aesmael

Not the reason I expected to be a first or early prompt for writing a post linking to FWD/Forward but...

This post? It's wrong. Infuriatingly, enragingly wrong. I hope that's just for rhetorical purposes.

Not the bit saying it is hard to confront people on their use of language, and I wouldn't disagree about it being harder taking the extra step of opening oneself up to that defensive hostility which so often arises when people are called on the ways their unexamined habits perpetuate systems of abuse and oppression, but to say changing one's language use is easy in such a derisive mocking way?

Oh dear. No, no it isn't. For most people, particularly the abled, language is a deeply ingrained automatic part of themselves. These words they use, they don't think about them most of the time and attempting to make a shift in long established usage is a very difficult habit to change. Words that rise up unbidden as part of commonplace speech as natural as breathing, words that have a lifetime of casual use behind them, words which are used pervasively in the surrounding environment as if they are ordinary acceptable terms?

No, not easy. Simple maybe. As simple as 'just say no'. As simple as uninternalising the messages I have picked up and believing myself to be a person of worth. 'Just change your mind', 'I know they were wrong and hurtful, so I can stop believing what they said of me'. It is simple, but it is not easy, and mistaking conceptual simplicity for ease of action has tripped me up many times in trying to recover... so. It quite aggravates me to see someone saying that because the concept of checking and altering one's habits of thought and action is simple, the doing of it is correspondingly easy.

What it takes in my experience and observation is mindfulness and sustained effort. Not slipping up is difficult. Try removing religiously based language from your non-technical vocabulary because it isn't your belief system; I've been working to control my vocabulary since primary school and it is still difficult to remove compromise words like 'darn' and 'drat' and 'bloody'. I'm fortunate I suppose that I never picked up most (not all, definitely some slipped through) ablist and homophobic and sexist language and was committed from a young age to not doing so, but it doesn't actually get easier as life goes on. Those words are normalised as part of our social discourse, they still get embedded in our lives and presented as language for our brains to pick up on and parse and use.

Quitting isn't so easy, no, but I have no fondness for people saying it is too hard even to try. Not for something like this when the message is "Please try to be less hurtful and more respectful in what you say, please be more mindful of others". Not the easiest thing to do, fine, but I'd say it is less than the minimum required of trying to be an ally, and well worth doing in itself. Pfah.

Bizarrely, my mother refuses to believe me that I am not watching Terminator 2: Judgement Day tonight because it is a bit of a tear-jerker and I don't feel like crying tonight.

Also, I want to start using these. This only reinforces my contention that our language could be far richer, or even possibly is far richer than common use would suggest.

Pronouns. Those are fun, right? In English we have male and female, plus a whole assortment of others. For a long while I have considered drawing distinctions among those others and systematising their meaning for me - not intended to restrict how others use them, but to devise a system for my own use which would distinguish subtleties of identity.

As yet I have not actually done so. Some people I know have done something of the sort, however, and I have adopted it for my own personal use. Thus, being presented both here and also now.

he	him	his	boyfriend	sir	Mr. (Mister)
zie	zir	zir	personfriend	august	Per. (Goodperson)
ey	em	eir	personfriend	august	Per. (Goodperson)

The second row consists of pronouns used to address persons who do not identify as male or female, while the third row consists of pronouns used to address persons of unknown gender. This system has been internalised as correct to the extent that other uses of these words register to me as incorrect, so I try to remember it is not in widespread usage and thus not correct those who do otherwise.

I tend to want to further distinguish between entities of neutral or no gender and those with gender but not one which is male or female. If I were to do so, I would likely adopt the set ve / ver / vis for this purpose.

As always,
Your Arbiter of Reality,
Per. Fakename, Tyrant

Edit: On a personal note, I have applied all of these terms to myself, and generally prefer not to specify a preference (which... sort of just got phrased as a preference itself). I like that there are people who will address me by female pronouns without prompting and that there are people who do the same for zie. Most of the time I lean more to the female set than the male, having had enough of the latter in my life for the time being, but when making self-reference perform a quick internal check to see which is most applicable in the moment. Sometimes using ey because I do not know. So for me personally, any of these are good except that I tend to avoid the male set in most circumstances.

