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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37165 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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It reminds me of something I complained about some time ago during our Voice referendum - the idea that if you can just successfully quibble what to call something, that can somehow substitute for actually convincing people of anything.

There's obviously an extent to which words matter, and symbolism matters, but that extent is not infinite, and I suspect that if you're very good at wordsmithing, or in a language-focused industry (like journalism or much of academia or much of politics), it can be easy to overestimate the power of words, or indeed to confuse words for reality.

Thus the idea that if you can quibble what you call Kamala Harris' role at the border, that will somehow mean something. Even though I'd say it pretty clearly doesn't.

Very common line of thinking for that shade of political thought, I think. It's a recurring issue.

If we just called them unhoused instead of homeless, the stigma would be gone and everything would be better. If we just call them neurodivergent instead of mentally ill/challenged, the erasure of the stigma will mitigate the issue. And be sure to call "slaves" "enslaved people" instead. None of these initiatives actually really improved anything as far as I can tell, but at least they function as shibboleths.

People who run on the euphemism treadmill don't seem to grasp the fundamental truth of the situation: words don't have stigma attached because the words are a magic spell, they have a stigma attached because the situation they describe is bad.

For example, being mentally ill is bad no matter what we call it. No matter what we call it, people will start to use that label as a mocking term. You simply cannot change that by changing the term, you have to work to fix the underlying problem if you want to make things better. But a lot of the euphemism treadmill aficionados seem to willfully disregard this truth of the world, and insist that mental illness (or whatever) isn't actually bad, and the problem is purely with how society reacts to those people. It's not true though, and all their efforts will never make it true.

I propose an alternative theory: the euphemism treadmill is not an attempt to destigmatize bad things via language. There's a little of that, sure, and I would imagine that's often the source of new euphemisms. But the primary purpose of the euphemism treadmill, the reason that new phrases successfully memetically propagate, is signalling tribal allegiance.

I’m going to start using “sibboleths” just to see who reacts.

Jewish Motters: I am not actually an Ephraimite.

Jewish Motters: I am not actually an Ephraimite.

You may not be an Ephraimite but referencing that particular story is a pretty loud dogwhistle for Freemasonry.

Really! Both a sibboleth and a dogwhistle. Some days I love this place. (The rest of the time, I like it.)

But do you sá-sí, if you can speak no better?

There's obviously an extent to which words matter, and symbolism matters, but that extent is not infinite, and I suspect that if you're very good at wordsmithing, or in a language-focused industry (like journalism or much of academia or much of politics), it can be easy to overestimate the power of words, or indeed to confuse words for reality.

Agreed. See also the terminally online, and anyone in an industry where their paycheck hinges on the belief that propaganda is decisive. There's the saying it's very hard to convince someone that the job that pays their paycheck is unnecessary, and it's equally hard to find someone in the convincing-people industry that too much money is currently being spent on trying to convince people.

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