TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
If there's one thing I am always consistent in opposing, it is trying to litigate and micromanage the words that people can and cannot use. This seems to be very omnipresent these days, and in my opinion it has to do with the fact that an increased amount of communication relies on huge tech platforms that can only moderate through AI algorithms. Thus, they have to scan for words and combinations of words to "detect" immorality instead of intuiting it through the intention BEHIND those words, which is what really matters. I talked about this in a more in-depth fashion in my essay THE TOS-IFICATION OF MORALITY.
So the first and foremost point I want to make clear is that I am deeply opposed to censoring any particular words. I have a very extreme view when it comes to freedom of expression and view any clamping down on it as unjust. In the ideal world that I want to move towards, anyone should be able to say any racial slur and have no one care. The move should always be towards de-fanging offensive words and making them mundane, rather than increasing their mystique as unholy forbidden fruits. You only make them more appealing that way. And I try to do that by always explicitly writing NIGGER rather than "n-word" or whatever else. The more language we have to use and experiment with, the better. As long as our attitudes beneath them are correct.
With that in mind, I want to talk about my thoughts on changing words and phrases and why I choose to not use some and to keep using others. I don't avoid saying any particular words because they are inherently bad words. There are no such things. These are pragmatic concerns. My hope is that these words can eventually become old-fashioned and therefore lose any negative power they might have, and thus be open for us to pick up freely once more.
The "euphemism treadmill" is a well-documented phenomenon. There is a classic George Carlin bit where he talks about how we once used the word "shell shock" to describe the lingering mental effects of trauma on the battlefield. It was a great word: short, alliterative, evocative, and so on. This eventually got replaced with "battle fatigues." This word is longer (x2 syllables), less direct, more abstracted, and so on. Now we call it "post-traumatic stress disorder." What was once an intuitive, evocative, short and simple word is not this extremely belabored, long, abstracted term. There are examples of this all around the world in different places of course.
Of course, all these name changes occur for reasons. Of course, the most notable about PTSD is that it removes the idea away from being completely connected to war, as we now understand that PTSD can occur after any kind of trauma, not just that sustained during war. To that argument, I would give the counter-argument that if we started referring to trauma disorders as shell shock even if they didn't occur during warfare, this would have happened anyway. In fact, it would have had the opposite effect of what these critics allege: showing that things like growing up in abusive families can scar people as much as being in a warzone. There are a lot of phrases we use with unusual origins that we often forget. We could keep calling it shell shock and thus remember the history that this was originally discovered as something related to war, but applies to various cases. How many of you know the details of the 1973 Norrmalmstorg robbery? Probably very few. But you all know the concept of Stockholm syndrome. It's not like we think that Stockholm syndrome can only happen during bank robberies, despite that being the origin of the term.
What Carlin's bit reveals is something I consider a fundamental law: people feel resentment when they are inconvenienced, even just by making them say a few extra syllables. Why is "battle fatigues" a worse term than "shell shock?" Because it makes you take longer to say it. This sounds kind of silly, but the human brain is a remarkably efficient tool. We will try to cut unneccessary corners wherever we can in order to communicate. When you make people take longer to say a phrase, you subtly piss them off a bit, even if they totally are on board with whatever reason you want to change the words we use. I know this feeling personally. Ecology is one of my passions and I don't like to use the term "climate change," because it makes the process sound kind of mild and natural, obscuring the anthropogenic (human-caused) nature of the heating. But I won't lie; I say it automatically a lot. That's not just because it's the de-facto term in all media today, but also because it's at least one syllable shorter than most more accurate terms (global warming, global heating, climate crisis, climate mayhem, climate breakdown, Armageddon, greedy fucking corporate bastards destroying the future of humanity, etc.).
