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What next?
From the Washington Post:
While the clickbait headline on the WaPo’s frontpage refers to “pronouns,” the article refers to “nouns.” These days you must say “343 firefighters died in the World Trade Center on 9/11” because saying “343 firemen died in the World Trade Center on 9/11” is an insult to the memory of all the firewomen who died on 9/11.
Well, maybe, but here’s a more creative idea. From an old iSteve comment:
A suggestion for the new ruling anti-WASP elite: Start a campaign to rename English. Start mocking the name. It’s antiquated, too exclusive, unrepresentative etc. Refer back to the buckles on the pilgrim’s shoes, the powdered wigs etc., link it to ‘English’. No, we need a hipper name that is more representative and inclusive for modern users. Modern International? Common International?
In the past, progressives actually went out and undertook massive reform efforts like inventing Esperanto to have an international language to be more fair. They taught Esperanto widely enough that William Shatner starred in a 1966 horror movie Incubus that was filmed solely in Esperanto. (At the premiere, more seasoned Esperanto speakers hooted at Shatner’s accent, which would seem to be undermining the purpose of Esperanto as a language of mutual appreciation …) Here’s the trailer:
Likewise, Heinlein sci-fi novels from the 1950s often include hints that the characters aren’t actually speaking English, that we are just reading a translation from some more globally-inclusive (or more Solar Systemly-inclusive) future language with a name like “System Basic.”
These days, however, progressives lack that kind of energy. They’re much more into changing names without changing substances.
For example, the dating system we use has traditionally been managed by the Pope and is notoriously Christcentric. Progressives in the past were alway thinking about how to get rid of Christian and monarchical influence by starting over with a new Year Zero, such as with the rationalized calendar and dating system used by Revolutionary France from 1793 to 1805
Today, nobody has the energy to attempt anything like that. Instead, the Good People just rename minor aspects of the system to make a name more sensitive.
(By the way, this is why I prefer the term “Social Media Justice Warrior” to “Social Justice Warrior.” The latter makes it sound like the SMJWs might actually be trying to accomplish something of substance.)
In the 21st Century, for instance, you can tell if somebody is a Bad Person or a Good Person by whether they use the old “B.C. and A.D. ” (Bad Person) or the new “B.C.E. and C.E.” (Good Person).
Doesn’t “B.C.E.” stand for “Before Christian Era” you might ask, so what’s the point?
Oh, no, it stands for “Before Common Era.”
Now, you may wonder what was so “Common” about the era that began in 1 C.E., but you’re missing the point. The point is that you are one of those Bad People.
Perfect time to bring up “Happy Holidays” replacing Merry Christmas in this country. Funny thing about BCE thing is that it still uses birth of Jesus as a starting point.
I do wonder when this type of stuff will end.
Yeah, I remember that part, where Common was born in a manger, and 33 years later, Common was crucified. For God so loved the world, that He gave his one and only son, Common…
Don’t forget that even supposed allies, like the website Atlas Shrugged, uses the Christ-phobic BCE and CE.
Ayn Rand was an unapologetic and militant atheist, so maybe Christ-phobic
I’m waiting for an SJW to demand the unedited footage from the European Space Agency showing all the NAM scientists and engineers: http://bit.ly/1ECgvFU
It’s not that liberals lack “energy.” It’s that the incremental approach is more effective in the long run. Don’t say you want to destroy marriage. Just promote promiscuity and gay marriage until the institution is meaningless. Frame every step in a way that seems like you’re paying heed to the institution, i.e. “Shouldn’t gays have the same respect and rights afforded to heterosexual couples?” Praise monogamy, commitment, etc. while changing the most fundamental thing you don’t like.
Similarly with religion in general. Don’t say “we’re going to destroy Christianity.” The rubes will then fight back. Talk about respect, dignity, the need to obey “civil rights” laws when one runs a business. Say that the Constitution says we must take religion out of schools, not ban pornography, etc. Once you’re only down to practicing your faith only one hour a week on Sunday, it sort of loses its meaning.
It’s mind-control status-signaling horse manure. Tell me why I have to call Bombay “Mumbai” now, but I can still say Bangalore instead of Bengaluru. And I have to pronounce Niger “nee-zherr.” Only Ivy League weirdbeards can keep up with what’s fashionable this week.
The one that really makes me puke is when they put an accent mark on San Jose, California. IIRC the post office is in charge of place names, and they have a rule against accent marks, but that doesn’t stop the Good People. They still pronounce it “Sanazay” though.
Your first clue that doctors are full of crap is how they keep changing the names of diseases and symptoms. It started as scrofula, then became consumption, and is now tuberculosis. Contusions, ecchymoses, eructation, diaphoresis. These all have perfectly good names, but the doctor wants you to not quite understand what he says to the nurse.
http://tumblr.benjamintseng.com/post/100759203666/the-real-reason-brontosaurus-is-now-apatosaurus
The link and url says “gendered pronouns” but the headline on the page itself says “gendered nouns”, which is what the article is about.
Still retarded, but much less so.
Read the ebook “Calendric Dominion” by Nick Land.
Well, at least when it comes to Libs, I think we should refer to them as ‘it’.
I didn’t read the WaPo thing, so it’s really about how you shouldn’t say “firemen” because that disrespects the tragic memory of all the firewomen who gave their lives on 9/11?
My attitude to the PCification of language is that, sure, it's stupid and facile. If the only sexism a society has to worry about is using a masculine pronoun to refer to both genders, then that society's not really sexist. Or if there are worse cases of sexism, it's stupid to focus on something so inconsequential. But it goes both ways: why should sensible conservatives care particularly if the new fashion is to avoid gendered pronouns? Language changes all the time for all sorts of reasons, and it doesn't really affect me in any material way whether I use he or they.Replies: @International Jew, @IBC
BP (before present) tries to get around the obvious problem of BCE and CE. Wouldn’t be so bad if we were discussing eons rather than millenia. The problem is two-fold: people have conceptualized time using the other system and by definition the date is not fixed. I always have to translate the date in order to “see” it.
Actually the article is much more interesting than the irritating headline would suggest. I learned that lots of nouns with feminine -ess endings were coined by Wyclif and Chaucer, including neighboress and singeress. Needless to say, they went out of style long ago, well before the current PC craziness.
My attitude to the PCification of language is that, sure, it’s stupid and facile. If the only sexism a society has to worry about is using a masculine pronoun to refer to both genders, then that society’s not really sexist. Or if there are worse cases of sexism, it’s stupid to focus on something so inconsequential. But it goes both ways: why should sensible conservatives care particularly if the new fashion is to avoid gendered pronouns? Language changes all the time for all sorts of reasons, and it doesn’t really affect me in any material way whether I use he or they.
I think it's interesting that we're supposed to use "Latino" and "Latina", but "Jewess" is considered "offensive".
Maybe Latino/Latina are ok because deference to diversity trumps genderwar? Dunno... But if that's the case, it would be cool if we could appropriate other vibrant Spanish terms like mestizo and mullato (together with their feminine forms!)
Similarly with religion in general. Don't say "we're going to destroy Christianity." The rubes will then fight back. Talk about respect, dignity, the need to obey "civil rights" laws when one runs a business. Say that the Constitution says we must take religion out of schools, not ban pornography, etc. Once you're only down to practicing your faith only one hour a week on Sunday, it sort of loses its meaning.Replies: @David, @Annek
I think you mean sort of like this Guy, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
Perhaps radio-carbon dating will prevail, that is the use of BP ( Before present). With the present being January the first 1950. Too bad it doesn’t work past that date, at least in scientic usage. There’s no AP ( after present), which is pretty inconvenient.
Joking aside, the Holocene Calendar is a good contender. Just add 10,000 years to any date AD or substract 10,001 to any date BC and there you have it. Some call it the Human Calendar. Wait till it becomes popular among Dawkins fans!
As for me, I stick to the true calendar upon which ours rests: the Roman calendar. The founding of Rome happened 753 BC, hence the first year of the Christian calendar is really 754 AUC ( ab urbe condita). That’s all you really need to know.
Careful, you’ll give the wrong people new ideas. We might end up like Turkmenistan back in ’02 where they passed a law renaming all of the months and most of the days. For example, January was renamed after the then president Saparmurat Niyazov. Lots of potential for mischief here.
Countenance, Very funny! Yes, I think we probably all remember Common.
Similarly with religion in general. Don't say "we're going to destroy Christianity." The rubes will then fight back. Talk about respect, dignity, the need to obey "civil rights" laws when one runs a business. Say that the Constitution says we must take religion out of schools, not ban pornography, etc. Once you're only down to practicing your faith only one hour a week on Sunday, it sort of loses its meaning.Replies: @David, @Annek
Death be a thousand cuts.
“You should basically stop using gendered nouns”
What Upworthy hath wrought. This is the Washington Post, for heaven’s sake, and they are deliberately writing dumb-downed headlines to make them seem like a peppy, precocious 16-year-old girl wrote them. They should basically stop. Do I have to point out the irony of how the adverb choice is gendered; it’s signaling “female”? Basically.
“Ethnic pronouns like Latina, however, don’t seem to carry the same stigma as other gendered words.”
