To me, "Latinx" is especially stupid because it's trying to solve the confusion created because English ditched the concept of grammatical gender somewhere about 1000 years ago. Thus, we already have a gender neutral version of "Latino": "Latin".
I have compromised by calling it Xitter*. The unit of communication becomes Xiiit which pleases me because it also captures the quality and tone of the content (oops, nearly typed xontent).
But - a note to you uncultured leftpondians - it is not mandatory that nouns are capable of being "verbed". In fact that is the original crime against the English language that resulted in the British Empire's decision to let the American colonies fend for themselves.
You should be grateful he stopped at one letter. This is a dude who named one of his kids "X Æ A-12" (yes, *of course* I had to look that up -- fun fact, apparently they eventually had to change it to "X Æ A-Xii" because California has at least one law that isn't bananas).
I hadn't heard "office manager" in lieu of "secretary" before, and I won't be using it. It's not good because it's confusing - "manager" strongly implies an authority to assign work and/or discipline employees, which most "secretaries" don't have.
Yeah office manager is a different job, that’s the person that figures out where people are going to sit and calls the hvac company when the heat’s on the fritz. A secretary is someone that takes dictation and answers the phones. An admin is someone that manages your calendar and gatekeeps who gets to talk to the boss. The latter two are somewhat interchangeable, although the actual content of the workday has shifted (more Outlook, less Remington).
I'm actually in the opposite camp when it comes to gender-neutral pronouns. Fiction where a character goes by "they" and sometimes travels in a group or pair introduces enough linguistic ambiguity that I frequently have to go back and re-read paragraphs. Did they come to a decision or did they come to a decision? They left the room in a hurry, but you're still talking to someone, so I guess it must have been the other they. Aagh! I would embrace a set of new gender neutral pronouns if they'd restore some clarity, regardless of how weird it'd be at first.
Came here for this... It's the same exact concept -- Sears Tower and Twitter are what we knew them as for forever, and "Willis Tower" or "X" are not improvements. Want us to call them by the new name? Make the new name a better name.
Yeah! I’ve never stopped calling it the Sears Tower. Is the John Hancock Building still named as such? I am from Denver, and have never stopped calling the football stadium Mile High Stadium.
Same. I don't care they knocked down Mile High and built a new stadium next to it. I will not say "Invesco field" or "Sports Authority field" or whatever surely-doomed company has the naming rights now. Giant corporations can change the name on the building but they can't make us say it. Mile High sounds cool.
Open question. This is a weird “if a tree falls in the woods” situation. But in conversation if someone uses “gypped” and doesn’t think it’s racist. And the listener also doesn’t think it’s racist. Is it still racist?
Basically I’m asking if every human being were wiped out. But books with racist words in them still existed would that mean that racism still existed even if all the people were dead?
Or is racism only something that happens between our ears?
I may be thinking too hard about this(I am. I sell weed. You do the math). But is racism something that exists in the same way trees exist? Or is it just an issue of language? And if it’s an issue of language that means it’s both an issue of saying and hearing. And doesn’t that mean that racism is defeatable by just adjusting the definitions of words to not be racist anymore? Because that’s what we did to create these words in the first place. We just took some phonetic syllables and said “yeah. This is just a bad word for x (not twitter).” And everyone said “yeah sure that makes sense.” But what if we didn’t. What if we took all the bad racist words. Gave them new meanings and normalized them? I know that’s utterly crazy in society. But we make up and change the definitions of words all the time.
Like words are just ways to simplify complex sentiments.
PS: yes changing twitter to x was stupid. But I am cool with it because x is hemorrhaging money and users and that can only be a net positive for society. Back to tumblr and comment sections. I’m not sure the idea of a personal stream of consciousness blog that everyone has all the time was ever really that great of an idea. So watching it die has made me nothing but happy!
I'm not familiar with "gypped" so I wouldn't consider its use to be racist.
Racism is definitely a "between the ears" problem and suppressing or repurposing words deemed to be racist will not cure it. Suppressing words does help with cultural changes away from casual racism - or at least it helped in South Africa (my country of origin) when the word "kaffir" was banned - because that causes people to think about what is about to come out of their mouth. Now that word is a great example of how racist words do not materialize out of thin air; rather a descriptive word gets used in an increasingly derogative manner until that meaning dominates. For "kaffir" is derived from the Arabic "kufir", meaning unbeliever (and which already had a derogative meaning in Arabic).
