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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   3051 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 2, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What are your picks for words/idioms that ought to be retired this year?

My pick is LARP, which used to mean something, but now just means "people I don't like are doing something." When both 4chan and the Azov are "Nazi LARPers;" the phrase just has no meaning, they seem to lack the live action on the one hand and the role playing on the other. I think it also overprivileges nostalgia for an imagined past when people were "real" and ideologies were "serious;" read about them and real successful revolutions and wars were just as filled with dilettantes, misfits, personal drama, and nonsense on their way to changing the world. Failure to recognize this starves our knowledge of history.

LGBBQTπKTHXBYE or whatever it is right now. It's a horrid acronym that just keeps on growing; needs to be cut off before it strangles the entire alphabet.

Trudeau officially retired it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=P5eZ3MiCfPs

Re: LARPing, I really like this Alex Kaschuta article: https://alexkaschuta.substack.com/p/all-the-worlds-a-larp

Embrace the LARP.

POC, BIPOC, BAME, and all other euphemistic portmanteau terms the lump together non-white people in white-majority countries. They obscure more than they illuminate and the people the words refer to don't like them.

BIPOC

... pointedly doesn't lump together all the non-white people. 'Black and Indigenous People of Color' (where 'indigenous' can be taken to include people with a substantial Native American ancestry component, thus sweeping up most Latinos who aren't Conquistador-Americans) excludes Asians of both the South Asian and the East Asian persuasion. It's implicitly a catch-all term for 'non-white people who have worse average social outcomes than white people', a PC alternative for what used to be called 'non-Asian minorities'.

... pointedly doesn't lump together all the non-white people. 'Black and Indigenous People of Color' (where 'indigenous' can be taken to include people with a substantial Native American ancestry component, thus sweeping up most Latinos who aren't Conquistador-Americans) excludes Asians of both the South Asian and the East Asian persuasion. It's implicitly a catch-all term for 'non-white people who have worse average social outcomes than white people', a PC alternative for what used to be called 'non-Asian minorities'.

My understanding (I am not American, and BIPOC is obviously meaningless outside North America) confirmed by a quick Google is that BIPOC is supposed to stand for "Black, Indigenous, *and *People of Colour" - i.e. it does lump together all non-whites, but centres Black Americans and American Indians within the lump.

Maybe so, but even then, it is still centring the groups with worse average social outcomes, and downplaying the ones who are more successful than whites.

I particularly hate the term "BIPOC" because, by definition, the ethnicity or ethnicities which are indigenous to a given country vary from country to country. The ethnicity which is indigenous to Sweden are white Swedes, and yet in this context the term "indigenous" is only ever used to refer to non-white people.

In the UK "indigenous" to refer to the white English population is considered to be a racist dog-whistle. Amusingly, there is a deep (as in going back to the 1380's, and still taken seriously as late as the 1980's) tradition of (pre-Wokespeak so it doesn't use the technical terms, but the sentiment is clear) left-wing historical mythology in England which sees the white working class as indigenous and the upper class as settler-colonialists descended from William the Conqueror's knights.

The researchers from the London School of Economics, Dr Neil Cummins and Professor Gregory Clark, said the name checks showed that social mobility in England is hardly greater than in medieval times, and that people inherited their social status even more than they inherit their height.

Dr Cummins said: ‘Just take the names of the Normans who conquered England nearly 1,000 years ago. Surnames such as Baskerville, Darcy, Mandeville and Montgomery are still over-represented at Oxbridge and also among elite occupations such as medicine, law and politics.

‘What is surprising is that between 1800 and 2011 there have been substantial institutional changes in England but no gain in rates of social mobility for society as a whole.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2479271/1-000-years-invaded-need-Norman-like-Darcy-Percy-ahead.html

Excuse the Daily Mail link, at least the quotes are from the source.

Of course going down the indigenous rabbit hole in a European country leads you to places where indigenous either doesn't mean anything (mythology) or doesn't mean anything useful to modern society (Neanderthals, out of Africa).

Yes! My company wants to increase the representation of "Indigenous+" in Europe, and make no effort to explain what that means. I'm in Germany, so I assume they want more Neanderthals....

What? I'd assume it means ethnic Germans. I'll be offended if it doesn't. Please let your HR department know I have high expectations of them.

Ha! I'll make sure to pass it along ;), but sadly, it does not appear that that is what they meant...

What are your picks for words/idioms that ought to be retired this year?

"Gaslighting". It has proper application sometimes, but it's increasingly little more than a synonym for "disagreeing".

Nobody uses that word, you're imagining things.

Anyone who claims our democracy is not threatened by election deniers is gaslighting us!

LARP has a more specific meaning, even in the insult version. A certain Don Quixote-like quality of delusional ly pretending to be something anachronistic, from a different time. Also not fully standing behind the thing with proper skin in the game. Playing a tough guy without backing it up. Now whether this applies to the Azov people, I don't know but accusing them of being unreal, weak, all talk, etc. is a classic insult. It doesn't make those words meaningless.

OP is probably complaining about my usage of LARP in a recent thread, which, fair enough, maybe it is not specified enough. But I meant it more like "bored people who have been so well-insulated from the real-world that they go out and do dangerous stuff."

Agree on LARP. Without exaggeration, I think the current usage could have been applied to the guys signing the Declaration of Independence - "lol, signing your name on a document doesn't make it a real country bro, stop LARPing".

I could probably pass on pretty much all current uses of "our democracy", which doesn't really seem to have much to do with democracy, but quite a bit to do with the possessive on the front of the phrase.

The acceleration of the use of "denier" for "someone who disagrees with me" has rendered it all but useless. Maybe it was always just as useless, or at least just as pointlessly pejorative, but it didn't seem quite as fully devoid of meaning until I saw people slapping it on "election deniers".

Of course, the weight of "denier" comes from "Holocaust denier". Then recently people started using "climate change denier" and also "election denier", "vaccine denier" etc. The association with Holocaust denial also makes it easier to argue that these other types of denials should similarly become illegal.

Muh wage gap denialism.

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