LOL, take a trip to the garden of academe. You will find papers in which every latino is rendered “latino/a,” every chicano a “chicano/a.” For 50 pages, basically. I basically don’t understand why the masculine ending takes precedence, even above alphabetical priority.
Run with CE/BCE. Who gets to decide what it stands for? When I write it, I mean Christian and not Common Era, and when I read it that’s what I say too.
“Christian” is a stronger and more vivid word, and it better represents what it refers to: head to head with “Common” and over time it will win out. There’s nothing common about the Common Era for a thousand years and more.
The Christian era didn't start until about 300, after all you can't call an era Christian while the Christians are being thrown to the lions. Or maybe 400 or so when the Church began burning heretics at the stake--yeah that's Christian.
We’ve had such a name for a couple centuries now: Pidgin.
Okay, fellow Sailermates, can you guess the one word our Neo-Overlords of the Multi-Culti-Diversity Fairytale Regime Thought Police will never gender-neutralize?
Give up?
Okay, here you go:
Dominatrix.
Language changes all the time for all sorts of reasons, and it doesn’t really affect me in any material way whether I use he or they.
I suppose it would not affect you in any material way (at least in the short term) if you were required to call the POTUS “Your Majesty” or address minor government flunkies as “Your Lordship”. One of the reasons the American people are so screwed is their laser-like obsession on short-term material things to the exclusion of all else.
There was a time when people understood that the material things came about as a happy byproduct of thinking correctly, and that that the language we use affects how and what we think.
I know you probably think Orwell's ideas about Newspeak are the last word on the subject, but he was simply following the fashionable thought of the time, which was very Whorfian. I, for my part, believe a society is quite capable of being sexist and patriarchal while using gender-neutral pronouns, while a society that uses gendered pronouns is quite capable of being progressive and egalitarian.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @IBC
To a large extent, this battle is being won by a combination of simply shutting down conversation until the language being used is changed, and the motte and bailey strategy, where the motte is "It's courteous to call people what they want to be called, don't you want to be polite?" and the bailey is "You must change the words you use to describe me on a daily basis, as I demand, or you mark yourself out as an awful person worthy only of abuse.".Replies: @Steve Sailer
“No, we need a hipper name that is more representative and inclusive for modern users. Modern International? Common International?”
Ah, but you can already see the jacobin-wing SMJW counteroffensive. “Modern/Common International” is imperialist. It’s trying to wrap the hegemonic English language — it’s just a dialect with smart bombs! — in the cloak of normativity. I’ll see your sensitivity and raise you, good sirs.
“dumb-downed”
Well, that was an own goal as far as typos go. Sheesh.
Oh yeah… Leonard Jeffries. The Era of the 1CE People.
Pronouns are one part of language that is pretty resistant to change. Just a few groups have enforced religiously or ideologically motivated changes in English pronouns: Quakers, Rastafarians, and feminists.
From the article:
Ok… but when referring to a mixed group in Spanish, it requires the masculine form. A man and a woman are Latinos. By progressive standards, this is extremely offensive… but one mustn’t pick at the KKKrazy Glue, so nevermind.
I suppose it would not affect you in any material way (at least in the short term) if you were required to call the POTUS "Your Majesty" or address minor government flunkies as "Your Lordship". One of the reasons the American people are so screwed is their laser-like obsession on short-term material things to the exclusion of all else.
There was a time when people understood that the material things came about as a happy byproduct of thinking correctly, and that that the language we use affects how and what we think.Replies: @jtgw, @NOTA, @IBC
You’re talking to a confirmed anti-Whorfian, I’m afraid. I don’t believe language affects how we think, at least not in any rigidly deterministic way. Rather, language reflects how we think. As long as PC reigns, it will no doubt influence our language use and cause us to use gender-neutral pronouns and so on. But if the political climate changes, I am sure our language will change again to reflect that. You needn’t worry about brainwashing, at least not through this route.
I know you probably think Orwell’s ideas about Newspeak are the last word on the subject, but he was simply following the fashionable thought of the time, which was very Whorfian. I, for my part, believe a society is quite capable of being sexist and patriarchal while using gender-neutral pronouns, while a society that uses gendered pronouns is quite capable of being progressive and egalitarian.
I’m reminded of something I read years ago in Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus To Our House. He noticed how the corporate CEOs were eager to impose modernist corporate headquarters on the public and on their more junior employees but almost invariably called in an interior designer to recreate the wood panelling, leather chairs and artificial fireplaces for the executive suite. A case of “Year Zero for thee but not for me”.
How silly and petty.
Micro-aggressions, meet micro-progressions.
Signal to the entertainment wing. People like Louis C.K. “Why f*** you keep up with that”English English’ crap?” “What you God damn Amish or something?” (Lots more f***s follow). Some tips.
I know you probably think Orwell's ideas about Newspeak are the last word on the subject, but he was simply following the fashionable thought of the time, which was very Whorfian. I, for my part, believe a society is quite capable of being sexist and patriarchal while using gender-neutral pronouns, while a society that uses gendered pronouns is quite capable of being progressive and egalitarian.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @IBC
Orwell’s version of Whorfianism is highly plausible. It’s not about pronouns, it’s about conceptual terms. It’s hard to think and harder to communicate about concepts that we don’t have names for other than “crimethink” or “racism” or whatever. The really obvious example is that our culture has the word “anti-Semitism” but no converse term like “anti-Gentilism,” and, not surprisingly, the latter concept barely exists in contemporary thought. Obviously, that reflect the exercise of political, cultural, and financial power, but there are practical reasons why so much political, cultural, and financial power is exerted to prevent certain simple concepts from entering contemporary discourse.
A.D. means Anno Domini – the Year of our Lord, so it makes sense that as America becomes less Christian it would be less acceptable – he ain’t my Lord! OTOH, using some other calendar only leads to confusion, so we use the same dates but without the loaded suffix. BC (Before Christ) is less loaded. AC is taken. Too bad that Jesus wasn’t really born in the year 1 CE. Most scholarly sources say 2-4 BC is more likely.
The world at large was always "less Christian" when the Western calendar went global. Were non-Christians really ever all that butthurt about the reference? I suspect it was the usual-suspect white academics and professional do-gooders leading the charge.
Tiw, Odin, Thor, Frigga, and Saturn ain't my lords, either. I guess back in the day when Europe was becoming progressively less pagan and more Christian even the educated Christian elite had more pressing matters to attend to than our contemporary great and good seem to have. (Are we going to have to change the days of the week as America becomes less European? Maybe switch out Wednesday to Quetzalcoatlday or something?)
The one that really makes me puke is when they put an accent mark on San Jose, California. IIRC the post office is in charge of place names, and they have a rule against accent marks, but that doesn't stop the Good People. They still pronounce it "Sanazay" though.
Your first clue that doctors are full of crap is how they keep changing the names of diseases and symptoms. It started as scrofula, then became consumption, and is now tuberculosis. Contusions, ecchymoses, eructation, diaphoresis. These all have perfectly good names, but the doctor wants you to not quite understand what he says to the nurse.Replies: @Ed
Like this example?
http://tumblr.benjamintseng.com/post/100759203666/the-real-reason-brontosaurus-is-now-apatosaurus
jimbo slice: “Ah, but you can already see the jacobin-wing SMJW counteroffensive. “Modern/Common International” is imperialist. It’s trying to wrap the hegemonic English language — it’s just a dialect with smart bombs! — in the cloak of normativity. I’ll see your sensitivity and raise you, good sirs.”
The obvious solution is to rename English as Imperial.
Sure, it will discriminate against languages like French and German which were also central languages of empires but those were evil white man empires so no one can raise the issue. If you want to be real fancy you can just rename French as Metric and German as Evil. The American chattering classes will love the opportunity to talk theoretical about using Metric more.
The CE thing was done very cleverly as they were able to use Jewish anti-Christian animus, get even some fairly normal-minded American Jews refusing to use AD/BC, and call criticism of BCE/CE ‘anti-Semitic’, which disarms most opposition since most US Christians are philo-Semitic.
Of course in reality SMJWs are Bad People. Some of their opponents are bad too, inevitably, but mostly we are Good, while they are all Bad.
If they get upset at BC meaning Before Christ, I guess they must be irate with the US Constitution for this sentence:
Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven…
I suppose it would not affect you in any material way (at least in the short term) if you were required to call the POTUS "Your Majesty" or address minor government flunkies as "Your Lordship". One of the reasons the American people are so screwed is their laser-like obsession on short-term material things to the exclusion of all else.
There was a time when people understood that the material things came about as a happy byproduct of thinking correctly, and that that the language we use affects how and what we think.Replies: @jtgw, @NOTA, @IBC
The problem is not the specific change in language, it’s the exercise of power involved in demanding that everyone change their language on a schedule dictated by what the in crowd is saying these days.
To a large extent, this battle is being won by a combination of simply shutting down conversation until the language being used is changed, and the motte and bailey strategy, where the motte is “It’s courteous to call people what they want to be called, don’t you want to be polite?” and the bailey is “You must change the words you use to describe me on a daily basis, as I demand, or you mark yourself out as an awful person worthy only of abuse.”.
George Orwell becomes more and more prescient with each passing year.
The left/KGB truly has taken 1984 as a manual, not a warning.
