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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35893 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I'm a non-native English speaker as well, though I might as well be due to immigrating at a very early age, and I second this and will go even stronger: it doesn't matter if there are impressionable children around, because they don't need to be protected from encountering the pain of seeing a specific set of characters in a specific order. Letters placed or syllables pronounced in some specific order are not magical spells, and it is bad for adults to behave as if they were in front of impressionable children.

The reason to avoid swearing around impressionable children isn't that they "need to be protected from encountering the pain of seeing a specific set of characters in a specific order", but that they are impressionable, liable to attempt to copy you and get the impression that things you do are a good idea to do in other contexts.

Edit: which is not to say that the entire Internet should be sanitized into child-friendliness.

Indeed, I have sat in that chair, I have had this conversation

Sure, but impressions can go in many directions. Using terms like "n-word" or "f-slur" when "nigger" or "faggot" would be more appropriate can give impressionable children the false impression that these words (and possibly, slurs in the general sense) actually have magical properties that make uttering them cause harm or whatever.

This is beginning to sound like the makings of a good South Park episode.

They do in fact have magical properties, though. They aren't just words, they are taboo in the most primitive sense possible, and there is no reason to believe this will change in the forseeable future. You might adhere strongly to the "words are just words" ideology, but the norms that ideology built lasted a bare handful of decades, and now they are gone. "they're just words" is, perhaps, minimally true, but "they will mess your life up if you use them" is maximally true and in a very immediate, concrete way.

If it is the case that such words really do have magical properties, then using them in front of impressionable children will demonstrate the magic - i.e. someone will mess your life up for using them - and children would notice that and learn of those magical properties. If using them doesn't result in such messing up happening, then it would demonstrate that, No, those words don't have magical properties, and there are contexts when they can be used without people messing you up. Impressionable children wouldn't necessarily pick up on those contexts, but I posit that (1) information about taboos around slurs is so plentiful anyway that watching/reading some adult use them has minimal impact and (2) children get much more leeway in breaking such taboos due to their natural lack of experience and maturity and learning the right contexts when to use such terms through experience and experimentation is part of growing up.

The problem is, some -- too many -- do treat them that way, and have banished the use/mention distinction. It's like the Jehovah scene in Monty Python. So rather than risk crazy people trying to ruin your life, people avoid the words.

I prefer to take it further, and talk about either Voldemort or "the letter-after-m word". Well, actually I generally prefer not to talk about it at all, since there are too many rabid, crazy people out there. (yet here I am, oops)

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