Being short and concise then seems to be a necessary component of effective and "good" phraseology. But being concise and short has the potential to be very harmful. In his brilliant essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell was highly critical of political writing and phraseology of his time. He argues that not only do these long, boring, artless phrases make language sterile and lifeless, but they actually can be used to gloss over crimes and injustices (and not just in totalitarian states like Stalin's Soviet Union):
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called "pacification." Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called "transfer of population" or "rectification of frontiers." People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called "elimination of unreliable elements." Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" [1]
These examples conform more with Carlin's "increase the syllables" rule, but the opposite can be even more insidious. In 1984, Eurasia operates in much the same capacity. But a lot of this operates by shortening and robbing things of nuances. The totalitarian one-party state in the book is called INGSOC, which is an acronym for "English Socialism." In fact, the party uses a lot of abbreviations and acronyms. This was inspired by tendencies in modern authoritarian states at the time. For example, the Nazi Party of Germany called themselves "Nazi," but what does this word really mean? It is an abbreviation of "Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" or "National Socialist German Workers' Party." Shortening this to "Nazi" makes us forget any of the original meaning of the term. It gets rid of the connection to Germany (and thus any particular past pieces of cultural heritage that do not conform with the Nazi party line), to workers (and thus to any pretense of improving the lives of working class people), and to socialism (and thus to any of the economic foundations of wealth redistribution and government regulation, etc.).
Stalin did similar things: bury all the atrocities and political hypocrisy and layers and layers of bureaucratic phraseology so normal people can never understand it. I read a book called We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth last year featuring a number of conversations with Native Americans on the subject of global heating and so on. One of them talked about the implementation of "TEK" or "Traditional Ecological Knowledge" in his state as a means of preventing ecological degradation. This primarily includes things like implementing the traditional stewardship practices of native tribes to maintain forests (controlled burnings and so on). The speaker jokingly said something to the effect of "now that we have an acronym for it, maybe they'll listen to us." I thought that this was very funny and sadly quite true. Everything has to be bogged down through bureaucratic bullshit to be taken seriously. So it is clear to me that while shortening is effective, it can also be used to make language less thoughtful and meaningful.
So it seems pretty clear to me: phrases/words that are both short AND evocative are the gold standard for effective phraseology and are extremely hard to get rid of. I think this tendency, however, can be used for advantages as well. A lot of the time, society is just waiting for a simple, easy phrase to capture something that is on the tip of everyone's tongue. A lot of zoomer slang is like this. The word "simp" has blown up so much because it is a simple, one-syllable word for a very particular phenomenon that everyone could see and recognize but not put into words: a guy who sucks up to a girl like a puppy in a very pathetic fashion in the desperate hope of getting female approval (pussy). We named this phenomenon different ways in the past (mostly "male feminist," lol), but SIMP is such a simple, brutal, sledgehammer of a word. There's no getting rid of it now.
Another good example of this is the word "woke." I choose not to use this word. It's so overused by everyone to mean whatever they like. A lot of right-wing politicians try to tie things like environmentalism into "woke" ideology, which I despise, since there have been right-wing environmentalists in the past and that we need all the environmentalist unity we can right now (to put it bluntly, I want to tell people "you can hate black people, women, and trannies and still care about carbon emissions"... sorry if you don't like that, but that's the level of crisis we face right now). But the point I want to make is that the word "woke" has caught on for a good reason. A lot of left-wingers will say that right-wingers use the phrase "woke" to mean "whatever I don't like." This is true to a degree, but I think it's silly to pretend like the word "woke" doesn't really mean something. If I was going to summarize it most simply, it would be "left-wing identity politics (usually revolving around race, gender, and sexual orientation) taken to the point of absurdity."
I think this is a fair definition. Of course, everyone will have a different standard of where that point of absurdity begins. But just because it's subjective doesn't mean that it doesn't have a genuine, real meaning. Now, I think that this term is largely harmful, but I also know that for about ten years now everyone has been trying to name this phenomenon of divisive, hateful, clumsy identity politics on the (primarily American) left-wing. First we called them social justice warriors or SJWs, but this term was a bit misleading, because the idea of "social justice" has a very positive history relating to things like ending child labor and so on. I still use this term because I think it's better than "woke" in spite of things, but it's hard to describe this phenomenon in the best way. I'm just against the idea of "identity politics" (which includes things like the KKK and neo-nazis as well) in general these days so that's how I tend to put it.