I am convinced that had Orwell lived through to the present times, he would have abandoned all the last of his leftist ideology, regardless of how much he wished for it. For Orwell, facts trumped ideology.
He would be an anti-leftist man of letters these days. No one who lived through the 20th Century and paid attention could be a leftist unless absolutely evil.
Here’s Yglesias’s plan for raising wages. Is it about forcing companies to raise wages? No. Is it about reducing the labor supply? Nope. It’s about packing people into high-rise apartments:
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/12/7193609/zoning-wage-stagnation
@whorefinder
Those kinds of hypotheticals are unhelpful. And Churchill would have been a member of the BNP!!! Probably not, if you could have transferred his embryo to a womb circa 1980.
re: 1984, I learned something recently that should have leapt out at me when I read the book: Emmanuel Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism is pretty clearly James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941).
We could try using Bishop Ussher’s calendar and have the year 1 start with the Creation. The Left might take it. Probably not. They’d prefer Year Zero from the Khmer Rouge -1975.
This is why I sometimes half-seriously say that modern man has resurrected the old medieval heresy of Nominalism.
The really obvious example is that our culture has the word “anti-Semitism” but no converse term like “anti-Gentilism,”
Antijaphetism – which specifically refers to prejudice against Europeans.
I’m all for renaming English. We have a lot of Indian guys at work who think they’re speaking English but they’re variously at the edge of comprehensibility or beyond it. We need a new word for what they’re speaking.
I think the use of English ‘privileges’ English culture over others.
I think the use of Western Alphabet ‘privileges’ Western culture over others.
I think the use of any written language ‘privileges’ the literate culture over oral culture.
I think we should all return to grunting.
Ugh ugh ugh. Oog. Gah!
Beavis and Butthead are renaissance kids.
I suggest we use H. Beam Piper’s Atomic Era (AE) which has its year zero corresponding to 1942 (the year Enrico Fermi produced the first working nuclear reactor in Chicago). AE dates are religion-neutral, politically neutral, and don’t suffer from the lack of a zero year like BC and AD.
If we shouldn’t use Redskin, as the Washington Post says, why should we use Washington? He owned slaves and killed natives. Maybe it’s unrealistic to expect Congress to rename the city, or Dan Snyder to rename his team, but the newspaper could easily rename itself the Potomac Post in sympathy.
Except Potomac is an anglicized translation of the Indian/Aboriginal/Native 'Murrican tribe that the English stumbled upon in the region. Washington should renamed to what the natives called in their own written language.
Oh wait...they didn't have a written language.
I see your point, though I might note that the previous absence of the word “anti-Gentilism” has not prevented you from deriving the concept and coining a word for it on your own. 😉
But it took me a long time.
“I see your point, though I might note that the previous absence of the word “anti-Gentilism” has not prevented you from deriving the concept and coining a word for it on your own. ;)”
He’s not the first to make that observation or identify that concept and use the word “anti-Gentilism”. Proto-WN writers were doing this in the 20th century; I can remember someone suggesting the word “anti-Gentilism” (maybe in the old Instauration magazine) back in the 1980s/90s and I’ll bet that wasn’t an original suggestion back then, either.
You can suggest all the new words and concepts you like, but if you have no access to the Megaphone, your ideas will never gain any traction in the public mind.
When it comes to.”offensive” language, like gendered nouns and AD/BC, remember: they don’t give a shit about offending you, so why should you care if your language offends them?
Antijaphetism - which specifically refers to prejudice against Europeans.Replies: @Steve Sailer
OK, so the way to get anti-Japhetism into use is to get anti-Hamitism into use first. Maybe Cornel West or somebody like that would want to use it for some reason. Is the ADL going to come down like a ton of bricks on Cornel West? Maybe, but they’d think twice before doing so.
To a large extent, this battle is being won by a combination of simply shutting down conversation until the language being used is changed, and the motte and bailey strategy, where the motte is "It's courteous to call people what they want to be called, don't you want to be polite?" and the bailey is "You must change the words you use to describe me on a daily basis, as I demand, or you mark yourself out as an awful person worthy only of abuse.".Replies: @Steve Sailer
Another issue is that changing the names of things makes everybody, on average, dumber.
Like what’s the name of Calcutta these days? I’m a reasonably well-informed individual, but I don’t what it is anymore. That makes it hard for old people like me to converse with young people who have been taught whatever the hell the new spelling is and have been crypto-indoctrinated that people who use the old spelling are evil.
Ever notice how restaurants still use "Bombay" and "Peking" in their names, rather than the native moniker? That's keepin' it real.Replies: @Lurker, @Brutusale
In the same line, I detest and deprecate the new English spellings of Chinese names & places, mostly because they makes a migraine-inducing chore of reading older histories that use the original English spellings (Tsingtao, Tientsin, Shanghai, Chungking, etc.). For the new spellings I really want to know who's the moron that came up with "Q" to be pronounced as "Sh"? That one certainly took a special, exceedingly perverse sort of genius.
So I still call it Peking. And I still call Burma Burma.
No one ever had a Myanmar Shave.Replies: @International Jew, @Gallo-Roman, @reiner Tor
When I first became aware of it I had no idea that it was the same place as Bombay. So obviously the net amount of understanding had been reduced. Then, when I realised, I asked a few random people at work if they had heard of Bombay (mostly yes), Mumbai (mostly no) and if yes to both, if they knew they were the same place (all no).Replies: @Steve Sailer
I do wonder when this type of stuff will end.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @IBC
When heterogenous America breaks up into its homogenous constituent nations.
My attitude to the PCification of language is that, sure, it's stupid and facile. If the only sexism a society has to worry about is using a masculine pronoun to refer to both genders, then that society's not really sexist. Or if there are worse cases of sexism, it's stupid to focus on something so inconsequential. But it goes both ways: why should sensible conservatives care particularly if the new fashion is to avoid gendered pronouns? Language changes all the time for all sorts of reasons, and it doesn't really affect me in any material way whether I use he or they.Replies: @International Jew, @IBC
“I learned that lots of nouns with feminine -ess endings were coined by Wyclif and Chaucer, including neighboress and singeress. ”
I think it’s interesting that we’re supposed to use “Latino” and “Latina”, but “Jewess” is considered “offensive”.
Maybe Latino/Latina are ok because deference to diversity trumps genderwar? Dunno… But if that’s the case, it would be cool if we could appropriate other vibrant Spanish terms like mestizo and mullato (together with their feminine forms!)
I’ve always been interested in language in the abstract, but never much good at learning actual languages. But I taught myself to speak Esperanto in a month or two while I was in high school. It is amazingly easy to learn! If only I had known someone else who spoke it I might have kept it up.
Oh no! Refreshing my memory via Wikipedia, I see that Esperanto has gendered pronouns. I guess we’ll need to look elsewhere for linguistic justice.
A bigger issue is how pop culture itself has deteriorated since the 90s, when you look at the popular songs from 1997 and 1998 such as At The Beginning and Immortality vs. Shake it Off now.
I had no idea that “Kolkata” was now insisted upon. The Wikipedia page for Calcutta redirects you to the PC name. Why do we need to write Kolkata but it’s perfectly acceptable to write Spain instead of Espana? There’s no consistency, at first blush. This demand that we de-anglicize an anglicization is very strange, until you think about it: cumbersome anglicizations exist, more or less, to annoy and humiliate the old colonial powers.
It reminds me of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin. The comedy of the book consists in the unpronounceable main character, an expat Russian professor, mangling the English language and getting hopelessly snarled up in American mores. It’s all very funny until you try to reference the book in conversation: PIN? POO-NIN? PUH-NEEN? PUNION? Nabokov lets this abused fictional creature take a kind of petty vengeance on the reader.
Jews have their own calendar that started the day G-d created this meshuggah universe. Today we’re in the year 5775. The reason Jews are so rich is many Jews hold notes that have been accumulating interest at 4% for five thousand years.
I prefer “moral crusaders” or “PC moral crusaders”, this makes it obvious that these sanctimonious twerps are nothing new, merely a variation on an old theme.
the website Atlas Shrugged, uses the Christ-phobic BCE and CE.
Ayn Rand was an unapologetic and militant atheist, so maybe Christ-phobic
It reminds me of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pnin. The comedy of the book consists in the unpronounceable main character, an expat Russian professor, mangling the English language and getting hopelessly snarled up in American mores. It's all very funny until you try to reference the book in conversation: PIN? POO-NIN? PUH-NEEN? PUNION? Nabokov lets this abused fictional creature take a kind of petty vengeance on the reader.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
Speaking of which, what’s with the froggy minusculing of “Anglicization”? I understand even OED and/or Fowler’s have surrendered to Napoleon on this. I refuse to Gallicize my orthography!
When I write it, I mean Christian and not Common Era, and when I read it that’s what I say too.
The Christian era didn’t start until about 300, after all you can’t call an era Christian while the Christians are being thrown to the lions. Or maybe 400 or so when the Church began burning heretics at the stake–yeah that’s Christian.
We should rename Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter etc. Muslims might be offended because they don’t believe in those pagan deities. Eurocentric too!
I always thought the term “PC” trivialized things, made it sound like it was just about using different words and had little real life implications. It makes it seem like a marginal issue. “Social justice warriors” tells you they’ll never be happy.