You'll notice that here I'm happily using a banned word; because we are discussing the word rather than using it to attack another person.
And that is the crunch of the matter - using any words to put other people in a convenient box of one's own construction so that they can be attacked or humiliated is bad. Doesn't matter whether it's on the basis of external characteristics or religious/political affiliations etc. Doesn't matter whether the words are from the "naughty" or "nice" list. Though when people proclaim their own groups it's fair game to attack the actual teachings of those groups.
𝕏 is at least already in our standard fonts on modern computer.
My head-canon for Prince is that he lost the name "Prince" to a contract dispute or something, so it was economic cleverness, because it *worked* and everyone called him "the artist formerly known as Prince" because "Hollow circle above downward arrow crossed with a curlicued horn-shaped symbol and then a short bar" wasn't going to work" was too ridiculous.
I forgot (and have chosen to ignore) that Philip Morris rebranded to Altria and still refer to it by its prior name. I refuse, on principle to call Twitter 'X'. Elon likes to think of himself as a real life version of Daring Danny X and do all sorts of stupid things with the names of his companies/products (remember, he wanted to call the third Tesla model the "Tesla E", to go along with the "s" and "x" models). His trajectory suggests he's the cheap south african equivalent of Howard Hughes: Instead of living out his days in a Sheraton Hotel in Las Vegas, Elon will live on a space station making crank phone calls.
To paraphrase one of my favorite writers: “Criteria” is a plural word; simply declaring it to be singular doesn’t really work. The word you want is “criterion” (though I might use “rule” here).
This strategy of "don't give this guy any oxygen and he'll go away" might work when it's a random nobody like Richard Spencer. It is manifestly not going to work when the person you're talking about is the sitting US President (as in Trump) or the literal wealthiest man in the world (as in Musk). That was the whole point of that cringey 2017 trend of only referring to Trump as "45" - it didn't work then, it's not going to work now, so why bother trying?
Where would MAGA be without Twitter? Ignored. Why do the wealthy and wannabe powerful buy or start their own media? Because they would be ignored otherwise. History shows the authoritarian shines hot and bright but for a short time. Kill its oxygen.
>Why do the wealthy and wannabe powerful buy or start their own media? Because they would be ignored otherwise.
Do you really think nobody would be paying any attention to Elon Musk if he hadn't bought Twitter, or Jeff Bezos if he hadn't bought the Washington Post? Both of these men were already among the most famous men who have ever lived long before they made these investments (plainly borne out by the Google Trends for Bezos https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F011z69&hl=en. - Bezos's peak search came in 2021, 8 years after he bought the Post).
>History shows the authoritarian shines hot and bright but for a short time.
There are innumerable counter-examples. The Soviet Union was extant for most of the twentieth century. China has been ruled by the PRC essentially since the end of the second world war. Iran has been an Islamic republic for nearly fifty years. The Bolivarians have been in charge of Venezuela for two decades.
Also curious to know in what sense Musk is an "authoritarian".
I'm sceptical, given that only a minority of Americans use Twitter, most of them use it infrequently, and Twitter users are more than twice as likely to vote Democrat as Republican (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-users/). Trump's election in 2016 is largely (though not solely) attributable to legacy media giving him free publicity by constantly complaining about how awful and wretched he is.
To me, "Latinx" is especially stupid because it's trying to solve the confusion created because English ditched the concept of grammatical gender somewhere about 1000 years ago. Thus, we already have a gender neutral version of "Latino": "Latin".
I have compromised by calling it Xitter*. The unit of communication becomes Xiiit which pleases me because it also captures the quality and tone of the content (oops, nearly typed xontent).
But - a note to you uncultured leftpondians - it is not mandatory that nouns are capable of being "verbed". In fact that is the original crime against the English language that resulted in the British Empire's decision to let the American colonies fend for themselves.
I'm also still transitioning... my preferered pronouns are TwitterX
In Spanish, this really makes sense :D
LOL
You should be grateful he stopped at one letter. This is a dude who named one of his kids "X Æ A-12" (yes, *of course* I had to look that up -- fun fact, apparently they eventually had to change it to "X Æ A-Xii" because California has at least one law that isn't bananas).
