IME it's a big part of it for a lot of people. People don't buy a car for what they do with it every day, they buy it for what they do with it a few times a year. If you have a boat on a trailer, you buy a vehicle that can pull the trailer. If you drive to the mountains in winter a few times a year, you buy a higher clearance AWD vehicle so that you can skip chain control.
You might say that this irrational and that people might be better off renting something on the occasion that they need to tow something, or go on a long road trip, or fit more than five people in their car. But people are irrational and they really do make these choices!
In addition, renting a large car for a few days is really expensive. If you have to do this 5-10 times a year, over 10 years of ownership, I'm not so sure that buying small and renting large make sense financially. Not to mention the inconvenience and loss of flexibility from having to collect and drop off a rental car, which typically isn't exactly right around the corner, especially in rural areas.
The biggest problem comes when this type of language policing is seen as the primary way of changing behaviours.
It's correct to be anti-racist / anti-sexist / etc. but that doesn't come from just changing your language while still operating the same as before. It reminds me of the whole fuss over using "homeless" vs "unhoused" - while actual policies to help homeless people get ignored or defunded.
> It reminds me of the whole fuss over using "homeless" vs "unhoused" - while actual policies to help homeless people get ignored or defunded.
More than one thing happens at a time. I'm fairly certain the people urging us to change our metaphors are also the ones pushing for more substantive change.
I am ambivalent about these language change campaigns myself. On the one hand, you're asking for almost nothing of people other than the agree that they agree something is wrong. On the other, inevitably it results in an ugly, violent backlash which reveals that that which you thought was beyond the pale isn't. Everyone rushes to die on the hill you pointed out.
I have a similar feeling about people insisting that starfish and jellyfish be called sea stars and jellies, but here I think the moral argument lies entirely with the resisters. No one is confused that these radially symmetric things are fish. What, are we going to call cardinals redbirds now because they aren't actually clergymen?
But in the case of metaphors that belittle or bother someone, why not just change? It demands nothing of you but courtesy.
It costs significant cognitive load, to change one’s use of language, to remember that to express the same thought one must now say b instead of a. Couple it with a social taboo - people who still say ‘a’ are bad people! Literally the worst! Actual racists! - and it’s not really a surprise that there is pushback.
It really doesn't. The human brain is very adept at accepting renames for concepts and we are so accustomed to alternative references to the same thing that we take physical pleasure from wordplay and give nicknames to our favorite things.
It takes only a few tries to start learning a new name or reference to something for normal people.
Hell, give it a try! Take a completely meaningless or harmless term in your life and attempt to use a different word for it. Hell, there is a wonderful children's book about doing this called "Frindle".
I would go so far as to argue being able to liberally and arbitrarily adjust how we reference things is one of the key powers that makes language work, and one of the main ways it enhances our ability to work with concepts and logical systems. Language DOES affect the way we think.
If using a different word for something really does cause you significant cognitive load, consider seeing a psychologist because there might be something "abnormal" about your brain.
You know, it’s fine as well, when there’s a point to it. In this case we have a fairly well written article giving some interesting context around cargo cults, but certainly nothing that contradicts the central idea around the metaphor, and no injured parties AFAICT. So that’s a no.
Of course the wording is not all. But it does induce a perspective on the situation, be it conscious or not. And it then more or less subtly influence how we engage in extra-linguistic interaction. It plays a huge role with feedback loops through laws that are the public statement of the dominant social order. And it has also a large impact on informal actions done at the tacitly ordinary daily social exceptions.
Consider how factory, mill, works and plant are all usable to refer to a place where some human endeavor is conducted. The term plant has several etymological hypothesis, including one linking it to slavery and colonization through plantations.[1]
I’m not a English native and I’m unaware of the "homeless" vs "unhoused" tensions. But to my mind they still seems same-minded compared to "indigent", "pauper", "sedentarized", "nomad" or "settler".
Isn't the distinction between "homeless" and "unhoused" that the former includes people who may have a house to stay in, at least temporarily, but the latter does not?
Like the difference between couchsurfing in a friend's house (homeless but not unhoused) and sleeping in a car or on the street (both homeless and unhoused).
> The biggest problem comes when this type of language policing is seen as the primary way of changing behaviours.
I think the biggest problem comes when this type of language policing is the primary way of changing behaviors. Lack of adequate conflict resolution leads to dysfunction.
I dropped the two BBC podcasts i'd been interested in (News Cast and In Our Time) for this reason, it's such a weird tack to take in order to chase views.
In general I think the west tends to underestimate how frail a young democracy is.
Western-style Democracy isn't something that spontaneously happens when a despot is removed. It takes a long-ass time for the institutions to establish legitimacy, and when installed in an environment when there's large inequalities from the get-go, things may change, but they will also stay the same.
Manufacturing prosperity through something like the Marshall plan is one way to actually let things settle in the right way.
Why worry about a problem that might happen 30 years down the line when you can make an outrageous amount of money today.. Heck, why worry about a problem that can happen next year if you can can make a good profit right now..
As the climate crisis shows, we are perpetually and knowingly heading for the proverbial brick wall full steam ahead in the name of a quick buck.
I don't know if it's true but I've seen it argued that shortsightedness of western capitalism was kept in check by the five year planning of the eastern bloc, and when the wall fell, that check was essentially removed and most of our problems today is a result of that.
As I said, I don't know if it's true, but it's certainly an interesting notion. Maybe it's true at least in the sense that during the cold war, the west couldn't really afford to rest on its laurels. Even the most dysfunctional market had to be compelled to beat the Soviet null hypothesis as a matter of survival for the way of life.
This, I find even trying to ignore news sources doesn't work. I continually try to prune the more tabloid papers like Daily Mail / Express / Sun but no avail.
Yeah... I like parts of Edge, and tried to train the news feed on the new tab screen, but eventually just disabled the news from showing up on that screen. I'm sure it's the same underlying service for the Windows News feeds.