I would like to add that I do like “Social Media Justice Warrior” though. Amusingly trivialising.
I always thought “Zaïre” was PC and annoying, but at least it helped distinguish the Belgian Congo from the French one. Not that anyone ever thinks about the French one.
Ever notice how restaurants still use “Bombay” and “Peking” in their names, rather than the native moniker? That’s keepin’ it real.
I remember a hilarious BBC interview with an Indian journalist about 10 years ago where he kept on saying Bombay while the PC BBC presenter insisted on Mumbai. Her discomfort was a pleasure to behold.
Around the same time I waged a futile email campaign with the BBC and others over their continued use of the term 'Bollywood' while at the same time insisting on Mumbai. If it's not Bombay then clearly Bollywood is incorrect. Except somehow that doesn't apply. I was told that Bollywood was a term in common useage and is therefore OK. Unlike Bombay. Wtf?
This was at the end of a phase in the UK when hipster/SWPLs were required to pretend to like Bollywood films. All long since forgotten of course.
Does it seem to anyone else that the Name Nazis only seem to care about the Third World? Why is it Mumbai or Knee-her-wah-gwah? Why isn't it Pah-ree or Row-mah when speaking of the major metropolises of France and Italy?
My answer to anyone with the audacity to try and "correct" my Peking or Bombay is, we're speaking English, fool!
No Mumbai Sapphire for me!
No, actually Quaker “thou” preserved the old system that everyone else was abandoning.
“343 firemen died in the World Trade Center on 9/11″ is an insult to the memory of all the firewomen who died on 9/11.”
Are you kidding me there where not any female first responders on 9-11 with significant injuries or deaths. While NYC it too PC to admit why if we look at New Orleans with Katrina we see that women abandoned their posts and had feminist organizations try to argue that it be treated like a scheduled leave of absence.
How many woman of the FDNY were killed on 9-11? Hint: in grade school you’re taught you can’t divide by it.
I don’t know. But while we are at it, why don’t we spell German names like the natives? I mean the Germans use our alphabet (save the umlauts). So wouldn’t it make sense to use their names and spellings? They write Bayern, we write Bavaria. They write Wien, we write Vienna. They call themselves Deutsche, we call them Germans.
Ditto for the Italians and many other Europeans.
Don’t forget that even supposed allies, like the website Atlas Shrugged, uses the Christ-phobic BCE and CE.
Not to worry, I think most of us know they are not our friends.
I always use BC and AD online, I want them to know I’m one of the Bad People – it saves time!
The one that ( currently ) gets me is “fishers” for fishermen .
When I hear it I firstly think that the speaker doesn’t know that the plural of fish is fish .
Then I think what if you want to differentiate between the act of fishing and the job of fishing .
Then I think I hope sensible people will decline to use such terminology and hopefully such language will go away .
But I’m not hopeful
Ever notice how restaurants still use "Bombay" and "Peking" in their names, rather than the native moniker? That's keepin' it real.Replies: @Lurker, @Brutusale
Ever notice how restaurants still use “Bombay” and “Peking” in their names, rather than the native moniker? That’s keepin’ it real.
I remember a hilarious BBC interview with an Indian journalist about 10 years ago where he kept on saying Bombay while the PC BBC presenter insisted on Mumbai. Her discomfort was a pleasure to behold.
Around the same time I waged a futile email campaign with the BBC and others over their continued use of the term ‘Bollywood’ while at the same time insisting on Mumbai. If it’s not Bombay then clearly Bollywood is incorrect. Except somehow that doesn’t apply. I was told that Bollywood was a term in common useage and is therefore OK. Unlike Bombay. Wtf?
This was at the end of a phase in the UK when hipster/SWPLs were required to pretend to like Bollywood films. All long since forgotten of course.
Beats me. And I don’t actually care. Oh, wait. It’s Kolkata. Which triggers my brain to think, “Cold cuts.” Will you be free to do lunch?
In the same line, I detest and deprecate the new English spellings of Chinese names & places, mostly because they makes a migraine-inducing chore of reading older histories that use the original English spellings (Tsingtao, Tientsin, Shanghai, Chungking, etc.). For the new spellings I really want to know who’s the moron that came up with “Q” to be pronounced as “Sh”? That one certainly took a special, exceedingly perverse sort of genius.
So I still call it Peking. And I still call Burma Burma.
No one ever had a Myanmar Shave.
The weird new (well, in widespread American use now for 40 years) spelling system, called Pinyin, is widely misunderstood. The old system (Peking, Shanghai, etc) was an effort to render Chinese sounds in the Latin alphabet *and* with the letters corresponding to their usual sounds in English. It's this second piece -- the letter-sound mapping -- that does not obtain in Pinyin. Yes, for most letters it does -- s is still s, h is still h. But q is "ch", x is "sh", zh is kind of a "dj", c is "ts"... This is because unlike the old system, which was devised by Americans for the convenience of English speakers, Pinyin was devised in China with a sort of pan-European audience in mind. And so Pinyin can't be read according to English rules, nor German, Spanish, Hungarian or what-have-you rules.
So actually, if the goal is to pronounce Chinese names as correctly as possible (though here the issue of Chinese dialect comes up) then for English speakers the old system is better. As for Pinyin, I suppose there's the advantage that Westerners from many countries can agree on one set of spellings (though then again I don't know how much Pinyin has caught on in places like France or Germany).Replies: @International Jew, @Ezra, @David R. Merridale
So I don't think there's a problem with the pinyin q. What's questionable is whether English speakers should be using the Chinese pinyin writing system, which was designed for Chinese speakers (mostly Chinese native speakers) and not for English speakers, who get confused because of the different Chinese pronunciation of the same letters.Replies: @Hard Line Realist
Another thing about Mumbai…
When I first became aware of it I had no idea that it was the same place as Bombay. So obviously the net amount of understanding had been reduced. Then, when I realised, I asked a few random people at work if they had heard of Bombay (mostly yes), Mumbai (mostly no) and if yes to both, if they knew they were the same place (all no).
Social-Media Warriors are the streamlined Nexus 6 model of earlier Internet plagues of activism like E-Psychiatrists, E-Lawyers, grammar Nazis, citation Nazis, World Travelers, etc.
When I first became aware of it I had no idea that it was the same place as Bombay. So obviously the net amount of understanding had been reduced. Then, when I realised, I asked a few random people at work if they had heard of Bombay (mostly yes), Mumbai (mostly no) and if yes to both, if they knew they were the same place (all no).Replies: @Steve Sailer
Thanks for polling on Bombay/Mumbai. Nobody ever does this kind of research as far as I can tell. It would be easy to do this kind of study and you probably wouldn’t get in too much trouble politically with the Bombay/Mumbai because you could spin questioning it as leftwing and anti-Islamophobe because the rightist Hindu nationalists did the name change.
For the war on B.C./A.D., the fact that it technically doesn’t privilege Jesus’s purported birth, except by artistic license, only fuels the dread crusade… The secular humanist ambition of 100% transcendental precise justice can be repurposed to any cause, whether inane or cataclysmic; thus with the Jacobins and their metric calendar/clocks — the less practical and less important the reform, the more urgently it must be pursued
The compromise of still using the old numbering system but without the religiously loaded suffix makes sense to me as a decent and harmless compromise that is NOT nuts (like making up a new decimal calendar is). The problem with the calendar is not so much that it starts from the (approximate) birth of Jesus (you have to start somewhere) but that each time you use AD, you are forced to indicate acceptance of Jesus as your personal deity.Replies: @GW, @IBC, @Wilkey, @Gallo-Roman, @Gallo-Roman
“Auntie Analogue says:
““Like what’s the name of Calcutta these days?””
Beats me. And I don’t actually care. Oh, wait. It’s Kolkata.”
Sounds like something served in a greek restaurant.
Kolkata
I first ever heard the word ‘firefighter’ in a Thames TV (UK), local news report circa 1980, so that Orwellian PC usage has been around an awful long time.
At first I didn’t know what the word actually meant, it sounded so strange and unfamiliar. ‘Fireman’ was exclusively used everywhere beforehand. Initially, I thought it meant something like ‘fire-lighter., but only gradually dawned that it was a political, ‘gender neutral’ term for fireman.
Strange that I first heard it on a commercial UK profit driven TV channel rather than the BBC.
One change I don’t mind is “firefighter” because “fireman” was always ambiguous: it also means one who feeds and tends a fire (think steam locomotive, or coal stove in a barracks).
I hate “Mumbai” and “chair” (in place of chairman).
“Social (Media) Justice Worker” is better. The parentheses preserve the obnoxious phrase.
I don’t particularly like it either. I struggle to think of a good alternative that will be readily understood, without naming them with the positive terms they name themselves. Who doesn’t want to be a warrior fighting for justice? However, we know that the “social justice” they want is not justice, so we shouldn’t use their term for it, even using it sarcastically is acquiescing.
The all-time best snottyism is changing the official English name of Ivory Coast to Cote d’Ivoire. Seriously, its racist to say Ivory Coast in English, it must be said in French,.., in English.
Mumbai and Kolkata are stupid, granted. Buuut, English IS actually an official language of India. More than 95% of the time that the names of those towns are pronounced in English, they are pronounced in India. So, Indians do have a stake in how their names are pronounced in English.
