I Seem to Be an Adjective

Great Debates
1

This is a semi-rant, but I think it’s more debatable than Pit-worthy, so I’m starting it here. David/Gaudere, feel free to move it if you disagree.

It frustrates the **** out of me when people define other people in categories, by nouns. Each person is an individual, a complex concatenation of numerous ideas, beliefs, personality traits, etc. “You are a(n) X” implies “…and in this group, as opposed to the non-X people in that group.” To use adjectives to characterize people is legitimate; I am Christian in my beliefs, moderately liberal in my politics, empathic (or at least try to be) in my relations to my fellow man, situationist in my ethics, and so on. These serve to clarify my views for those who might have questions on them. But when you use nouns, you draw lines in the sand and relegate me to some category or other. I refuse to be categorized. I am me, not someone’s caricature of a Christian, a liberal, a situation ethicist, or whatever.

Now, every regular poster, including me, uses nouns for convenience. “We theists have a worldview that them there atheists do not share.” It’s a necessary simplification if every post is not to be two feet long, with appropriate nuances and savings clauses scattered throughout. But we need to keep in mind that the nouns are not reality; the adjectives are what is real. And they describe individual people.

2

So what you’re saying is, you’re an anti-nouner. :wink:

3

Where’s the debate possibility here? Is someone going to have to argue that people really are the nouns we use to label them?

4

Actually, I was de-noun-cing categorizing people, Tracer! :smiley:

5

I thought you were referring to a name like “Many Fish” in some Indian dialect.

Oh well.

<FONT COLOR=“GREEN”>ExTank</FONT>

6

Well, if Gaudere is a verb, I see no reason why you can’t be an adjective, Poly. Just remember, I’ve already got dibs on being an interjection! :slight_smile:

7

You can interject all you want, RTFirefly, just do it from the privacy of your own bedroom. And be sure to wipe it off afterward.

8

Adverb going once! going twice! Does anyone want to be an adverb for $250?

I think bjorn would be a rambling subjunctive clause. That may be taken, but you can still be a dangling participle! It’s next on the auction block!

9

Konrad, it’s against the law to dangle your participle in a public place! :slight_smile:

I enjoy the repartee, but does anyone have any serious comments about what I posted?

10

friend polycarp,

i agree with your op. it is convienient to use a one word label for people, but we are all more complex than that.

“don’t get strung out by the way that i look, don’t judge a book by it’s cover” (tim curry as dr. franknfurter in rhps)

11

don’t look at me… I’m 2 adjectives in one!

12

Labels are woefully inadequate. It is human nature to categorize our fellow relations. You will never be anything more than a noun to me.

Unless I meet you and you decide to be a spectacular, sexy Verb!

Yet to be reconciled with the reality of the dark for a moment, I go on wandering from dream to dream.

13

Labels are handy; they are shortcuts to understanding the viewpoints of others. If all liberals seem to advocate spending money on education, gun control, and welfare, and you meet someone who says he is a liberal, you can assume those things without a lengthy inquiry into this person’s beliefs. We would get exhausted grilling every person about every nuance of their beliefs; it is easier to use a template and make modifications thereof. If someone says they are a Christian, I will assume they hold a certain set of beliefs. I may have to modify this assumption after further discussion; I had assumed Poly held the traditional “Jesus had to die to absolve our sins” belief, and I was wrong. What need to be remembered is that these labels are tools, not laws; assumptions we make based on our experience for our own convienence, but not a rule that others must obey.

I find it far more dangerous people who decide on a label and make their decisions based on what they “should” believe, instead of thinking it through for themselves: “I’m a Southern Baptist, so homosexuality is a sin.” While guesses and extrapolation are useful when you have to do a “cold read” of other’s beliefs, it does not seem a good way to determine your own beliefs. Surely we have enough time to formulate our own thoughts, rather than taking the views pre-thought for us by others who happen to share a nomenclature or a few common tenets.

Hm, I seem to have raised a few objections, made some comments, and ended by acknowledging the validity of the original premise. How very Polycarpian of me. :wink:

“It’s like I always said…there’s nothing an agnostic can’t do if he really doesn’t know whether he believes in anything or not” --Monty Python, “The Meaning of Life”

14

Is anyone else surprised bj0rn hasn’t been along to spout his particular brand of linguistic nonsense yet?

I have to agree with the OP though. Labels are nice conveniences to hang on someone or something, but the nuances, of course are in the descriptors. The labels allow and can even enforce prejudice.

–UncleIndiaPaleAle–

Here’s mud in yer eye,
UncleBeer

15

Thanks, Unc and Gaudere. Your points are very well taken – when “labels” become substituted for the people they attempt to categorize, then trouble is afoot.

