LHoD: One thing to keep in mind is that Pinker is an opponent of even the weak sapir whorf view, and argues from that paradigm. And while it may be true that language does not effect thought in some cases , in others, it does. Especially categorical perception.
If language really didn’t effect thought, you wouldn’t have a different disposition toward someone based on how they were described. “He’s a real nice guy.” “He acts all nice, but he’s a real asshole once you get to know him.” Language would influence thought/emotion/disposition in such a case. Jus’ sayin’ is all, dun wanna hijack this thread into the realms of linguistic theory.
But you see that sort of overreaction is so absurd and rare as to fail to be a reasonable example of a trend.
“Administrative assistant” and “administrative professional” (one I had never heard) is sometimes used to dress up a job, but when people get used to the idea that that job is also usually held by women and is also lower paying, it will have the same connotation that “secretary” does. (The word secretary never bothered me; it was the pay that didn’t seem to be in line with all the work done.)
“Person of short stature” is actually a very awkward and vague phrase. “A short person” would have said the same thing, but it would have been just as vague. What we called “midgets” as children may not even exist anymore because of the use of growth hormones.
“Mobility device” is another one I haven’t heard. I promise there is no vast left wing conspiracy to get the name changed from wheelchair.
If this is the sort of thing you object to, I don’t think that you are going to find any argument from those of us on the left.
What puzzles me is how you could think that anyone would think there is any comparison between the two.
Unfortunately, I think you’re underestimating the number of places and situations where this type of sensitivity training is the norm, rather than the absurd. The woman who was sent to this training works for a small town radio station, not a university, Wall Street office or political organization - and they have a Diversity Committee. Yes, my comparison of “secretary” and “nigger” was slightly over the top for effect, but I have been in situations where my use of the term “secretary” has been reacted to as though I HAD said “nigger.”
Which brings me back to a point - if I were the type of person who used words like “nigger” or “spic”, do you think insisting that I change my terms would make me a better person? Do you think the ideas that I hold would change because I was using different language? (My godmother is a perfect example of this type of bigot: “Look at the little nig… OH I’M SORRY! I MEAN AFRICAN-AMERICAN <rolls eyes and makes a big put-upon sigh> baby! They look like little monkeys.”)
I know there’s no vast conspiracy to change the use of “wheelchair” to “mobility device”… but the fact that it even ever came up, that someone would have it on a list of “corrective” language, should make us all take a step back and rethink how far out of hand this can get, and how easily. I’m certainly not insisting that we go back and start referring to women of Jewish background as “Jewesses” but I do think we’re really starting to go too far in the other direction.
A while ago, I started a thread decrying the use of the Phrase “people of color”. It turned out that it was an old George Carlin rant that I had forgotten I had ever heard. After some well-deserved and good-natured ridicule for the lack of originality, the real pitting began. People assumed that
Dittoheads ridicule PC-speak
Hoodoo ridicules PC-speak
Hoodoo is a dittohead
One of the arguments used was that no one says that anymore anyhow. A week later Howard Dean was here being pitted for some of his remarks using the same phrase.
Well, almost accurate (things are looking up). The OP’s thread title “I pit cognitive dissonance” was followed by the following text: “The phrase. Hate it with an Orwellian passion. I will never use it. Again.” As Lewis and Popper kept repeating (seems like they needed to too), reading between the lines is so much easier than reading the lines themselves.
Actually, he addresses this with several examples of people who were raised without language: a deaf woman whom folks mistakenly thought was severely retarded until she was 31, for example at which point she obtained hearing aids that allowed her to participate in language for the first time. While she is now able to reason at the low end of normal (I believe), and holds down a job at a veterinary clinic, she’s never been able to learn language syntax. She might say something like “He dog he shot needs says.”
Thanks, Finnagain: my knowledge of linguistics comes almost exclusively from reading Pinker’s books, and while I realize that this gives me a limited view of the field, I don’t really know how my view is limited. One of these days I’ll branch out.
This is a good example of an accurate term which needs to be used in certain circumstances, but which gets bandied around as an example of PC. Obviously, a wheelchair is a wheelchair. However, if I need to have a building adapted for full accessibility, it needs to accomodate not only wheelchairs, but also perhaps larger powered buggies, and certainly walking frames, crutches, etc. So I need to have it adapted to suit ‘mobility devices’.
Well, people certainly haven’t been niggardly in their opinions here.
(Waits for applause and laughter to die down.)
PC passed the giggle point for me many years ago, when someone who bought into it utterly berated me for telling a story where my grandmother used the term “colored people”. When I asked what term she should have been using for the past sixy-eight years, the berater replied with a perfectly straight face,
“People of color.”
Some of this kind of thing is genuinely meant. Some is an attempt to gain power over people by changing the rules of polite discourse at random, so you can swing on someone if you need to and act offended. Thus “Negro” becomes “Afro-American” becomes “person of color” becomes “black” becomes “Black” (I read it in Ebony! It must be right!) becomes “African American”. It’s like the absolute insistence on calling transsexuals “she” hereabouts, which even the PC can’t always keep straight. Or references to “Queer politics” I have seen, which I always feared represented an attempt to set people up to use the same term so they could be dog-piled for hate speech.