Bear in mind, that everyone understands that Burma was changed to Myanmar by a dictatorial government. If you support democracy in Burma, you say Burma, not Myanmar.
The social media justice warriors are really just the last dregs, the epigones, the fourth or fifth photocopy of a photocopy of the original Year Zero advocates. Orwell wrote at the time when the cult of Year Zero was at its height and now we’re here to witness its shabby death. At its peak it gave us some interesting art and architecture but it also gave us Pol Pot. Now at its end it gives us yappy little social media justice warriors so dumbed-down they don’t even know their own intellectual pedigree.
The current Year Zero militants have been taught by Gen X believers in the Year Zero cult, who were themselves dumbed-down by 68ers, who were, in turn, deliberately dumbed-down in order to free us all from the mess made before them. The cure for the damage done by the Year Zero cults of the first half of the 20th century was more but different Year Zero-ism in the second half.
I think this short clip gives us a good idea how we got from the Year Zero daydreams of 100 yrs ago to the shabby “progressives” of today. This captures the thinking around the midpoint :
Kenneth Clark – Hope in today’s youth – 1969 – Civilisation
One world-historical date that we know for sure is the discovery (or “discovery”, for the Leftists) of America in 1492. That should be year zero.
I’m not up on the nuances of what “privileges” what (in my day privilege was a noun) but it sure sounds to me that calling somebody “Our Lord” privileges him. If our common calendar had the suffix “ITYOOPMPBUH” (in the Year of Our Prophet Mohammed Peace Be Upon Him”) would you say that “privileged” Mohammed? Would you want a less loaded suffix?
The compromise of still using the old numbering system but without the religiously loaded suffix makes sense to me as a decent and harmless compromise that is NOT nuts (like making up a new decimal calendar is). The problem with the calendar is not so much that it starts from the (approximate) birth of Jesus (you have to start somewhere) but that each time you use AD, you are forced to indicate acceptance of Jesus as your personal deity.
Bullshit. In Islamic countries I would suspect that they don't make much apology about using the Islamic calendar.
Here's the deal: THEY moved to OUR countries. OUR countries are historically Christian, and use a Christian calendar. We did not decide to impose it on them by surprise after they moved here. We were already using it long, long before any religious minorities, save for Jews, were living here.
Why should we apologize for using an ancient calendar when leftists never apologize for jack shit? Multiculturalism has been sold to us by the Left as entirely a matter of addition - we get our culture PLUS the blessings of a little bit oof new culture. Instead what it increasingly seems to be is a matter of subtraction - we have to remove all the aspects of our culture which might offend them like the Christian calendar, Christmas carols, or even piggy banks.
That is not the mark of immigration - it is the mark of colonization; of them coming here and imposing their culture on us. No thanks.
I am? Well, then, damn good thing Christians don't go around whacking apostates anymore, a lot of us would be in a hell of a lot of trouble!
Anyway, by that logic, every time you use BCE or ACE you're being forced to indicate this acceptance indirectly, too.
I'm not that arsed about BCE and ACE. It doesn't really muddy the waters the way other PC-talk does. It's just silly and pointless, and there's way too much of that going around as is. And no, if the modern world had taken off in the Islamic world instead of Europe, and a calendar dating from the hejira had been adopted as the standard, the only reason sensible people would be objecting to your abbreviation would be because it took too damn long to write.
I am? Well, then, damn good thing Christians don't go around whacking apostates anymore!
Anyway, by that logic, every time you use BCE or ACE you're also being forced to indicate this acceptance, indirectly.
I'm not that arsed about BCE and ACE. It doesn't really muddy the waters the way other PC-talk does. It's just silly and pointless, and we've got enough of that going around as it is. And no, if the modern world had taken off in the Islamic world instead of Europe, and a calendar dating from the hejira had been adopted as the standard, the only reason sensible people would be objecting to your abbreviation would be because it took too damned long to write.
Beida, China’s most prestigious university, still calls itself “Peking University” in English.
In Victorian Era America, words like “cock,”cockroach,” and “purse” were changed to “rooster” “roach” and “handbag” to take any reference to sex out of of the language (purse was the slang word at the time for scrotum). The British had a field day making fun of us for it and our puritanical ways. Political correctness is just latter-day puritianism. Puritanism is an underlying theme running through Ameican history and today it manifests itself as political correctness and as Americans have so much influence in the world it has spread to other parts of the world as well, particularly Europe.
Funny how these Libs bitch and whine about Hindu PC in India but remain silent about Jewish/homo PC that has silenced or destroyed so many careers in the West.
“JackD says:
The problem with the calendar is not so much that it starts from the (approximate) birth of Jesus (you have to start somewhere) but that each time you use AD, you are forced to indicate acceptance of Jesus as your personal deity.”
No, you aren’t being forced to accept that. You are being forced to accept hm as the deity of the civilization into which you were born. You are not required to believe in him. However I see nothing wrong in acknowledging that your forefathers did.
No, “thou” had already been mostly abandoned, and the Quaker version was different: Quakers used “thee” where Shakespeare would have used “thou.”
The compromise of still using the old numbering system but without the religiously loaded suffix makes sense to me as a decent and harmless compromise that is NOT nuts (like making up a new decimal calendar is). The problem with the calendar is not so much that it starts from the (approximate) birth of Jesus (you have to start somewhere) but that each time you use AD, you are forced to indicate acceptance of Jesus as your personal deity.Replies: @GW, @IBC, @Wilkey, @Gallo-Roman, @Gallo-Roman
If our calendar had a suffix referring to Muhammad it’d probably be because we were conquered by jihadists, and it’d actually be the least of our worries. Poor example.
The problem with using “CE,” aside from the fact it is non-historic and one sounds stupid doing so, is that it is something artificially pushed by Jews/secularists in academics on the rest of us. We’ve compromised to them enough. Just because they fail to recognize the kingship of Christ doesn’t mean should.
“If we shouldn’t use Redskin, as the Washington Post says, why should we use Washington? He owned slaves and killed natives. Maybe it’s unrealistic to expect Congress to rename the city, or Dan Snyder to rename his team, but the newspaper could easily rename itself the Potomac Post in sympathy.”
Except Potomac is an anglicized translation of the Indian/Aboriginal/Native ‘Murrican tribe that the English stumbled upon in the region. Washington should renamed to what the natives called in their own written language.
Oh wait…they didn’t have a written language.
In the same line, I detest and deprecate the new English spellings of Chinese names & places, mostly because they makes a migraine-inducing chore of reading older histories that use the original English spellings (Tsingtao, Tientsin, Shanghai, Chungking, etc.). For the new spellings I really want to know who's the moron that came up with "Q" to be pronounced as "Sh"? That one certainly took a special, exceedingly perverse sort of genius.
So I still call it Peking. And I still call Burma Burma.
No one ever had a Myanmar Shave.Replies: @International Jew, @Gallo-Roman, @reiner Tor
“(Tsingtao, Tientsin, Shanghai, Chungking, etc.). For the new spellings I really want to know who’s the moron that came up with “Q” to be pronounced as “Sh”? That one certainly took a special, exceedingly perverse sort of genius.”
The weird new (well, in widespread American use now for 40 years) spelling system, called Pinyin, is widely misunderstood. The old system (Peking, Shanghai, etc) was an effort to render Chinese sounds in the Latin alphabet *and* with the letters corresponding to their usual sounds in English. It’s this second piece — the letter-sound mapping — that does not obtain in Pinyin. Yes, for most letters it does — s is still s, h is still h. But q is “ch”, x is “sh”, zh is kind of a “dj”, c is “ts”… This is because unlike the old system, which was devised by Americans for the convenience of English speakers, Pinyin was devised in China with a sort of pan-European audience in mind. And so Pinyin can’t be read according to English rules, nor German, Spanish, Hungarian or what-have-you rules.
So actually, if the goal is to pronounce Chinese names as correctly as possible (though here the issue of Chinese dialect comes up) then for English speakers the old system is better. As for Pinyin, I suppose there’s the advantage that Westerners from many countries can agree on one set of spellings (though then again I don’t know how much Pinyin has caught on in places like France or Germany).
Addendum: I realized that question is easily answered. I looked up "Beijing" on Wikipedia and then checked the "Read in another language" option. Turns out it's still Peking in French and German (with slight modifications to reflect local spelling). In fact it's still something like "Peking" in most of the major European languages. Hmm.
For us Westerners, the point of transcribing Chinese names is to have *some way* of pronouncing them, not to reproduce the native pronunciation. Natives won't understand you anyway if you don't use the tones, and Westerners aren't going to learn the tones.
With that in mind, here's a "good enough" guide to pinyin:
Q = CH = English CH
X = SH = English SH
J = ZH = English J
C = English TS
Z = English DZ
E = English UH
Notice that the common pronunciation of Beijing with a French-style J is bogus, based on the "foreign words get oddball pronunciations" rule.
Obviously there is a difference between pinyin Q and CH (etc.), but for an English speaker it's not an *important* difference. Polish speakers will recognize them. And there are some funky rules about vowels - e.g., zhi is Jurr not Jee - which you can look up if you care.
