be false or stupid. For example to accept that gender impersonation is actually a transformation is at the level of creation myths or geocentrism.
You bring back memories of my own sojourn at Parris Island all those years ago…
I only did 4 years, and have memories good and bad but looking back at it with a benefit of a few decades of hindsight, I must say that my time in the Marines was where I best saw real diversity and inclusion put into practice in a meaningful way, probably not even intentionally, and certainly not for virtue signaling purposes. The drill instructors had to take people from all over the world and every walk of life of different religions and cultural backgrounds and melt them into a single cohesive fighting force. They would hurt some feelings along the way but I think they did a damn fine job of it and we all learned to get along and work together regardless of any of our multiple identities.
Semper Fi
Semper Fi back to you brother. I just did four years too, but they were in decidedly formative years of my life.
In Vietnam a dark green Marine who didn't especially like light green Marines went in harm's way for me as a brother without regard for the tint of our green. More meaningful in those turbulent years than any diversity training I received years later.
Man you are bringing back memories...I had totally forgotten about dark green and light green....but yes, we achieved real diversity, real unity, real brotherhood without having it shoved down our throat by a bunch of academics who think it's a good idea in theory...from their gilded castles where they live out their segregated lives.
Blessings to you for a long, prosperous, and healthy life!
PS:My brother-in-law, Dennis Malvasi, served two tours in Nam with the USMC infantry. The first was hell....his unit largely obliterated; the second one comparatively a cakewalk. I have learned a lot from him.
This treatment of new recruits goes back thousands of years.
I live my life here in a language without pronouns. There is one for "I" (tôi) that is the default and at my age I am safe using it all the time but a child would almost never use it. As with Chinese, most "pronouns" are words like uncle, nephew, son, grandmother .... and there are others. I am called brother or grandfather. The generic "you" as in advertising is bạn, friend. One's own first name or nickname can be used as 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person.
My teacher in the USA didn't know his own father's actual name until he was fourteen.
In Thai the word Pee is placed before an elder's name (older brother or sister) and Nung for younger brother or sister. It is not literally brother or sister; I am addressed as Pee Dave by people unrelated. Thanks to the more comfortable life my wife has lived in America she aged better than her sisters and people who don't know tend to call her younger sister pee saao and my wife noong saao, much to her sister's chagrin.
The language is full of words formed around relationships of age or status. Men always put the polite word krap at the end of a sentence. Women put khah. A sexual gender reference to themselves. Leaving that out is often considered rude, especially when speaking to someone who is not close in relationship rather than absurd like trying to make Spanish genderless with the word Latinx.
This is cool; I'm not surprised that relative age and status are part of the Thai language, this is so for every Asian language I know anything about. But the spoken period is news to me, like when I send a text message talking to my watch; "where are you question mark." "I'll call in an hour period."
I took a year of Cantonese before I learned Vietnamese, not very fluent in the former but I learned a lot of phrases and I can go to a Chinese restaurant and use the idiom that means I can eat real Chinese food and I am comfortable with chopsticks. But as with Russian and Italian, it's fading away.
Anyway I've seen Chinese who meet someone do a quick almost ritualistic exchange to establish how they address each other. Their faces go completely expressionless while they do it. I'm pretty sure Vietnamese do it too; in my case they ask my age, I answer "sáu mươi tám tuổi" 68 years old, and I get "ông," grandfather. Thanks a lot. Anyone younger can be "em" though I have some leeway there. It's all relative to your own age, not by the other's age as I used to think.
There are two words for uncle, depending on whether the other is older or younger than your father. Ho Chi Minh is Bác Hô, older uncle, not grandfather, more familial than maximal deference. It sounds complicated but it becomes second nature after a while.
At a Vietnamese friend's home, he chastised a child for not addressing me as uncle.
You can get in a LOT of trouble not showing proper deference. What did the kid call you?
Dave (what Hoong calls me), rather than an acceptable uncle Dave. Hoong and I are close enough to dispense with that between the two of us.
Mint chocolate ice cream is delicious!
This is basically fighting talk.
Black cherry is not to everyone's taste but I love it.
That's racist as well as derogatory to virgins ;)
You are going to burn.
What else would you do with a witch? :)
Okay, well then I will suggest everyone, but especially black people, remove the words '...whip your ass" from their vocabulary :)
Pretty astonished that "field" got the boot before "chain" or "whip" to be honest.
"rule of thumb" comes from the maximum diameter of a whip to use on a disobedient woman.
Morons will say that the phrase is misogynistic, even though nobody known its origin anymore.
That's almost as dumb as this "field" thing.
Any bets on the lifetime of Masters degree?
I had not even thought of that one. That one must go ;0)
;0)
I think the idea of replacing "field" with "practicum" is that academics feel the need to play mind games to ensure that their work is completely incomprehensible unless you've paid for the ticket & joined the club.
I'm just waiting for someone to try growing something useful (carrots, perhaps?) in a practicum...
Also, bonus, 'practicum' sounds way more pseudo-intellectual than 'field'.
Never use a simpler word or phrase when you can impress everyone with our academic intellectualism with silly jargonbabble.