Oh my god that's true. The poor kids. This guy is just something else. He should not have that much money and that much power that's for sure.
I hadn't heard "office manager" in lieu of "secretary" before, and I won't be using it. It's not good because it's confusing - "manager" strongly implies an authority to assign work and/or discipline employees, which most "secretaries" don't have.
Around here, they're "administrators".
Yeah office manager is a different job, that’s the person that figures out where people are going to sit and calls the hvac company when the heat’s on the fritz. A secretary is someone that takes dictation and answers the phones. An admin is someone that manages your calendar and gatekeeps who gets to talk to the boss. The latter two are somewhat interchangeable, although the actual content of the workday has shifted (more Outlook, less Remington).
Seems bad for similar reasons.
Clerical officers in these parts
As all of us aging nerds know, there is one and only one true X.
https://x.org
First thing I thought of was the band X from Los Angeles. Now that was something. Great music, great attitude.
I liked them a lot, too. But I wanted to play on X.com vs X.org.
As I noted here (https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/p/prophet-song-and-psycho-political), "Twitter mob" makes perfect sense. "X mob" sounds like a group of people who USED to be a mob, but have since learned the error of their ways.
I'm actually in the opposite camp when it comes to gender-neutral pronouns. Fiction where a character goes by "they" and sometimes travels in a group or pair introduces enough linguistic ambiguity that I frequently have to go back and re-read paragraphs. Did they come to a decision or did they come to a decision? They left the room in a hurry, but you're still talking to someone, so I guess it must have been the other they. Aagh! I would embrace a set of new gender neutral pronouns if they'd restore some clarity, regardless of how weird it'd be at first.
Do we also need to bring back thou/thy for the same reason, since "you" can be either singular or plural?
Hailing from Chitown... SEARS Tower 4EVR 💥
Came here for this... It's the same exact concept -- Sears Tower and Twitter are what we knew them as for forever, and "Willis Tower" or "X" are not improvements. Want us to call them by the new name? Make the new name a better name.
Yeah! I’ve never stopped calling it the Sears Tower. Is the John Hancock Building still named as such? I am from Denver, and have never stopped calling the football stadium Mile High Stadium.
Same. I don't care they knocked down Mile High and built a new stadium next to it. I will not say "Invesco field" or "Sports Authority field" or whatever surely-doomed company has the naming rights now. Giant corporations can change the name on the building but they can't make us say it. Mile High sounds cool.
“The artist formerly known as Prince”
Taf-cap worked well for me during that whole era.
Open question. This is a weird “if a tree falls in the woods” situation. But in conversation if someone uses “gypped” and doesn’t think it’s racist. And the listener also doesn’t think it’s racist. Is it still racist?
Basically I’m asking if every human being were wiped out. But books with racist words in them still existed would that mean that racism still existed even if all the people were dead?
Or is racism only something that happens between our ears?
I may be thinking too hard about this(I am. I sell weed. You do the math). But is racism something that exists in the same way trees exist? Or is it just an issue of language? And if it’s an issue of language that means it’s both an issue of saying and hearing. And doesn’t that mean that racism is defeatable by just adjusting the definitions of words to not be racist anymore? Because that’s what we did to create these words in the first place. We just took some phonetic syllables and said “yeah. This is just a bad word for x (not twitter).” And everyone said “yeah sure that makes sense.” But what if we didn’t. What if we took all the bad racist words. Gave them new meanings and normalized them? I know that’s utterly crazy in society. But we make up and change the definitions of words all the time.
Like words are just ways to simplify complex sentiments.
PS: yes changing twitter to x was stupid. But I am cool with it because x is hemorrhaging money and users and that can only be a net positive for society. Back to tumblr and comment sections. I’m not sure the idea of a personal stream of consciousness blog that everyone has all the time was ever really that great of an idea. So watching it die has made me nothing but happy!
I'm not familiar with "gypped" so I wouldn't consider its use to be racist.