On Tuesday in Montgomery County, Maryland (Washington, D.C. suburb), the school board voted to no longer close schools on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Christmas, and Easter, but to still close schools on the days that those holidays happen to occur for reasons that shall never be officially identified.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/backlash-over-montgomery-decision-to-strip-christmas-from-school-calendar/2014/11/12/80766d2c-6a8d-11e4-b053-65cea7903f2e_story.html
The weird new (well, in widespread American use now for 40 years) spelling system, called Pinyin, is widely misunderstood. The old system (Peking, Shanghai, etc) was an effort to render Chinese sounds in the Latin alphabet *and* with the letters corresponding to their usual sounds in English. It's this second piece -- the letter-sound mapping -- that does not obtain in Pinyin. Yes, for most letters it does -- s is still s, h is still h. But q is "ch", x is "sh", zh is kind of a "dj", c is "ts"... This is because unlike the old system, which was devised by Americans for the convenience of English speakers, Pinyin was devised in China with a sort of pan-European audience in mind. And so Pinyin can't be read according to English rules, nor German, Spanish, Hungarian or what-have-you rules.
So actually, if the goal is to pronounce Chinese names as correctly as possible (though here the issue of Chinese dialect comes up) then for English speakers the old system is better. As for Pinyin, I suppose there's the advantage that Westerners from many countries can agree on one set of spellings (though then again I don't know how much Pinyin has caught on in places like France or Germany).Replies: @International Jew, @Ezra, @David R. Merridale
“(though then again I don’t know how much Pinyin has caught on in places like France or Germany).”
Addendum: I realized that question is easily answered. I looked up “Beijing” on Wikipedia and then checked the “Read in another language” option. Turns out it’s still Peking in French and German (with slight modifications to reflect local spelling). In fact it’s still something like “Peking” in most of the major European languages. Hmm.
As has been mentioned, the mass renaming of Chinese place names that occurred in the 1970s is particularly annoying because it makes old books on Chinese history essentially unreadable. It’s much more than Peking/Beijing. I understand this was done because the old spellings were based on the southern Chinese pronunciations, and the new ones tried to express the ‘official’ northern pronunciations.
(Another unzware hickup)
In this case, I think we should respect liberal sensibilities.
In this age of “cisgenderism” and “gender fluidity”, we must never risk the potential faux paus of addressing liberals as “he” or “she”; they should always be referred to as “it”.
The one exception is if a liberal identifies as a feminist. In this case, the liberal should never be called a “woman”; instead feminists should be called “womyn” (singular) or “wymyn” (plural).
Neither should we ever use traditional terms of address for a liberal, to include “Mr.”, “Mrs.” “Miss”, or even “Ms”. Liberals should always be addressed as “comrade”.
I do wonder when this type of stuff will end.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic, @IBC
Yes, I even saw a commercial where a child was wishing Ebeneezer Scrooge “Happy Holidays.” Bah humbug indeed! Instead of fewer public references to a part of the year that actually isn’t particularly special in many or most cultures (Christmas isn’t even the most important holiday for traditional Christians), we instead have even more attention directed at it but with references to the original holiday itself increasingly left out.
I take a little consolation in the idea that this is really just another step in the evolution of Christmas as a business opportunity, and that evolution actually began over 150 years ago with the publication of stories such as A Christmas Carol itself. When you’re running a business, you have to think about who your customers might be and how to reach the greatest number of them. Ultimately, I think this is what the growing emphasis on “holiday season” is about, not what the Slate.com editorial board necessarily wants. It’s like commercial ecumenicalism.
It also shows that despite, all the multicultural rhetoric, there are still strong cultural assimilationist pressures here in the USA even if they are largely driven by money and institutional convenience. Personally, I’d like to just enjoy the months of October, November, and December for what they are, rather than constantly hearing about “holiday shopping.” Christmas could get some public attention for a couple of weeks (It is twelve days afterall, though starting on Christmas Day) and there even could be some public recognition of other traditions such as in the Orthodox calendar or the Hispanic Día de los Reyes (Ephiphany). By the way, I’m another one who’d like to see Thanksgiving in October when Canada has it. I know it’s not going to happen though. Maybe if MLK, jr. day was moved to Oct. as well. That’s the month he won the Nobel Peace Prize and has better weather than January for most of the country.
My attitude to the PCification of language is that, sure, it's stupid and facile. If the only sexism a society has to worry about is using a masculine pronoun to refer to both genders, then that society's not really sexist. Or if there are worse cases of sexism, it's stupid to focus on something so inconsequential. But it goes both ways: why should sensible conservatives care particularly if the new fashion is to avoid gendered pronouns? Language changes all the time for all sorts of reasons, and it doesn't really affect me in any material way whether I use he or they.Replies: @International Jew, @IBC
Because it feels like coercion. At my school, we were automatically penalized for using non-gender neutral language in our writing. However, gender-neutral pronouns that people actually use anyway, such as the singular meaning of “they,” were also still marked down as grammatically incorrect . What’s funny, is that over the same period of time in which the promotion of gender neutral language has reached critical mass, the use of non-gender neutral terms like “you guys,” in reference to women or mixed gender groups, has also became more popular. It just shows how difficult it is to actually control these things. The use and acceptance of gender-biased terms like “guys” shows that the original logic behind eliminating the broader sense of “man” was faulty or more about signaling than Sapir-Whorf.
So yes, it’s a lot easier and usually healthier to just go with the flow, “pick your battles,” and all that. But why was this a big deal in the first place? And if it’s about going with the flow, why do distinctions such as who/whom still matter as well?
The records do not show any NYC firewomen dying on 9/11.
The records show 1 NYPD and 1 PAPD policewomen died.
Accuracy is still allowed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_workers_killed_in_the_September_11_attacks
What Upworthy hath wrought. This is the Washington Post, for heaven's sake, and they are deliberately writing dumb-downed headlines to make them seem like a peppy, precocious 16-year-old girl wrote them. They should basically stop. Do I have to point out the irony of how the adverb choice is gendered; it's signaling "female"? Basically.
"Ethnic pronouns like Latina, however, don’t seem to carry the same stigma as other gendered words."
LOL, take a trip to the garden of academe. You will find papers in which every latino is rendered "latino/a," every chicano a "chicano/a." For 50 pages, basically. I basically don't understand why the masculine ending takes precedence, even above alphabetical priority.Replies: @IBC
And don’t forget to alternate the “o” with the “a.”
I suppose it would not affect you in any material way (at least in the short term) if you were required to call the POTUS "Your Majesty" or address minor government flunkies as "Your Lordship". One of the reasons the American people are so screwed is their laser-like obsession on short-term material things to the exclusion of all else.
There was a time when people understood that the material things came about as a happy byproduct of thinking correctly, and that that the language we use affects how and what we think.Replies: @jtgw, @NOTA, @IBC
That’s the “scientific” background for gender-neutral language reform. The relationship between how words are used to express thoughts and how words themselves potentially shape someone’s thoughts. The basis for most of this discussion is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. It’s also an important theme in public relations, advertising, and propaganda, e.g. Newspeak.
The compromise of still using the old numbering system but without the religiously loaded suffix makes sense to me as a decent and harmless compromise that is NOT nuts (like making up a new decimal calendar is). The problem with the calendar is not so much that it starts from the (approximate) birth of Jesus (you have to start somewhere) but that each time you use AD, you are forced to indicate acceptance of Jesus as your personal deity.Replies: @GW, @IBC, @Wilkey, @Gallo-Roman, @Gallo-Roman
How many people even know what “AD” means? It’s actually supposed to be written before the date, not after. That should be some indication. If people don’t know what “AD” means, why would they know what “CE” means unless someone made a point of drilling it into them. For a long time I thought that “AD” meant “after death;” Christ’s death. Of course if “BC” means “before Christ” that would have given him a lifespan of zero years, which is either truly miraculous considering what he is supposed to have accomplished, or is proof that he never existed which is what some atheists and non-Christian critics believe anyway.
A.D. means Anno Domini – the Year of our Lord, so it makes sense that as America becomes less Christian it would be less acceptable – he ain’t my Lord!
The world at large was always “less Christian” when the Western calendar went global. Were non-Christians really ever all that butthurt about the reference? I suspect it was the usual-suspect white academics and professional do-gooders leading the charge.
Tiw, Odin, Thor, Frigga, and Saturn ain’t my lords, either. I guess back in the day when Europe was becoming progressively less pagan and more Christian even the educated Christian elite had more pressing matters to attend to than our contemporary great and good seem to have. (Are we going to have to change the days of the week as America becomes less European? Maybe switch out Wednesday to Quetzalcoatlday or something?)
Ever notice how restaurants still use "Bombay" and "Peking" in their names, rather than the native moniker? That's keepin' it real.Replies: @Lurker, @Brutusale
I seem to remember a report on NPR during the initial push for Mumbai saying that it would be Mumbai only to a small minority of Indians who spoke that particular dialect.
Does it seem to anyone else that the Name Nazis only seem to care about the Third World? Why is it Mumbai or Knee-her-wah-gwah? Why isn’t it Pah-ree or Row-mah when speaking of the major metropolises of France and Italy?
My answer to anyone with the audacity to try and “correct” my Peking or Bombay is, we’re speaking English, fool!
