In other words, it probably didn’t happen?
I find this statement… weird (?) in this context. Are you saying that organizations - public and private - shouldn’t be able to tell their employees what terms to use, how to address clients/costumers? And if they do, it’s “top-down” linguistic and Orwellian?
That’s pretty strongly implied by, “a thing I read on Reddit,” yeah.
I, too, think it’s weird to assume malice or evil in a professional group setting language standards for their professional jargon. It works better if the professionals are all in the same page as to what their jargon means.
And if real estate agents think that “main bedroom” will sound better to some of their clients than “master bedroom”, then that’s the word they should use. Take about mountains out of mole hills.
As for the cocktail (which I’ve never heard of before) it sounds like no one has actually complained about the name. But you know what, if someone does, I’m sure some clever bartender can come up with a new name for exactly the same drink.
No. Organizations are free to dictate whatever linguistic policies they wish. And when those policies are stupid, the rest of us are free to make fun of them, just like we do when they use artificially contrived “biz-speak”.
No, it works both ways – sometimes it’s a product of social change, sometimes it’s an attempt to drive social change, or to signal the endorsement of it. It’s often a chicken-and-egg situation in which one can have a boring argument about which came first, but there’s no doubt that there are institutions driving language change. For instance, as a positive example of the latter, the use of gender-neutral terminology (and I stress – this is a good thing) has been driven by innumerable style guides, literacy guides, and even by government decree. In Canada, the Federal Plan for Gender Equality sets out government policy with respect to gender-neutral terminology (and was even presented to the UN to further promulgate such policy). And the main reason for this is to help dispel the notion of a male-centric society. All of which I fully support, but it is nevertheless an example of how language change aims to change our attitudes and behaviours.
Well, I started a whole thread remarking on the silliness of banning the term “master bedroom”. I assure you it wasn’t because I’m in favour of slavery!
That falsely assumes that all the cases have equal merit. They do not. What you call “fringe cases” are easy to make fun of because they’re stupid.
Usually nothing, but in the examples I gave, they’re trying to drive language change in a deliberately deceptive way, and hope the rest of us will follow.
It’s not banned though. You can sell houses and use that term if you want to.
If monkey is race-baiting, isn’t “bird” arguably sexist?
Do you really not understand?
Only for Brits. Note that they haven’t named a disease “Chick Flu.”
That most certainly didn’t happen, and couldn’t have happened, until the social change was already well under way. Did you think it came out of nowhere?
No. Just in favor of being able to use language without thinking about it.
I don’t actually think that one is stupid. Claiming the term could only have been applied to slave masters would have been stupid, yes. But it does imply that whoever’s using that bedroom is in some sense in charge of whoever uses the other bedrooms in the house; and, as was pointed out rather exhaustively in that thread, that very often isn’t true; and is odd language to use even when the residents are parents and children and the parents are in charge of the children.
Of course that’s the intention. But that doesn’t make it “top-down”.
It’s the use of terms like banning and force I disagree with.
I drove by a billboard today that showed some cows and quoted the sixth commandment: Thou shalt not kill. And then said I should become a vegetarian.
Was this billboard an attempt to drive social change? Yes, clearly. But it wasn’t banning the consumption of meat. It wasn’t forcing me to be a vegetarian. There is no enforced top-down Orwellianism.
When I used the word “enforced” I was thinking of mandates within a particular organizational domain, or enforcement by social pressure. It’s certainly not enforcement in the sense of some all-powerful authority as in Orwell’s 1984, so as I acknowledged before, the term “Orwellian” is just a reference to the idea that language really does shape our attitudes and behaviours. In many contexts that term can be regarded as hyperbole, but the fact remains that there clearly are institutional authorities directing us on the preferred and even mandated use of language. That we are not actually jailed for transgressions, or that the mandates have limited reach, doesn’t change that basic fact.
I feel your argument falls apart because you’re using the word force in a situation where no actual force exists.
The Oceania government was a dystopia because it used force (both threatened and actual) to compel its subjects. Remove the force and what you have left is an advertising campaign.
There were some regulatory tweaks in how the insurance industry needs to report certain types of expenses more than 25 years ago. To reconcile with that, my professional organization changed the official language, switching from “ALAE” (allocated lots adjustment expenses) to “DCC” (defense and cost containment). Today, i almost never heard “DCC” and all my exhibits say “ALAE”. Organizational domains don’t actually have the power to force changes in language. If real estate agents are saying “primary bedroom” instead of “master bedroom” it’s because society changed, in an organic way, and real estate agents have customers who prefer that language.
I don’t think I’m misunderstanding or misrepresenting you at all. The crux of the disagreement is that you think “Orwellian” can be used to describe language changes that aren’t enforced via violence, and I don’t. Ironically, your use of the word “Orwellian,” as a politically subtle shift in meaning to villainize your adversaries, is, by your definition but not the original, an Orwellian use of language.
It’s absurd to treat things like “primary bedroom” as “Orwellian”. If a government body is threatening to arrest real estate agents who say “master bedroom,” it’s appropriate; otherwise, it simultaneously dilutes the word and obfuscates the actual social dynamics at play. Folks should stop doing that nonsense.
Same for chicken pox. Insulting to chickens! Insulting to people who have been called chickens! Change it to c-pox!
May I just offer up my enthusiastic Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow!
It’s not possible to “keep separate” the latter two “issues” you mention, because the distinction between them is purely subjective. One person’s “convey[ing] greater respect to the disadvantaged or greater inclusion to the marginalized” is another person’s “stupid efforts to modify the language to suit woke sensibilities”. Where one draws that line is a matter of personal opinion.
Concurring with the general consensus that this is a stupid thread, and snowflakey handwringing about controversial examples of linguistic evolution being allegedly “Orwellian” is stupid too.
Which is what I’m offering. Others are offering theirs. And among those who have offered their views is John McWhorter, a renowned linguist specializing in language change who should not be casually dismissed. As he writes in an article in The Atlantic,
… according to counsel from Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center, or PARC, considerate people must go further [than gender-neutral terminology]: Apparently, we must retire victim, survivor, trigger warning, and African-American too. We must do so, that is, if we seek to ignore some linguistic fundamentals while also engaging in distinctly callow sociological calisthenics. When we are to even “consider” avoiding the word prisoner (try person who was incarcerated) or walk-in (because not all people can walk) and the phrase everything going on right now (I’ll leave you to find out what’s wrong with that one), we are being preached to by people on a quest to change reality through the performative policing of manners.
McWhorter concludes as follows:
But these sanctions are based on no general agreement among even sensitive, sociologically concerned people. Couched as compassionate counsel, this list is mostly a series of prim concoctions by people who, one suspects, simply need more to do. In the end, working to change conditions is much more important than obsessively curating the words and expressions we use to describe them.
And I agree that the OP is silly but the side discussion that it triggered is not.
I know, but my point is that it makes no sense to treat those subjective opinions as meaningful distinctions between categories of issues that need to be “kept separate”.