He also seems motivated by a reprehensible world view
ad hominem
reporting you
Knock yourself out. But you might want to take just a moment to peer into your soul and examine what’s really bothering you about SSM.
I remember this guy (not a ling major) in a linguistics class who flipped out about the use of the word “tribalism” in an article because “tribe” originally denoted the tribes of Israel, and it was wrong to use it any other way. I just tried finding the rant he wrote in the college paper about connotation and denotation, but, alas, the archives are only available in print and I’m flying to the west coast today.
Never mind that he had the etymology wrong.
there is no such thing.
Then peer into whatever sits between your ears.
Asked and Answered …
Melchior, you’re correct that marriage is based on biological imperatives, but those biological imperatives are a lot more complicated than you realize. Yes, there’s a biological drive towards reproduction, but that’s not what leads to marriage. Dogs are driven to reproduce, too, but they don’t much care with whom. If a bitch is in heat, all the male dogs around her will attempt to mate with her, and she’ll accept whomever is first as her mate. Doesn’t matter if she’s mated with that dog before, or if she ordinarily gets along with him, or anything like that. Dogs reproduce without anything resembling marriage.
Swans, now, they’re different. Swans will take their time choosing their mates, and once chosen will tend to mate with the same partner repeatedly, over the course of their whole life. It’s a behavior called “pair bonding”, and swans feel a biological drive to engage in it. They don’t, of course, hold any special ceremonies about it, nor describe themselves with a special word once they’ve bonded, but that’s just because swans are neither sapient nor language-using. But they do, in so far as they’re mentally able, engage in something similar to marriage.
Humans, now, well, it turns out that we’re sort of like swans. We, too, feel a biological drive to find one particular partner, and stay with that same partner for life. And because we are sapient and lingual, we have invented ceremonies and words concerning our pair-bonding process: That’s what marriage is.
But here’s the thing: Most humans, and most swans, feel this biological drive to pair-bond with a member of the opposite sex. A few humans (and swans), however, have a slight variant on that biological drive. Those individuals instead have a biological drive to pair-bond with members of the same sex. So far as we can tell, though, all other aspects of this pair-bonding instinct work basically the same way as they do for the majority. So given that it appears to be the same biological drive accounting for both, why shouldn’t we use the same ceremonies and the same word for both?
This is an opportunity to agree that union between same-sex adults, with the same legal and societal benefits of marriage, is a good thing.
Melchior is just very sad because culture, tradition, and language around him are changing, and he just can’t seem to wrap his mind around it.
This is just another one of those ‘damn kids with the loud hippety-hop music!’ – cane-shaking-old-man moments.
Because they are different, as in “not the same”. Things that are not the same should be distinguished semantically.
and I am going to pass, because I disagree.
A chihuahua and a great dane are not the same. And yet we call them both “dog”.
What, in your opinion, determines the meaning of a word?
Supporting data for Procrustus.
So - its not about the word “marriage” , then, is it? Which is opposite of what you said earlier in the thread.
What does the word “bastard” mean, though? It was coined, or so I understand, as a term that had legal meaning, and legal force that limited the rights a child could hope to have recognized by civic authority. These days, I generally only hear it used as an epithet, and not even one that is expected to be taken literally.
Is there today any practical point in assigning the name to a child born outside of marriage?
Yes, of course. He was not ‘legitimate’ and had limited or no claim to his parent’s property.
You’re just down in that hole, digging with a shovel, aren’t you?
Not responsive. Not an argument.
So why have you ignored all the arguments I’ve made?