No Mumbai Sapphire for me!
“We could try using Bishop Ussher’s calendar and have the year 1 start with the Creation.”
Does that mean we now live in the year 13,500,002,014? Or do we just adopt the Jewish calendar? There is something to be said for the latter since 4000 BCE is roughly when history (or at least civilization) began — and in the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley too, just like it says in Genesis!
https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=Adam+and+Eve+in+its+mesopotamian+context&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest&gws_rd=ssl
What a coincidence.
“343 firefighters died in the World Trade Center on 9/11″ because saying “343 firemen died in the World Trade Center on 9/11″ is an insult to the memory of all the firewomen who died on 9/11.
….
I don’t know if you were being sarcastic, but here’s a link to the names and pictures of the brave 343 members of the New York Fire Department who died at the World Trade Center. Take a look. See any firewomen? Neither do I. Every one was male.
Some male (horribly chauvanistic, non-PC) firefighters refer to female firefighters as “fire watchers.” Firefighting is a tough, dirty, demanding, strenuous job, and some (evil) male firefighters resent the fact that female firefighters are held to lower physical standards and therefore spend their time at fires watching the men do all the strenuous jobs such as humping the hoses, clearing flaming debris or dragging unconscious victims out of burning buildings. I know, I know, it’s shocking that such dreadful ideas can exist in the 21st century, but there it is. Reeducation and thought control will be required.
At first I didn't know what the word actually meant, it sounded so strange and unfamiliar. 'Fireman' was exclusively used everywhere beforehand. Initially, I thought it meant something like 'fire-lighter., but only gradually dawned that it was a political, 'gender neutral' term for fireman.
Strange that I first heard it on a commercial UK profit driven TV channel rather than the BBC.Replies: @Auntie Analogue
“Firefighter” has been around much longer than “a Thames TV….news report circa 1980.” My Dad was a fireman who in the 1950’s showed me that his profession’s then-struggling union’s abbreviation IAFF stood for International Association of Fire Fighters, which was formed in 1918.
The compromise of still using the old numbering system but without the religiously loaded suffix makes sense to me as a decent and harmless compromise that is NOT nuts (like making up a new decimal calendar is). The problem with the calendar is not so much that it starts from the (approximate) birth of Jesus (you have to start somewhere) but that each time you use AD, you are forced to indicate acceptance of Jesus as your personal deity.Replies: @GW, @IBC, @Wilkey, @Gallo-Roman, @Gallo-Roman
“If our common calendar had the suffix “ITYOOPMPBUH” (in the Year of Our Prophet Mohammed Peace Be Upon Him”) would you say that “privileged” Mohammed? Would you want a less loaded suffix?”
Bullshit. In Islamic countries I would suspect that they don’t make much apology about using the Islamic calendar.
Here’s the deal: THEY moved to OUR countries. OUR countries are historically Christian, and use a Christian calendar. We did not decide to impose it on them by surprise after they moved here. We were already using it long, long before any religious minorities, save for Jews, were living here.
Why should we apologize for using an ancient calendar when leftists never apologize for jack shit? Multiculturalism has been sold to us by the Left as entirely a matter of addition – we get our culture PLUS the blessings of a little bit oof new culture. Instead what it increasingly seems to be is a matter of subtraction – we have to remove all the aspects of our culture which might offend them like the Christian calendar, Christmas carols, or even piggy banks.
That is not the mark of immigration – it is the mark of colonization; of them coming here and imposing their culture on us. No thanks.
The compromise of still using the old numbering system but without the religiously loaded suffix makes sense to me as a decent and harmless compromise that is NOT nuts (like making up a new decimal calendar is). The problem with the calendar is not so much that it starts from the (approximate) birth of Jesus (you have to start somewhere) but that each time you use AD, you are forced to indicate acceptance of Jesus as your personal deity.Replies: @GW, @IBC, @Wilkey, @Gallo-Roman, @Gallo-Roman
…but that each time you use AD, you are forced to indicate acceptance of Jesus as your personal deity.
I am? Well, then, damn good thing Christians don’t go around whacking apostates anymore, a lot of us would be in a hell of a lot of trouble!
Anyway, by that logic, every time you use BCE or ACE you’re being forced to indicate this acceptance indirectly, too.
I’m not that arsed about BCE and ACE. It doesn’t really muddy the waters the way other PC-talk does. It’s just silly and pointless, and there’s way too much of that going around as is. And no, if the modern world had taken off in the Islamic world instead of Europe, and a calendar dating from the hejira had been adopted as the standard, the only reason sensible people would be objecting to your abbreviation would be because it took too damn long to write.
Anti-Gentilism isn’t the quite right word since Chinese and Latin Americans are Gentiles and it doesn’t apply to them. (But then I guess you could say the same thing about anti-Semitism.) Why not just say anti-European bigotry, signifying animus to both the European Gentiles and their historical culture and civilization? (Not that there is not much to criticize in traditional European culture and civilization. But then if that is your standard, “who would escape whipping?”)
Ashkenazis — and, let’s face it, it is a few Ashkenazi Americans, mostly journalists and academics — who express such bigotry rarely self-identify as European, do they?
The compromise of still using the old numbering system but without the religiously loaded suffix makes sense to me as a decent and harmless compromise that is NOT nuts (like making up a new decimal calendar is). The problem with the calendar is not so much that it starts from the (approximate) birth of Jesus (you have to start somewhere) but that each time you use AD, you are forced to indicate acceptance of Jesus as your personal deity.Replies: @GW, @IBC, @Wilkey, @Gallo-Roman, @Gallo-Roman
…but that each time you use AD, you are forced to indicate acceptance of Jesus as your personal deity.
I am? Well, then, damn good thing Christians don’t go around whacking apostates anymore!
Anyway, by that logic, every time you use BCE or ACE you’re also being forced to indicate this acceptance, indirectly.
I’m not that arsed about BCE and ACE. It doesn’t really muddy the waters the way other PC-talk does. It’s just silly and pointless, and we’ve got enough of that going around as it is. And no, if the modern world had taken off in the Islamic world instead of Europe, and a calendar dating from the hejira had been adopted as the standard, the only reason sensible people would be objecting to your abbreviation would be because it took too damned long to write.
I don’t get this need to rename or change pronunciations for place names from countries which don’t even use the Roman alphabet. Meanwhile no one bothers forcing us to adopt place names from countries which do use the Roman alphabet and would even be quite easy to pronounce – saying names like Roma, Milano, Italia, Napoli, Venizia, Muenchen, and Firenza really ain’t that hard, and most people wouldn’t have too big a problem with the shift. But we keep them, while changing the name of every damn town in China and India to something all but unpronouncable and frequently unrecognizable.
Steve,
“this is why I prefer the term ‘Social Media Justice Warrior’ to ‘Social Justice Warrior.’”
The proper usage is Social Justice Worrier.
A more elegant means to get where you’re going.
“I’m a reasonably well-informed individual, but I don’t what it is anymore. That makes it hard for old people like me to converse with young people who have been taught whatever the hell the new spelling is and have been crypto-indoctrinated that people who use the old spelling are evil.”
Nah, just say it ironically with a sparkle in your eye like you’re in on the joke. The evil is in the indoctrination – you both agree on that.
In the same line, I detest and deprecate the new English spellings of Chinese names & places, mostly because they makes a migraine-inducing chore of reading older histories that use the original English spellings (Tsingtao, Tientsin, Shanghai, Chungking, etc.). For the new spellings I really want to know who's the moron that came up with "Q" to be pronounced as "Sh"? That one certainly took a special, exceedingly perverse sort of genius.
So I still call it Peking. And I still call Burma Burma.
No one ever had a Myanmar Shave.Replies: @International Jew, @Gallo-Roman, @reiner Tor
If I get crap about “Bombay” or “Rangoon” I start a quiet but relentless campaign of being-offended-by-proxy against the perps. No more letting “Pair-is” or “Munich” or “Florence” or “Moscow” slide by without glares and tut-tuts. And you’d better lose that English “s” and get that Iberian lisp down when pronouncing Spanish place names, bigot. (This last one was inspired by that comical affectation whereby NPR-ites interrupt their normal anglophone accents (RS – Received Snide) for labored “Hispanic” pronunciations of Latin American place names or Spanish names.)
The Jewish Calender dates the beginning of the world to 3,761 BC, which means that we are living in the year AM 5775
I know you probably think Orwell's ideas about Newspeak are the last word on the subject, but he was simply following the fashionable thought of the time, which was very Whorfian. I, for my part, believe a society is quite capable of being sexist and patriarchal while using gender-neutral pronouns, while a society that uses gendered pronouns is quite capable of being progressive and egalitarian.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @IBC
In most Arab countries, doesn’t a woman traditionally keep her maiden name after she gets married?
When I teach Western Civ (listed in the course catalog as “European History”), I use BC and AD exclusively. I’ve seriously considered changing textbooks so that the book corresponds with the language that I use in lecture. The students are exposed to alternatives in other courses, so I have no compunctions.
I allow students to use the date designation of their choice in their writing. A large majority go with BC and AD. Only once have I received an angry stare from a student who looked displeased with my usage; she used another in her papers.