At the center, I suppose, the whole PC thing is an attempt to respect people’s feelings. At the extremes, it is an attempt to impose thoughtcrime.
We should all be aghast at the cruel tyranny friend Shodan is forced to confront. Why, on almost a monthly basis, he must navigate the treacherous shoals of pronoun usage in reference to transexuals! It always there, isn’t it? You seek a civil discussion on Barry Bonds, and must decide which pronoun to use in reference to transexuals, or a polite discussion on the mating habits of Australian wombat, again, the problem arises.
See, this gets back to the “it’s just good manners” business. I viscerally DO NOT get the concept of gender identity: if I woke up as a woman tomorrow, it wouldn’t change who I am. So I viscerally DO NOT get the worry people have about being called “he” or “she.” Hell, I often get mistaken for a woman, especially by the elderly: I have long hair, am clean-shaven, and soft-spoken. Not to mention my bodacious rack. So I viscerally DO NOT get why transsexuals worry about whether they’re called “he” or “she.”
However, I don’t have to get it. If Chris tells me to use the feminine pronoun, I’ll use it when referring to her; what skin is it off my back to do so? It makes her happy, and though I may not understand why it makes her happy, that’s irrelevant. I’ll call her what she wants to be called.
That’s not being PC. That’s just plain old-fashioned considerate.
No prob, my pleasure. Smackin’ ignorance an’ all that. I would recomend, if you’ve got the time, the book Gentner, D., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (eds.). Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
They come from the perspective of at least being willing to look at the weak Whorfian view. And with that, imma be quiet.
My objection was not exactly to the notion of transsexuals expecting politeness. It was mostly to the use of insisting on all kinds of complicated circumlocutions that, as I mentioned, even the PC cannot always keep straight, so when someone can’t keep up on the latest rules, they can be excoriated. It’s a power grab - I’m more PC than thou, therefore thou art an asshole.
Look at the thread where Kaitlyn/Number Six was outed as a complete liar and fraud. The first few pages of the thread were people ragging on whoever it was that started the thread for referring to Kaitlyn as “she” in quotes. And it turned out the skepticism about his/her/their gender identity was entirely justified.
It’s not always expecting politeness. It’s sometimes a game of “gotcha”.
Regards,
Shodan
PS - is “fundie” an example of “just good manners”, or does that only count for PC groups?
Indeed it did. I don’t follow your point, however. It’s good manners to accept someone at their word about what they want to be called; it’s ill manners for a person to lie about that.
False, and baffling, dichotomy. I have never claimed that “fundie” is good manners; indeed, I’ve specifically said that it’s a rude thing to call someone. Sometimes rudeness is copacetic, and folks who want to take away my rights are a perfect example of when rudeness is copacetic. If you want to rehash this point, I invite you to open another thread on it.
Perhaps it would be better to think of PC terms as suggestions, to be adopted or discarded accordingly. For instance, “Ms.” as a term of address for a woman that does not take into account her marital status. Started as a “PC” term, and caught on. Nowadays, accepted as standard practice.
As well, PC terms offer the opportunity to display the good intentions of the speaker. The willingness to use clumsy locutions is a gesture of good intent. Scorning such may not necessarily reveal a hostile or derisive intent, it may only imply that the speaker regards such as futile and pointless. Such a speaker may not be part of the problem, but does not volunteer to be part of the solution.
Being human, our good intentions are frequently flumoxxed by our own weaknesses and failures. The solution is not to quit trying but to try something else.
Something I recently saw in IMHO, which may help clear up the confusion. After writing a few paragraphs about TS/TG people and editing any mention of words he or she, mojavee66 used a pronoun I’ve never seen before:
Seeing that it was used twice, I can safely assume it wasn’t a typo. Using ze may be PC, but damn, it does make it easier to use second person references to those in the TS/TG community.
I’ve always seen that one as “zie”, myself. There are a couple of gender-neutral pronoun sets kicking around – zie/zir, sie/hir, and e/eir are the ones I know of (that’s nominative/possessive).
I generally see them used for “person of unknown gender”, “person of undisclosed gender”, or “person of non-standard gender”. I don’t see why they would be appropriate for transfolk, who are very clear about their gender and in my experience rarely prefer that it be undisclosed.
(Personally, I’m of the camp that holds that English has a gender-neutral pronoun – they/their – and further don’t find any of the manufactured solutions particularly aesthetically pleasing. I will use them for people who have requested them if there is no convenient way of structuring my sentences so a pronoun is unnecessary.)
In practice, it was a faddish manifestation of largely white cultural elitism, giving the well-to-do of suburbia another excuse to look down their noses at various species of white trash. I wish this weren’t true, but I bore the brunt of it quite often in college, and was left completely disillusioned with the entire concept. Imagine how surprised I was to learn, upon suggesting to my peers once I considered “All In the Family” to be brilliant cultural satire, that admiration of Archie Bunker is just the sort of behavior a “Mainard” would display. All I ever really saw of PC was rich white kids from posh suburbs looking for a way to justify their delusions of superiority with asinine and sanctimonious misconceptions such as that, while various minorities had little to do with them and looked on with bemusement at the wiggers pumping their fists to Vanilla Ice and 3rd Bass. PC turned into just another form of hate speech, I’m afraid, and was about as impolite as can be.
