I agree that we should try and be understanding when people inadvertently use language that has become offensive.
At the same time, there are a whole lot of people who want to staunchly defend using language that has become offensive, and even use it gleefully. I have much less sympathy for this position.
Yes, we should try to be understanding. We currently are not. If someone important says "Sexual Preferences" instead of "Sexual Orientation", we devote a news cycle to talking about how horribly homophobic she is for implying that sexuality is changeable like a preference rather than fixed like an orientation, nevermind that that reverses which things can be changed, nevermind that "Sexual Preferences" was broadly acceptable 5 years prior.
I have plenty of sympathy for people who react to this needless cruelty with a total rejection of the concept and deliberate rebellion. Rationally, sure, they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But this is an emotional response and I can understand it and sympathize.
Admittedly, I have sympathy for everyone. I ultimately believe in determinism; I can no more fault a serial killer for a murder than a cloud for blocking the sun. There is a utility to behaving as though good and bad people exist, rather than just good and bad outcomes: you can improve those outcomes. But witholding sympathy does not improve outcomes.
Most of these words haven’t “become” offensive, activists have declared them offensive. It’s not that Latinos felt offended by that term, some academic activist came up with Latinx because they wanted another shibboleth.
I don't think you're going to be run through the gauntlet for saying Latino.
Yah-- using gender neutral terms when possible is nice, and someone has to coin those terms.
But what I'm talking about: there's a whole lot of these words that were initially offensive, or became offensive because they have been used derisively. If you insist on referring to people by terms they find offensive, even after correction, then you are being a jerk.
And I am saying that in most of these cases it is not that the terms "have become offensive", it's that academics and activists invent and promote, sometimes enforce, new terms, proactively so to speak.
> using gender neutral terms when possible is nice
That's your opinion, and it tends to very strongly correlate with left-wing politics, it's not a consensus opinion.
It's been favored in pretty much every style guide for decades at this point. I am presently in the middle of the political spectrum, but I've spent the majority of my life pretty right-leaning. At the same time, I see no reason to choose words that might imply to a lot of people that I'm only talking about men, or to choose other words that might cause people offense.
It's funny how we can so clearly see this in so many domains -- referring to an unintelligent person as a "moron" would pretty clearly be not nice -- but are willing to defend doing it to other disfavored groups so strongly.
>referring to an unintelligent person as a "moron" would pretty clearly be not nice
- but neither would it be an attempt to demean everyone who suffers from a learning disability. It would, instead, be an affirmation that low intelligence is an undesirable quality. And anyway, in practice, overwhelmingly such language is aimed at people of ordinary or even above average intelligence, with the intent of suggesting that the target is not meeting expectations.
> but neither would it be an attempt to demean everyone who suffers from a learning disability
No, but it might have that net effect, to whomever is in earshot.
> And anyway, in practice, overwhelmingly such language is aimed at people of ordinary or even above average intelligence
If you don't think the kid who is struggling in school is being called a "retard," I don't know what to tell you.
Another example-- the word "boy." There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the word "boy," but it was used by a lot of people to demean black men. I certainly wouldn't want to say it to a person who would think I'm doing the same thing to that point. And at that point, maybe it's time to prune the word "boy" as a word of address out of my language, and discourage my kids from the "booooiiiiii" that would be interpreted very poorly in the wrong situation.
That is of course awful in every way, but I really wonder, isn't the real problem that there are bad people? I think we can agree that people who are heartless enough to bully a vulnerable person like that, they will not stop just because a new euphemism is promoted. So how does it actually help? I can understand that if you are being called a slur, you want that slur to go away, but if it's going to be replaced by another slur, what is actually achieved?
It won't stop people from bullying the vulnerable person, but it will mean that the bullied person won't have to hear the same term in a bunch of contexts, and it will mean the bully will have less plausible deniability if confronted by authority over their behavior.
That's pretty different from calling the kid with the obvious intellectual disability by the term every day as he waits to board the bus home.
And given that there's people with that experience, perhaps it's time to heavily discourage use of the word in general. Calling your buddy it to be funny helps normalize it for the people who want to use it to be cruel, and gives them cover.
OK, so if we accept that something that is a neutral term can turn offensive (retarded) and that we should stop using it as a result... why not do it for other terms that have the same problem?
Right around 1990, and I don't think the "really, don't say 'retard'" thing took strong effect until early 2000's.
Our culture's imperfect, but there's a fair bit of evidence that it's a kinder, more courteous world-- especially for youth-- than 30 years ago. Taking some sharp edges off language may have helped with that.
At the same time, there are a whole lot of people who want to staunchly defend using language that has become offensive, and even use it gleefully. I have much less sympathy for this position.