lotuslizard asked:Just to let you know, upon getting a bit into this whole JonTron thing, I looked into and learned more about slurs. In your article (I think that's probably referred to as article) you used the word "idiot." Learning more about slurs, it turns out "idiot," "moron," and "imbecile" were used as terms for different levels of handicapped persons. It was never used as a slur for them like the r one, so it probably doesn't actually really count as an awful thing to use, but in case you'd wanna know.
i’m aware of the etymology, but i suppose those aren’t slurs because we don’t use them to refer to people with low IQ any more, and i’m not aware of any significant period of overlap where the words were used in both ways
beyond that it gets fuzzy
like i cannot recall ever seeing anyone use “crazy” to refer to a person with a known specific mental illness. i’m sure it happens and i know the stigma exists, yet i’ve encountered more overt racists than people who feel a need to mock the ill.
on the other hand, “crazy” is pretty frequently used to refer to people just to dismiss: “this doesn’t make sense to me, therefore it is not worth listening to or considering at all”. i have apparently done this more than i’d like to think. so i certainly don’t mind seeing that usage go.
i mostly have the urge to use “crazy” to refer to situations or outcomes or rules that are wildly different from my vaguest expectations. which is, ultimately, what synonyms of “insane” mean in the first place. the implication is that this is unfortunate, hence the push to stop using the words at all. i doubt anyone with depression or schizophrenia or OCD thinks those are good things to have, but i can totally see how having your own condition used as a euphemism for undesirable things would suck a bit.
(speaking of, “suck” is only a few decades old, and derives from exactly what it sounds like: suckin dick. so using that to mean “is bad” suggests performing fellatio is bad. same for “blow”.)
this isn’t a problem with “cancer” as a metaphor, because we consider people to have cancer but be schizophrenic etc. so the root problem is not so much mere words, but our inability to separate a condition from the person afflicted by it
and yet sometimes that’s not unreasonable, either: a person with severe delusions or narcissism or what-have-you is going to be very difficult to tease apart into the “real” person and the effects of the disorder. (i know people whose home lives were hell because of a parent who was bipolar or borderline or similar.) hell, we can’t even define what the disorders really are; we just categorize them by symptoms. we can look at and see most physiological illnesses. all we can do for mental illnesses is give them acronyms if they happen to interfere with normal life. is ADD an illness, or just a personality trait that’s only a problem because life has gotten complicated now? is high-functioning autism an illness, or just a different way of interpreting input? i don’t know. nobody knows. we’re making this up the best we can as we go.
someone once chided me for using “sociopath” to refer to people who were skilled manipulators and used that ability to be cruel towards their perceived enemies and hide the cruelty from their circle of supporters. but what other word do we have for that behavior? these people will never be diagnosed professionally, but even a diagnosis is just matching symptoms with the fuzzy list of things we use the word to mean. is it inappropriate to make an amateur judgment call, having at least a vague grasp of what sociopathy is supposed to be?
there are other synonyms i haven’t seen any objections to: “deranged” comes to mind, and literally just means “insane”. is that ableist? what about “out of your mind”, which is a pretty clear idiom?
even “dumb” refers to people unable to speak, and “lame” refers to an inability to walk. are those objectionable? does anyone use those words with those meanings any more? i’ve only ever heard “lame” refer to a horse.
curiosity: “bizarre”, “wild”, “outlandish”, and “strange” all derive from some flavor of “foreign”, i.e. literally from a different place.
there are some mild grumblings from cis people that “cis” is a slur, even though it’s a literal description of them, because it’s mostly used to say something negative. TERFs have referred to “TERF” as a slur, even though it’s a literal description of them, because it’s mostly used to say something negative. i have had someone tell me that “denier” (in the climate change sense) is a slur, presumably because it’s only used to say something negative. “ha ha!” you say. “that’s silly! literal descriptions can’t be slurs!” and it is here that i politely remind you that “negro” is literally spanish for “black”.
context is everything, but all the context here is huge and murky.
to tell cis people that “cis” is not a slur is to tell them that their offense is unreasonable and unworthy of attention. but in this case that’s pretty reasonable, because the offense is really “boy i’m sick of hearing trans people complain about how everyone else keeps murdering them and whatever”.
strangely this doesn’t seem to come up very often; people just laugh and assert that no of course cis isn’t a slur, as self-evident. but offense is not created equal. being reminded that your grandparents were literally owned or put in small camps or whatever by the grandparents of the person talking to you is a little different from being reminded that the person talking to you is angry about having to exist on the fringes of society.
sort of like how having a panic attack when you’re reminded of the assault you experienced is a little different from being reminded that you don’t like tornadoes.
i wish we’d stop diluting words like “trigger” that have no effective synonym. words change, language evolves, but we do ourselves a great disservice if we remove the meaning from specific words that have no substitute.
anyway
i don’t know anything
maybe we should stop deriving pejoratives from words that are intended to apply to people. but it’s a bit late for that now
the real problem is that we want pejoratives to use on people in the first place
yeah i like to call people “idiots” when they do stupid things. (whoops, “stupid”. how do i even rephrase that? things that i expect them to realize have unfortunate consequences.) maybe that’s different because we understand “idiot” as usually being a contextual response to a specific event, but use “crazy” to dismiss an entire person outright. words we use the latter way — including racial slurs and slurs relating to handicaps — suggest that both the target and the entire named group are worthless.
that makes a lot of sense to me. i don’t like even using “liberal” or “conservative” if i can help it, because i know half the US would read it as “someone i can already assume is not worth taking seriously”.
so after much rambling, maybe that’s the secret: feel free to pick on the idiot things people do, but don’t dismiss people outright.