My ancient history teacher said that a well educated person said “AD 1941” (in the year of our Lord 1941) as opposed to “1941 AD.” Hardly anyone nowadays passes that test. (Ann Barnhardt does, however.)
It sounds better and makes more mocking contrast to take out the ‘justice’ and just call them “Social Media Warriors”. That’s what I’m going to call them from now on.
LOL, take a trip to the garden of academe. You will find papers in which every latino is rendered “latino/a,” every chicano a “chicano/a.” For 50 pages, basically. I basically don’t understand why the masculine ending takes precedence, even above alphabetical priority.
Or worse, though not in academic usage, “[email protected]”. But of course the male should come first, in order to be culturally sensitive to Latinos.
In the same line, I detest and deprecate the new English spellings of Chinese names & places, mostly because they makes a migraine-inducing chore of reading older histories that use the original English spellings (Tsingtao, Tientsin, Shanghai, Chungking, etc.). For the new spellings I really want to know who's the moron that came up with "Q" to be pronounced as "Sh"? That one certainly took a special, exceedingly perverse sort of genius.
So I still call it Peking. And I still call Burma Burma.
No one ever had a Myanmar Shave.Replies: @International Jew, @Gallo-Roman, @reiner Tor
That’s pinyin, i.e. Chinese writing when they are using proper European (Roman) letters instead of those funny Chinese characters. Every letter has to be pronounced differently in every language, e.g. English c could be something like s or something like k depending on the situation, etc. As a non-native speaker of English, I personally think English spelling is the most moronic in the world (don’t think about changing it, though! I got used to it, and I don’t like new things, like the new German spelling – perhaps simpler, but I dislike it), whereas the Chinese are just using a letter (q) in a somewhat odd way, but I’m sure it’s way more logical than English spelling. It’s also not more illogical than the Spanish j or x.
So I don’t think there’s a problem with the pinyin q. What’s questionable is whether English speakers should be using the Chinese pinyin writing system, which was designed for Chinese speakers (mostly Chinese native speakers) and not for English speakers, who get confused because of the different Chinese pronunciation of the same letters.
The sound you are thinking of in Pinyin is X or SH.
There are IPA symbols for all of these that I cannot be bothered to look up.
So I don't think there's a problem with the pinyin q. What's questionable is whether English speakers should be using the Chinese pinyin writing system, which was designed for Chinese speakers (mostly Chinese native speakers) and not for English speakers, who get confused because of the different Chinese pronunciation of the same letters.Replies: @Hard Line Realist
Actually, no. Q is mapped to a sound like ‘ch’ that is said with the tongue against the lower front teeth, while ‘CH’ in Pinyin is the retroflex ‘ch’.
The sound you are thinking of in Pinyin is X or SH.
There are IPA symbols for all of these that I cannot be bothered to look up.
How about just anti-Christian? Yes, the Old Testament is full of invectives against the Gentiles, but that world of ancient polytheism is pretty remote from the cultural environment in which Ashkenazi Jewry developed. For Ashkenazis, the “other” has been Christendom as long as they can remember, and that is the culture against which they define themselves and which they see as their main historical enemy.
These rules don’t matter to everybody. Like most professional linguists, I think the rules about who/whom or singular they are silly and pointless. Unfortunately you and probably many schoolchildren are now the victims of a double-whammy from old-style schoolmarms and new-style Thought Police. I say a pox on both their houses, but I do agree about choosing one’s battles.
We should adopt the word “wymyn,” to mean “women from Wales.”
The weird new (well, in widespread American use now for 40 years) spelling system, called Pinyin, is widely misunderstood. The old system (Peking, Shanghai, etc) was an effort to render Chinese sounds in the Latin alphabet *and* with the letters corresponding to their usual sounds in English. It's this second piece -- the letter-sound mapping -- that does not obtain in Pinyin. Yes, for most letters it does -- s is still s, h is still h. But q is "ch", x is "sh", zh is kind of a "dj", c is "ts"... This is because unlike the old system, which was devised by Americans for the convenience of English speakers, Pinyin was devised in China with a sort of pan-European audience in mind. And so Pinyin can't be read according to English rules, nor German, Spanish, Hungarian or what-have-you rules.
So actually, if the goal is to pronounce Chinese names as correctly as possible (though here the issue of Chinese dialect comes up) then for English speakers the old system is better. As for Pinyin, I suppose there's the advantage that Westerners from many countries can agree on one set of spellings (though then again I don't know how much Pinyin has caught on in places like France or Germany).Replies: @International Jew, @Ezra, @David R. Merridale
The story I heard was that during the 1970’s, Romania was the only country using a romance language that had friendly relations with China, so pinyin transliterates into Romanian. I doubt that is true though.
Meanwhile, Seattle has gone full retard:
http://www.seattle.gov/rsji
Spend some time on the site for some delightful educational program edification. The PDFs are especially enlightening. The standout pic is the lily white mayor signing various equality decrees amongst beaming blacks. All Seattle emplyees are required to go through 8 hours of white privilege and race education, to include a large segment on how modern science as “toppled” any notion of biological differences in race. All on the tax-payer’s dime, of course.
Elliott Bronstein runs the department. Here’s the contact info to send him letters of encouragement:
Contact Us
The City’s Race and Social Justice Initiative is coordinated by the Seattle Office for Civil Rights (SOCR). For more information, please contact Elliott Bronstein at …, [email protected].
Seattle Office for Civil Rights:
Voice 206-684-4500
FAX 206-684-0332
Central Building
810 3rd Avenue Suite 750
Seattle, WA 98104-1627
This Seattle county website is also scary, and good for a laugh:
http://www.kingcounty.gov/exec/equity.aspx
The weird new (well, in widespread American use now for 40 years) spelling system, called Pinyin, is widely misunderstood. The old system (Peking, Shanghai, etc) was an effort to render Chinese sounds in the Latin alphabet *and* with the letters corresponding to their usual sounds in English. It's this second piece -- the letter-sound mapping -- that does not obtain in Pinyin. Yes, for most letters it does -- s is still s, h is still h. But q is "ch", x is "sh", zh is kind of a "dj", c is "ts"... This is because unlike the old system, which was devised by Americans for the convenience of English speakers, Pinyin was devised in China with a sort of pan-European audience in mind. And so Pinyin can't be read according to English rules, nor German, Spanish, Hungarian or what-have-you rules.
So actually, if the goal is to pronounce Chinese names as correctly as possible (though here the issue of Chinese dialect comes up) then for English speakers the old system is better. As for Pinyin, I suppose there's the advantage that Westerners from many countries can agree on one set of spellings (though then again I don't know how much Pinyin has caught on in places like France or Germany).Replies: @International Jew, @Ezra, @David R. Merridale
As a system for Mandarin speakers to write Mandarin, pinyin (e.g., Deng Xiaoping) makes a lot more sense than the old Wade-Giles system (Teng Hsiao-p’ing).
For us Westerners, the point of transcribing Chinese names is to have *some way* of pronouncing them, not to reproduce the native pronunciation. Natives won’t understand you anyway if you don’t use the tones, and Westerners aren’t going to learn the tones.
With that in mind, here’s a “good enough” guide to pinyin:
Q = CH = English CH
X = SH = English SH
J = ZH = English J
C = English TS
Z = English DZ
E = English UH
Notice that the common pronunciation of Beijing with a French-style J is bogus, based on the “foreign words get oddball pronunciations” rule.
Obviously there is a difference between pinyin Q and CH (etc.), but for an English speaker it’s not an *important* difference. Polish speakers will recognize them. And there are some funky rules about vowels – e.g., zhi is Jurr not Jee – which you can look up if you care.
Pinyin doesn’t remotely resemble Romanian orthography. Anyway, it was invented in the 1950s.
Or worse, though not in academic usage, "[email protected]". But of course the male should come first, in order to be culturally sensitive to Latinos.Replies: @Wilkey
In fact several colleges and universities insist on naming their Latino studies programs just such: Pitzer, Pomona, UCSD, and UWisMad all have programs with names like “Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies”. And I’ve seen the genders alternated – “Latina/o – Chicano/a” – just to be certain no one’s feelings are hurt.
http://www.seattle.gov/rsji
Spend some time on the site for some delightful educational program edification. The PDFs are especially enlightening. The standout pic is the lily white mayor signing various equality decrees amongst beaming blacks. All Seattle emplyees are required to go through 8 hours of white privilege and race education, to include a large segment on how modern science as "toppled" any notion of biological differences in race. All on the tax-payer's dime, of course.
Elliott Bronstein runs the department. Here's the contact info to send him letters of encouragement:
Contact Us
The City's Race and Social Justice Initiative is coordinated by the Seattle Office for Civil Rights (SOCR). For more information, please contact Elliott Bronstein at ..., [email protected]
Seattle Office for Civil Rights:
Voice 206-684-4500
FAX 206-684-0332
Central Building
810 3rd Avenue Suite 750
Seattle, WA 98104-1627
This Seattle county website is also scary, and good for a laugh:
http://www.kingcounty.gov/exec/equity.aspxReplies: @Wilkey
Love that page: “Imagine a city where…African American, Latinos, and Native Americans can expect to live as long as white people.”
Uhhh…how long are Seattle’s Asians living, and why do whites not have the right to live as long as them?