Racism is definitely a "between the ears" problem and suppressing or repurposing words deemed to be racist will not cure it. Suppressing words does help with cultural changes away from casual racism - or at least it helped in South Africa (my country of origin) when the word "kaffir" was banned - because that causes people to think about what is about to come out of their mouth. Now that word is a great example of how racist words do not materialize out of thin air; rather a descriptive word gets used in an increasingly derogative manner until that meaning dominates. For "kaffir" is derived from the Arabic "kufir", meaning unbeliever (and which already had a derogative meaning in Arabic).
You'll notice that here I'm happily using a banned word; because we are discussing the word rather than using it to attack another person.
And that is the crunch of the matter - using any words to put other people in a convenient box of one's own construction so that they can be attacked or humiliated is bad. Doesn't matter whether it's on the basis of external characteristics or religious/political affiliations etc. Doesn't matter whether the words are from the "naughty" or "nice" list. Though when people proclaim their own groups it's fair game to attack the actual teachings of those groups.
I’m just always reminded of this episode of South Park.
https://youtu.be/6i7a0cwyDDw?si=GeO3EvAwVGpX7eIY
𝕏 is at least already in our standard fonts on modern computer.
My head-canon for Prince is that he lost the name "Prince" to a contract dispute or something, so it was economic cleverness, because it *worked* and everyone called him "the artist formerly known as Prince" because "Hollow circle above downward arrow crossed with a curlicued horn-shaped symbol and then a short bar" wasn't going to work" was too ridiculous.
I forgot (and have chosen to ignore) that Philip Morris rebranded to Altria and still refer to it by its prior name. I refuse, on principle to call Twitter 'X'. Elon likes to think of himself as a real life version of Daring Danny X and do all sorts of stupid things with the names of his companies/products (remember, he wanted to call the third Tesla model the "Tesla E", to go along with the "s" and "x" models). His trajectory suggests he's the cheap south african equivalent of Howard Hughes: Instead of living out his days in a Sheraton Hotel in Las Vegas, Elon will live on a space station making crank phone calls.
Now that you mention it, can we go back to calling Austrians Huns?
To paraphrase one of my favorite writers: “Criteria” is a plural word; simply declaring it to be singular doesn’t really work. The word you want is “criterion” (though I might use “rule” here).
Can we also stop saying “Elon?” Like make him cease to exist by ignoring him?
Because that worked so well for "45".
When has he ever been ignored? Quite the contrary.
This strategy of "don't give this guy any oxygen and he'll go away" might work when it's a random nobody like Richard Spencer. It is manifestly not going to work when the person you're talking about is the sitting US President (as in Trump) or the literal wealthiest man in the world (as in Musk). That was the whole point of that cringey 2017 trend of only referring to Trump as "45" - it didn't work then, it's not going to work now, so why bother trying?
Where would MAGA be without Twitter? Ignored. Why do the wealthy and wannabe powerful buy or start their own media? Because they would be ignored otherwise. History shows the authoritarian shines hot and bright but for a short time. Kill its oxygen.
>Why do the wealthy and wannabe powerful buy or start their own media? Because they would be ignored otherwise.
Do you really think nobody would be paying any attention to Elon Musk if he hadn't bought Twitter, or Jeff Bezos if he hadn't bought the Washington Post? Both of these men were already among the most famous men who have ever lived long before they made these investments (plainly borne out by the Google Trends for Bezos https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F011z69&hl=en. - Bezos's peak search came in 2021, 8 years after he bought the Post).
>History shows the authoritarian shines hot and bright but for a short time.
There are innumerable counter-examples. The Soviet Union was extant for most of the twentieth century. China has been ruled by the PRC essentially since the end of the second world war. Iran has been an Islamic republic for nearly fifty years. The Bolivarians have been in charge of Venezuela for two decades.
Also curious to know in what sense Musk is an "authoritarian".
>Where would MAGA be without Twitter? Ignored.
I'm sceptical, given that only a minority of Americans use Twitter, most of them use it infrequently, and Twitter users are more than twice as likely to vote Democrat as Republican (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-users/). Trump's election in 2016 is largely (though not solely) attributable to legacy media giving him free publicity by constantly complaining about how awful and wretched he is.
"Elmo"
:wheeze:
"Twitter is no more; it has ceased to be... It crossed to the other side of the curtain and joined the choir invisible.
This is an X Twitter."
Someone had to say it.