I see a movement away from simple, effective, naturally-occurring terminology everywhere these days, and I think it's a bad thing. A lot of the times I still feel lost about what phrases to use though. For example, I still refer to the original inhabitants of the continent today known as North America as "native Americans" or just "natives" for short. There's a kind of euphemism treadmill going on today with these people. The oldest word that everyone uses is, of course, "Indian." I don't think we should use this term anymore, and not for any political correctness reasons. Of course, the term is a mistaken one, based on a mistake made hundreds of years ago by European colonists. It's kind of silly for that reason. But the simple fact is that, today, even if we don't care about accuracy at all, there are a LOT of people in the Americas from the actual country of India these days. In fact, you're much more likely to run into one than into a native in most states. So this term is just too basic. In Europe, the term "Amerindian" is more common, but again: more syllables makes it harder to widely adopt! In Canada, and increasingly in the US, the term "indigenous" is replacing "native," but it just seems like more syllables to say the same thing, so I don't see much of a point to it. Frankly, I think that a reason people have trouble finding the right term is that most white Americans feel a tinge of guilt in referring to these people no matter what term they use, because it reminds them of a negative colonial history. And they mistakenly attach their feeling of unease to the word itself. This will never be fixed by just changing the words we use.
I would like to see something for natives comparable to the phrase "black" for melinated individuals. The truth is that the word "black" to refer to them largely dates back to after the Civil Rights era and the whole "black power" movement. The more common term before that was "negro." Of course, these words both mean exactly the same thing, so I think it seems a little arbitrary. But I do see both of these as preferable to "African-American." There's a reason that NOBODY likes this word nowadays. Nobody wants to say all those syllables! And a lot of it is rooted in a kind of Malcolm X-era romanticization of African roots that most black people today really can't understand. I remember talking to a black female from the states who had lived in Ghana for a number of years and she told me that "I will never call myself African-American again after that experience. I may be the same color as people there, but living there made it clear that I am in no way an African, any more than a white American like you is English." A very sensible opinion, I thought! So yes, I think "black" is here to stay, and for good reason.
I wish we had something like that for natives. I think that in the face of this, the best option is to refer to natives by their individual tribe whenever possible. Call them a Navajo, a Cherokee, a Blackfoot, a Chippewa, a Yaqui, or whatever else. Or, even better, refer to them as just an individual person. This might be very controversial, but a part of me feels like we should have never stopped saying "red" and "yellow" for people with American or Asian ancestry in addition to "black" and "white" when talking about people with European or African ancestry. All of them refer to categories of genetic difference that are equally as broad and general (and therefore, generally, unhelpful) at the end of the day, and if we are going to keep talking about people in such broad and therefore imprecise categories, we should at least be consistent about it. But obviously that's something that few would be open-minded to.
This essay ended up being very rambling and disorganized, so I guess I'll just sum it up in saying that short and evocative words and phrases are necessary if you want to change people's everyday speaking habits. It will never work otherwise. This is particularly important for those of us who care about things like environmental regulations that are commonly left out by people on the right, because in the US and in much of the world the right-wing is FAR better at coming up with good phraseology. Philosopher and progressive political commentator George Lakoff discusses the importance of "framing" issues correctly in his book Don't Think of an Elephant!, which is very informative no matter what your politics are like. He focuses on, for example, the phrase "tax relief" which was a common Bush administration term for cutting taxes (mostly to the extreme rich). This phrase automatically creates an impression that taxes are a bad thing we need to be relieved from, when we could alternately frame paying taxes as a patriotic duty required in contributing to a better society. The left-wing in the US has not learned a thing since this book came out in 2004, and to their great shame. As someone who cares about real left-wing issues (labor rights, UBI, health care, etc.) and enviromentalism, they are sadly my closest political allies right now and they need to learn this lesson.