  • Polycarp
    …founder of Polycarpianity (courtesy of Gaudere)
16

True enough, Gaudere. Indeed it is often conservatives who take definite postions on various issues “because I’m a conservative”. However, there’s a twist to your characterization of liberals. A true liberal doesn’t necessarily support more spending on public schools, welfare, affirmative action, etc. (Current gun laws are “liberal” i.e. generous, permissive.) To be liberal is to be open-minded, to be willing to change your position based on new information and experiences (hence Democrats’ support for welfare reform to combat the new problem of dependancy). Political correctness is not liberal at all, it is a new kind of left-wing conservativism. Minorities believe their lives are controlled by racism because they’ve been brought up to believe that. It’s like a religion. So hearing a person give an opinion doesn’t tell you how to label him because you don’t know how he arrived at that opinion.

17

Well, I recall being labelled as anti-Christian on this very board by an idiot lawyer (Oops! Redundancy!) and and no matter how I asserted myself that it wasn’t the case, people still bought it.

Even in the wake of me gaining some respect and being a somewhat active member of LBMB, I doubt this person thinks anything but to this day.

And guess what? Her (and anyone else who agrees) fucking loss.

I have long hair and listen to heavy metal. I also spend much time listening to NPR.

I am pro-choice but also against most gun control and I am not against the death penalty.

I am a huge sports fan who cries when my team loses, but I’m also prone to cry when looking into my lovers eyes and realizing how much I love her.

So feel free to think you know me, feel free to put me in a box. Just don’t be surprised when you realize that a box cannot contain me.

Nice OP, Polycarp… for a Christian! :smiley:

Yer pal,
Satan

18

Satan:

I think you’re pretty cool.

19

True, “Liberal” can have a different meaning than what we generally mean when we say someone is liberal, but I daresay “true” conservatives don’t necessarily follow the beliefs of what we think is the conservative position either. Conservatives should be opposed to change, right, so why are most people who are labeled conservative today trying to push through flag-burning and anti-abortion laws? I think people can sometimes follow “belief sets” and take on a whole bunch of opinions on issues that don’t necessarily have any internal consistency. They find a group that they mostly agree with and like, and then they adopt the “party position” on an issue they haven’t thought much about until they decide to really think it through (which may be never). So a person who decided they were most accurately described as a “liberal” (as it is most commonly defined in America, i.e., left-wing) because they opposed legislation of morality as an infringement of personal freedom might wind up endorsing strict gun control simply because it is the liberal thing to do, and not realize it goes against his/her original beliefs. (I’m not meaning to pick on liberals here, particularly since I probably am one, it’s just the example that came to mind.)

So, no, you don’t know how people got to the position they hold on issues; they may have thought it through thoroughly or just adopted it since they think they should. But the labels and their concomitant belief sets are a shortcut, and often useful: if someone is a radical pro-lifer, they’re probably for capital punishment. You just have to make sure you don’t mistake the short-cut label for the person; that’s like putting on sunglasses to shield your eyes from the sun and then claiming it’s gotten darker out. Don’t think the tools you use to make it easier to deal with the world actually become the world itself.

20

Since squeels brought in the term ‘political correctness’, I thought I’d use it as a starting point for a ramble. PC has become popularly synonymous with a particular set of left-wing opinions, but it’s more aptly defined, IMO, as the act of absorbing a set of opinions as your own, primarily because those are the opinions of your group.

This process of taking the labels we use to clarify the world, and applying them whole-hog to people of various persuasions, is, in a way, the projecting of political correctness on others, usually the ones whose views we disapprove of: ‘you conservatives’, ‘you liberals’, ‘you fundamentalists’, ‘you atheists,’ etc. are all alike, we effectively say.

By failing to distinguish between individuals in another group, we implicitly accuse them of believing the same things because they are too intellectually lazy to think for themselves. However, when we do this, we’re the ones who are guilty of sloppy thinking; we’ve assumed, without verification, that they all believe the same things. To paraphrase Gaudere, we’re substituting the tools we use to make it easier to deal with the world for the world itself.

And the wonderful thing about people is that categorizing them is dangerous. Fundamentalists believe that drinking alcoholic beverages is immoral, except that I’ve gone drinking with more than a few. One wouldn’t think that atheists would be all that interested in how Christians wrestle with our belief in and experiences of God, except that here on this board, I’ve found a surprising level of interest in such things, even among those who believe that we Christians are pleasantly deluding ourselves. :wink: You just never know.

When we tell people who they are, rather than finding out who they are by giving them room to be themselves, we’re the losers. We miss out on the infinite variety and complexity of our fellow human beings, and experience instead the cardboard cutouts that we put in their places.

“And as for me, I’m going back into the closet, where men are empty overcoats.” - Marx