MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-06-06 |
| FROM | Phil Stracchino
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout - NYLXS] The historical roots of our computer terms
|
On 2020-06-06 13:27, yuv wrote:
> On Sat, 2020-06-06 at 19:12 +0200, Jaroslaw Rafa wrote:
>> Black color is culturally associated with the devil (and also death),
>> and white with an angel (innocence, etc.)
>
> in your culture. have you tried checking other cultures?
Exactly. In Japanese culture, blue is associated with purity and
innocence, and white with death and funerals, as I recall.
>> Let's not get crazy.
That is the golden watchword here. The trouble with trying to
politically cleanse language is, where do you stop?
It is instructive here to consider the case of, for instance,
chairman/chairperson. We were all exhorted to abandon words like
chairman, mailman, on the grounds that they are male-centric and
indicative of the patriarchy.
Unfortunately, when you study the historical etymology of the words,
that is not the case. Long ago, the language that became English used
to have three words for a person: one meaning an explicitly male
person, one meaning an explicitly female person, and one meaning a
person of unspecified gender.
"Man", if we're going to talk historical etymology, is the word for *a
person of unspecified gender*. The word for a specifically male person
does not exist in the English language any more. It was lost a thousand
years ago.
Sure, yes, let's do our best not to use clearly racially or culturally
divisive or offensive terms. But to abandon perfectly neutral terms
because a discriminatory connotation *can be retconned onto them* is to
throw the baby out with the bathwater. Where does it end?
There *is no basic human right not to be offended*. Seriously. There
isn't. And you CANNOT eliminate all usages from speech that might
offend someone, because there are people who appear to evaluate their
self-worth in terms of how many things they are offended by today, and
they are endlessly inventive in confecting offense in language that
developed with no discriminatory intent whatever, because the more
offended they are, *obviously* the better a person they are. And to
make matters worse, some of these people will complain about words whose
meaning they don't understand because it sounds similar to a bad word
and they don't know the difference. Tried using the word 'niggardly'
lately? People hear the word and *just assume that it must be racially
offensive*.
The rule that you cannot say anything that might possibly offend
someone, somewhere ends only one place: Nobody is allowed to say
anything, because *anything* you say *might* offend *someone*.
Are we going to tell the Black Watch they need to find a new name?
Devise a new term for the color of paper? Prohibit selling cars painted
the color that is neutral in hue but darker than grey?
That way lies madness. Sometimes a cigar is just a freakin' cigar.
> For the political debate... it's the twitterization of language. White
> is RGB(255,255,255) and Black is RGB(0,0,0).
"The twitterization of language." I like that phrase, and am hereby
adopting it. :)
--
Phil Stracchino
Babylon Communications
phils-at-caerllewys.net
phil-at-co.ordinate.org
Landline: +1.603.293.8485
Mobile: +1.603.998.6958
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