Because enslaved persons vs slaves is silly. It means the same thing but the first one is just more cumbersome. I’m never going to write about the enslaved person’s trade or people of person enslavement. Those are goofy constructions.
Anybody’s entitled to an opinion about the silliness or otherwise of particular changes in language usage, of course. But other people are also entitled to their opinions about what anybody’s criticism of such changes as “silly” may reflect about anybody’s level of understanding.
I mean, we all know that the fundamental atrocity of human enslavement is that it treated human beings as objects that could be bought, sold and abused at will. Calling human beings in that condition “slaves” emphasized their “object” status: white Americans who might have felt a bit skeevy about attending something called an “auction of people” were comfortable with the concept of an “auction of slaves”, for example.
So a term that emphasizes an enslaved person’s personhood rather than their enslavement is a linguistic gesture towards acknowledging the humanity that was systematically denied them, in all sorts of symbolic as well as legal and physical ways. That’s why many people who talk about human enslavement nowadays prefer such terms.
If you say that such reasoning is “silly”, you do tend to come across as just not understanding it.
I have never seen anybody arguing in favor of those particular phrases, so it’s not clear to me why you’re worried about being expected to use them. AFAICT, familiar terms such as “slavery”, “slave trade”, and “enslavement” are used right alongside the newer terms of “enslaved person” and “enslaver” all the time in current writings on the subject.
The problem with this explanation is that it is a complete mish-mash of words that sound very nice, but ultimately have no meaning. Suppose I was arguing to use the word “slave” instead of “enslaved person.”
I could easily say that by not using the term “slave” you are attempting to minimize the horror that these people went through and how they were treated. By using “enslaved” you imply a transitory condition much like a person who was “kidnapped” or “assaulted,” again minimizing the fact that these individuals and their children were held as chattel for life. If that sounds ridiculous, it is no more ridiculous to my ears than your explanation.
The term “slave” has no negative connotations; nobody faults Harriet Tubman, for example, for being a former slave. You might as well argue that “baker” should be “person who bakes” because the former term denies a person his humanity and suggests his only worth to society is in the food he bakes and fails to understand that he is an entire person. It’s pure claptrap.
Further, it injects this language shift into an area where there is no debate and no people to be hurt. The argument the left has made about PC speech is that we should listen to people who are hurt by our language (leaving aside the debate over whether a college professor is representative of the group). There is no serious or even frivolous debate over bringing back legal slavery. Nearly nobody has been enslaved or a slave in the United States. That ended in 1865. What issue are we trying to solve by changing a term like “slave” which has long been used and long understood to mean exactly what it means? Who is hurt by the term? Someone whose great-great-great grandfather was a slave?
I have a couple of problems with the euphemism treadmill:
- The people who will use the new phrase voluntarily already have compassion and forcing others to use it won’t teach them compassion. If feels like we’re wasting time for no effect.
- Making words taboo gives them power. I like what the gay community did when they commandeered “queer”; it has lost its power as an insult. I am very very pro-immigrant and most of the time I explicitly use “illegal alien” as a fuck-you to racists. Don’t let them pick a fight over words.
It’s not compassion. It’s control. Control language and control thought.
Sure, you could make that argument for the use of the term “slave” if you wanted, and people could discuss whether it was a more persuasive argument about linguistic connotations than arguments for the use of the term “enslaved person”.
Does it, though? Have people routinely denied the humanity of bakers and treated them as mere objects? Hell, even the grammatical form of the word “baker”, with its agent-noun suffix, literally implies more agency than the word “slave” does.
Linguistic connotations are things about which reasonable people can reasonably disagree. But the fact that a lot of miffed “anti-PC” conservatives want to categorically dismiss the whole issue as “silly” or “ridiculous” doesn’t make it so. Making up their own deliberately claptrap linguistic connotations in order to argue that the whole subject is claptrap just reinforces the impression that they don’t really understand what they’re talking about.
I can imagine Carlin sighing with frustration while he wrote that routine…when he realized “operational exhaustion” and “post-traumatic stress disorder” have the same number of syllables.
So people like William Wilberforce lacked compassion? Because he most assuredly talked about “slaves.”
Sure, and so did people who had been enslaved themselves. Back in the 19th century.
What’s “lacking compassion” is not so much the conventional usage of one term rather than another, but rather the contemptuous dismissal of the whole subject of how to talk respectfully about disadvantaged and oppressed people.
That’s what I keep trying to tell male acquaintances who start out being cheerful but then get upset when I compliment them on their gay personality. But they still stay mad at me, especially if I said it in front of their boss or their date.
I think this is strange. I can see how embedding greater detail into the semantic terminology might seem like it is doing greater service to the understanding of the underlying concept, and maybe that’s useful to someone who isn’t familiar with the concept, but it’s absurd to imagine tha lt Wilberforce lacked sufficient compassion because of some semantic detail of a concept he very likely knew and understood and felt better than anyone here.
If we are to judge past usage on semantics like this, are you really certain that ‘enslaved persons’ is *compassionate enough? * couldn’t you do better than ‘enslaved persons’? And if you could do better, why didn’t you? Don’t you care?
During World War II, the Japanese army rounded up Chinese and Korean women and forced them into military brothels, where they were repeatedly raped.
To this day, they are called “comfort women.”
(Of course, to come up with a new term would be an Orwellian act of thought control.)
I agree. Who in this discussion do you think is seriously arguing that Wilberforce “lacked sufficient compassion” because he used the term “slaves”?
My mistake - apologies
I wonder if the OP is coming from the “Nomadland” book’s/movie’s perspective. I think the book mentioned it and the movie reiterated it, but basically the idea is that you don’t need a house in order to have a place to live that you call “home.”
Certainly, an apartment or trailer can be a home. And to be fair, when you look at what houses cost, starting with the down payment, including the mortgage interest, taxes, repairs, etc. the sticks and bricks may be far out of the reach of a lot of people.
“Home” is where you make it, such as in a van, even if you’re pooping in a bucket.
I have zero problem with people living within their means. But my two cents is that a fair number of these folks can’t (or don’t want to, or think they don’t have to) pay their way. I mean, if you have a grandma who will let you park your RV in her back yard, you don’t directly support the local schools (for example) , even though your kids attend them. But the person(s) whose land you use do. ISTM that t all comes back to “No free lunches” I think.
I don’t think “house” when used in this context means only a detached single family dwelling. For example, the term “housing” is used when talking about inner cities and college dorms.
You make it sound like the default is that people think living in an apartment = being homeless. That is utterly bizarre.
It wasn’t my distinction exactly. IIRC in the book the distinction was being houseless. In the movie Frances McDormand said something to the effect that she was “houseless, not homeless.” She skipped apartmentless and trailerless because in order to survive, they have to travel, which means they don’t have any of the usual choices available…they get vans and RVs.
As well as the euphemism treadmill, and attempting to influence how people think of an issue reasons already mentioned, IMHO there’s an aspect of demonstrating that you’re part of the ‘in crowd’ with these new usages, same as with teenage slang, and that’s why they change so frequently. Once usage has become widespread, new terms are needed.
This is the real question. The older I get the more I suspect it’s the latter.
LaTanya Richardson Jackson (Samuel L. Jackson’s wife), was on Graham Norton (the chat show) a few months ago, but I only saw it today. She said she dislikes the word “slave” because it sounds like a race or religion, something you’re born with or is part of your own culture. Something that would be handed down to your children because of you, rather than because of the way you were owned.
I wish I could find a video of it online, because she explained it better than I did.
Obviously it doesn’t apply to historical uses of the word. These suggestions for change never apply to past uses and it’s misdirection when people act as if they do.