Growing up with a severe stutter (now largely gone) I was in constant pain of humilation and sought to compensate by drawing attention to my intellect. I would take every chance I could to display how smart I was, and later I hated myself for doing things like that and made a point of always choosing words for accuracy, never to impress.
And as many here doubtless know, we tend to despise most in others what we despise about ourselves; Wm. F. Buckley probably had the most dog-eared thesaurus in history, and on Firing Line his eyebrows would shoot up every time he managed to work in an unfamiliar word. I hated him.
But don't think this dumb-as-hell name change is to sound smart. I think it comes from the same moronic "inclusiveness" that gives us gems like "euronormative phallocentricity" and "cisnormativity."
Idiots. Idiots. Idiots.
I will defiantly go on using the generic "he" to compensate.
My mother couldn't stand Buckley either, and always referred to his "$64,000" words. She was no dummy either, she read a lot and had a much better vocabulary than most Americans, but she wasn't a pretentious ass about it.
Grammarly tells me that my vocabulary places me in the top 1% of writers, and I've never seen "practicum" before.
Neither have I, but okay, let's embrace it... "'Practicum' slaves were different from 'house slaves' in that the former performed backbreaking work in the practica picking cotton and singing spirituals about how hard it was to work in a practicum.
I'll be practicuming <----Beavis & Butthead snigger--- questions later. Please join us for next week's lecture by a physicist who will address the newer question in woke scientific corners: Is Unified Practicum Theory Racist? Including its implications for gravity and magnetic practica.
I have a vast library of books on Quantum Practicum Theory.
I've never found Carlin to be bearable as a standup comic. He was much better at quotable quips; I never watched one of his standup routines all the way through, though it only takes one to see why he had heart attacks.
That one was in grotesquely poor taste, just a string of racial epithets and not funny at all. Yes some young black people refer to each other with the N word but it's absolutely verboten in anyone else's mouth. I wish they would stop.
"He was much better at quotable quips; I never watched one of his standup routines all the way through, though it only takes one to see why he had heart attacks."
Yeah, this is a good point. Actually I don't think I've ever watched one of his specials in its entirety either. And while I'd seen the second half of this before, I hadn't seen the list of slurs at the beginning. Pure shock-bait. Pretty disappointing really.
I'm with you on Carlin, he was better in small bite-sized humor chunks. He was, in his day, more like a fouler-mouthed Jerry Seinfeld when he wasn't talking about politics.
I wrote the interim Dean of this school about this. He is at vpapadop@usc.edu.
A few weeks ago I saw a list of forbidden words from Stanford. Most of them were completely absurd. It struck me that there are a lot of people who will dutifully follow such lists and will sound like complete idiots, and this at the recommendation of a university that costs $70,000 a year to attend,
I have no desire to electively hurt others’ feelings but this stuff has gone way too far. And when it extends to abhorrent grammar like “they” for a single person, I absolutely refuse to go along. Yet there are workplaces where I could be fired for that.
It was in 1967 living in Spain that my mother remarked about Spaniards referring to a “disabled” person as a “cripple.” This stuff didn’t start all that recently.
A little of this is okay; I have never used the N word, never will, but rigorous application of these silly rules deprives language of texture.
If not meaning.
"but some words are worse than others"
I become legally deaf in the 7th piano octave which means that I can still enjoy the fundamental frequencies of most musical instruments but often find it difficult to understand human speech, so I usually have closed caption turned on. The closed caption censors also find some words worse than others. In keeping with the original thought of this commentary, you might find their apparent criteria interesting if you didn't have CC on when you watched it.
I must also mention that this is golden, "It's a feature of a lot of activism right now that a few narcissists do more harm than good for everybody else unlucky enough to share a demographic with them."
And autocomplete on cell phones will never suggest such above-the-fold words as "shit" much less "fuck," no matter how many times I use them, and I use them a lot.
I could see these being disabled by default but it defeats the whole purpose when I keep having to change ship and duck back to what I clearly intended.
Yeah yeah yeah First World problems,
That's strange, I find those words popping up in my auto correct even when I don't use them. I was terrified that someday I might miss it when that happens, and accidentally send an obscene message to a female student. (which would probably have gotten me fired.) On the other hand it once changed a message from my wife saying "you can thank me later" to "you can fuck me later", which was a pleasant bit of banter.
Having tonsilitis three times a year until I was 25 left me hearing-impaired as well; unless the latter is near the bottom of its range, I can no longer distinguish an oboe from an English horn. Yours however might be worse, masking the overtone difference between an oboe and a clarinet.
My right ear is useless for understanding speech and a few times in my life people have thought I was giving off some attitude because they would speak to me on my right and thought I was ignoring them.
I read lips very well, and when I was studying Cantonese I would even understand its speakers on the other side of a noisy room. But if I don't see a speaker's face my comprehension drops sharply.
And it's never coming back.
I don't read lips that well but the pandpanic showed me that I do rely on it. I don't know how many times I've said "I'm sorry but I have no idea what you are saying" over the past couple of years thanks to the muzzles.