As a further note, I considered that the use of male as the baseline in that table could be sexist but finally decided to go with it rather than add the extra complication of Ms. / Miss. / Mrs. to the right-uppermost box. I do not like that titles for women are used to code marital status in a way that is not done with men.

One of the great things about language is, it is open-source.

    Got to finalise that job application by tomorrow. Fortunately they allow email submissions or I would have had to send it in by *checks clock* now.

( Cut for: Writing talk )

    From pouringsand, this page which claims to donate 10 grains of rice to people in need for every word visitors get correct. Much more useful than decapitating peasants.
    At first I was using the Answers.com plugin for Firefox and my vocabulary level was marked at 48. When I stopped using it to get a more accurate picture it hovers around 44. Very difficult to stop clicking, although I might quibble with some of their definitions. Well, synonym really. So maybe not.

Edit: Apparently 'grok' is one of the words.

    Machine translated Russian reads like confusing poetry.

    Yes, I was intending to go to sleep after that last post; my head hurts and all. However, I found myself turning over one of shelleybear 's late posts in my mind, trying to understand how it could have happened.
    The thought that keeps returning to my mind is that the jury has been dishonest in reaching their conclusion. At least, I am assuming events occurred as described in the linked article. Even though I was not there and have no access to any of the evidence I have no reason to believe otherwise (I try to be aware of the provisionality of my knowledge in all cases, usually not explicitly and with the optimistic thought that people realise this. This time I could be bothered.) so for now I think any dishonesty must lie in the verdict.
    Have I rambled into a thicket? I think I have. I say dishonesty because how else can they, with video footage of the assault and the admission of the assaulter, still find these people* guilty?

( * )

    There is a disconnect in me. I keep trying and failing to guess at the thought path that would lead people to conclude it is okay to reach the verdict they did. Is there something I am missing? A detail of the trial or law perhaps, if not in the minds of those involved? Perhaps the answer is as simple as 'the jurors were unethical and took advantage of an opportunity to have the legal system punish people they disliked'.
    My mind wandered all the way into how people make decisions about right and wrong and the relatively easy target of Divine Command theory, rubbish idea that it is. The connection is forgotten for now, alas, but I did have a hypothetical debate with a hypothetical proponent of the theory (there are still real ones about) who maintained for the purposes of this train of thought that the killing of human beings is wrong because God says it is wrong.
    Ve attempted to refuse my doubly hypothetical yet based in reality question 'what if God declared it a good act to kill humans of class X (where X is not a category of people who have committed a crime [although if you were to maintain that disobedience toward God were itself a capital crime I suppose they still would be {unless we stipulate also that they have not actually committed any disobedience and merely fall into an identifiable category <parentheticals, whee!>}])?' by claiming 'God would not do that'.
    Of course, I pressed on the matter of, if God's will/decree is what defines right and wrong there is no reason why such a decree should not be made**. Ve claimed, then, that God is eternal, unchanging and necessarily as Ve is or else there could not be existence, therefore such hypothetical questions are invalid because there is no possibility in any reality - it is not a sensible question.
    I consider this to be a concession of the argument since I think it requires some set of principles prior to God which dictate Vis nature and, by extension, what is moral. The original purpose of writing this entire post was to ask if that were a valid objection to my hypothetical question but since in the writing I have concluded it is not I am now asking if I am in fact mistaken. I am sure I have made some unjustified/unjustifiable leap somewhere.
    And of course, one of the dangers of conducting arguments where one takes both sides is a tendency to use weaker arguments for the side not favoured but since there is only one question at stake in this case I have hopefully not been too bad.

**Well, if a previous decree were that right and wrong could not be changed in future there would be, actually. I did not realise this at the time.