- cross-posted to:
- longreads
- cross-posted to:
- longreads
Found this article in the longreads community arguing why “politically correct” terms shouldn’t be used. You guys have any thoughts?
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I think that the text has some merit, but it misses the full picture, and the conclusion is crap.
Sure, what matters is what you say, on a discursive level; not the specific words that you use to say it. And meaning is not hard-coded into the words, it depends on a thousand things, it changes over time, yadda yadda.
So far, so good. However meaning doesn’t depend on “intent”, as the intent only exists inside the head of the speaker; meaning is socially negotiated between the speaker and hearers. And some words become associated with prejudice in a way that, even if the speaker tries to cancel it out, they still sound “unfortunate”.
I also think that the author is building a big strawman on what “politically correct language” is supposed to be. It is not just about the individual words.
At the end of the day it’s about manners and putting forth a reasonable effort to make others feel welcome and comfortable.
Yup, pretty much.
The term he keeps using as his main example is “differently-abled”, which he says has been “thrust upon an eye-rolling public”. But no one is being forced to use it, or even expected to use it—it certainly isn’t a societal norm. His complaint isn’t that he’s being forced to say it, but that he’s been forced to hear it.
The common thread behind such complaints is that critics feel new “PC” terms are giving established terms new meanings unintended by the speakers. But the point being made by people who use alternate terms like “differently-abled” is that the established terms are polysemic, and people using them have been saying things they didn’t intend all along.
I think it comes down to at its greatest core: is there a reason and are the people affected on board. And I’ll present 3 examples: transgender, differently abled, and latine
Back in the old days trans people were called transsexuals. Unfortunately that word had problems; it was a medical term, it’s diagnostic criteria had problems to say the least, and the “sexual” component had people uncomfortable as it didn’t have anything to do with sexuality. The community adopted a new term, and it spread, and eventually the old term became seen as outdated and like evidence that someone hadn’t been around trans people since we started defining our own selves.
Differently abled came from abled people who were uncomfortable acknowledging that disability is defined by what we can’t do. The social model of disability exists and bears quite a bit of merit, but the fact is it was just a platitude. It was rejected by the community it described. I don’t hate it. Good try and whatnot, try asking some of us before coining a new term next time.
Latine is more controversial. It was coined by queer Spanish speakers looking to create a gender neutral grammatical gender for Spanish that doesn’t have the jar of latinx or the unpronouncability of latin@ (which i recall had been coined as a feminist attempt to remove the neutral masculine). However many Spanish speakers don’t want a neuter gender in their language and it developed some culture war bullshit, in part because queer non-spanish speakers picked it up fairly quickly especially after years of hate against latinx and because the Spanish speakers we’re most in conversation with are the queer ones.
Oh and for a bonus one. Hearing impaired got popular as the politically correct version of hard of hearing in the late 20th century (idk when I grew up with my mom saying both terms but my grandma said hard of hearing, but schools and audiologists said hearing impaired). Anyways the deaf fucking hate the term and it’s become a clear identifier that someone sees deafness as a medical thing entirely and not a community and a culture. This has lead to the idea that while hearing impaired is the politically correct term, hard of hearing is the culturally correct term, which is a distinction I quite like
Depends on the language. A language that is not controlled by a steering institution (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_Française) will float freely, evolving as it does by public use of words. If I use a word and you understand it, then it is a word. Definitions also float in this way.
But the argument for/against politically correct language can be interesting. Because, unlike a controlling organization, there is instead social pressure being applied. And you may disagree with the source of that pressure, politically. Sometimes it makes you an asshat, and sometimes it’s legitimate pushback.
Anyway, long short, I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with it. Nor do I think it’s weird that some people push back.
Complete BS. You know why dont we just use PIE/phoenician if language isnt allowed to evolve? JFC.
‘Politically correct’ language that is used to avoid negative connotations like racist and sexist slurs is a positive. I out that in quotes because as far as I can remembr politically correct was a disparaging term for inclusive language and not using slurs.
As with everything humans do, it does get taken too far to the point of undermining clarity and that should be discouraged. If someone collects trash for their job, they are a garbage collector. Collector instead of man is a good change because women collect garbage ad well. But they aren’t sanitation engineers if they aren’t doing any engineering.
Using language that accurately describes something while avoiding stereotypes and negativity is good, but some of what gets pushed seems to reduce clarity and it really depends on the change. Wholesale support and opposition are both wrong.
prescriptivism is wrong, actually. descriptivism FTW.
Prescriptions and descriptions are not opposites. They’re orthogonal to each other:
- when you tell people how things are, you’re being descriptive;
- when you tell people how things should be, or what they should do, you’re being prescriptive.
And prescribing is not automatically wrong. For example if I were to tell someone “don’t call us Latin Americans «spic niggers», it’s offensive”, I am prescribing against the usage of the expression “spic nigger”; it is prescriptivism. Just like when someone proposes inclusive language.
What is wrong is that sort of poorly grounded prescription that usually boils down to “don’t you dare to use language in a different way than I do, or that people did in the past”. It’s as much of a prescription as the above, but instead of including people it’s excluding them.
Tagging @[email protected], as this addresses some things that they said.
Ironically, instead of “prescribing against,” it seems like you mean proscribing.
Both “to prescribe against [thing]” and “to proscribe [thing]” are functionally equivalent in this context, at least acc. to how I use both words:
- to prescribe - to lay down rules on what should be accepted / rejected.
- to proscribe - to forbid, to strongly recommend against something.
But I’d rather use the first one here due to the topic, prescriptivism.
This is fair. Usually when I hear “prescriptive” I have a knee-jerk reaction to it as something bad because it’s usually used to refer to people using made-up rules to enforce systems of oppression rather than fight against them like inclusive language does, but I hadn’t thought about it as “prescriptivism for good.”
The knee-jerk reaction is understandable, since most prescriptions are of the exclusionary type. And at the same time, since linguists say “we’re describing, not prescribing”, people create a false opposition between both things. And, well, if description is scientific and good the prescription ends as “unscientific and bad”, through that opposition.
Using inclusive language isn’t linguistic prescriptivism. Prescriptivism is saying “this word is incorrect English/doesn’t mean what you are using it for.” Inclusive language is saying “if you use this word, you’re being a jerk.”
