Thank you, this is one of my personal bore-people-to-death-at-parties hobby horses: it’s absolutely common folk wisdom around the “left”, especially (and ironically) in academic contexts that that Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not just true but settled and accepted science, which is crazy-making since the actual experimental and empirical evidence for it is… “highly contested” is about the kindest term I could possibly use.
What it actually is, of course, is a belief in _magic_, specifically of a strain that Ursula LeGuin poetically described in “A Wizard of Earthsea”: things have their common names and their secret true names, and if you know the latter you can control them. It makes for dazzling fantasy literature but rather less dazzling political practice.
Another interesting bit from LeGuin: in the Dispossessed, there are a number of short vignettes about Shevek's life on his homeworld, an anarchist colony that has all manner of weird differences with the statist planet his species originates from. She spends a lot of time talking about Shevek's childhood and how he was raised in an anarchist education system. I know a lot of lefty people who *love* this book (and so do I, it's a great book!) who seem to think that the key takeaway from the anarchist education system of Anarres is that if you just teach people the right words and right concepts they will be perfectly good anarchists.
Which is bizarre, because the really significant differences are all political, social, and material! It's not the words, it's the underlying concept. The kids are allowed to do whatever they want and imprison one of their friends for fun, and become disgusted with prisons as a result. But somehow all these people who are ostensibly Le Guin's political allies seem to read this segment and take away the fact that all you really need to do is tell people prisons are bad, and they will think prisons are bad.
Another example is Shevek derisively calling someone on the capitalist planet a "profiteer", which is basically a high-grade insult on Anarres, and the dude takes it as a compliment. And somehow, a leftist can read this book and say "man it would be so cool if profiteer was an insult so people knew it was bad to be rich" instead of "wow, if you rebuild your social mores so that seeking personal gain makes you an outcast and destroys your social capital, words associated with profiteering will become insults".
Neither here nor there, but I find "The Dispossessed" at once utterly compelling and intensely frustrating as a book. It's hard to imagine a basic premise that I'd be more naturally sympathetic to ("militaristic state capitalism is bad, and leninism/stalinism no better") and yet it somehow gets from there to "actually, starvation is kinda good since it imparts good morals and politics in the long run" and there's an uncomfortable lesson there about how good basic premises are no guarantee of good outcomes.
One of my pet peeves in this matter is people objecting to the term "pet" and wanting to use the term "companion animal", for example.
I point out that "pet" in French is precisely that, " animal de compagnie", but the French or not more humane towards animals than Anglophones. So is the intent to spare the animals' feelings?
I keep hearing this, and yet every real estate listing I've ever read doesn't shy away from the term, my wife's brokerage hasn't so much as whispered they shouldn't use it, and no client or potential client has ever considered it offensive.
Are we sure this isn't an apocryphal "this happened once, somewhere, maybe" anecdote gone wrong?
Not the same thing, but multiple real estate podcasts and youtube channels I sometimes consume all use phrases like "primary bedroom" instead of "master".
People do it, but I don't really have an issue with it because the term "master" doesn't actually tell you something useful about the room. It's not like that room gets to boss the other bedrooms around or something.
For the nerds out there, a similar thing that happened where a lot of people using the software versioning system git renamed the `master` branch of their repositories to `main`. There was some kvetching about this at the time from some of the OG programmers, but again `main` is actually a better description of the main branch and how it works, so I think the change will stick.
TL;DR is that you can make a culture war issue about this if you want, but at the end of the day people are going to mostly look at the issue functionally, and `master` is just not the best word to use in a lot of the places where we see it today.
> `main` is actually a better description of the main branch and how it works
I know you're legit because you used markdown :0
But I don't think I agree here. The term 'master' in this usage is the same as a 'master' in the recording (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastering_(audio)) sense: the final version with all the edits applied. I don't think 'main' conveys that same sense. I mean, there's a reason 'master' was chose in the first place, but you are implying it was totally arbitrary.
It was also dumb to pretend that it was in any way offensive, and I don't think that "kvetching" was unwarranted. It really only became a thing because there _was_ a somewhat offensive term used in another part of software development: the master/slave server types. That one I could get behind, but like many words 'master' can mean different things and we shouldn't pretend because it's somewhat offensive in one context, it's necessarily the same in other contexts. My company spent close to 500 dev hours switching master -> main for no real purpose, so it's not like it had no cost.
Agree to disagree- it's definitely true that the main/master branch is special in the sense that it's usually the one that is integrated into the rest of the codebase, but it's never really "final" and you can swap it out with others, etc. and I'm kind of surprised that you lost 100 dev hours on a change like this (but architectures differ). I'll grant that there is some subjectivity about whether `master` is a better word to describe a branch that does that than `main`, however.
Anyway, my point is that complaints that might seem off point like this can actually lead people to adopt a better practice anyway, as I claim the renaming of bedrooms and git branches represents.
P.S.- I think that the master/slave server example actually cuts against my point, because AFAIK the master server does in fact completely control the slave server (I'm not in Dev ops, so I don't know). In a case like that I think you really are making the language change because it's offensive, full stop.
I glanced through about 40 local listings just to see, and found "main" or "primary" used in lieu of "master" on 8 of them, disproportionately in the rich, white suburbs. Master was used on 25 or so, the rest didn't have anything, mostly in the city, probably because a lot of older rowhomes don't have a master suite.
So 20% or so of my non-scientific sample. Not nothing, but also hardly evidence of a nefarious plot. The fact that the words "primary" and "main" are perfectly serviceable substitutes that effectively convey meaning just means that I don't really have to care about other people's preferences.
Anyway, you seem to understand the value of markets, so I'll point out that this is an inevitable offshoot of having a market economy: everyone with any money is going to have their preferences catered to by *someone*, even if you think them stupid or "weirdos".
As with Facebook and Twitter having the ability to ban people, my response is: if you don't like it, nationalize the industry. Lol.
Don’t get me wrong: I couldn’t care less if the entire residential real estate industry changes from one standard term to another. But I think it’s likely that the change is being driven entirely by a tiny number of people who really, really care (the weirdos*) and the vast majority who care very little or not at all.
*In this case the weirdos are also ignorant, but that’s not always the case.
That's kind of a false dichotomy since the use of "master" to describe slave owners just grew straight out of using "master" to describe the head of a feudal household. The word in North American English just got particularly associated with slavery because, outside of slaveholding regions, you really didn't have the dynamic of manor houses, great houses, etc., although you still had the expression, "master of the house." (Also worth noting that the use of master/servant in English law to describe employment relationships went back centuries before the transatlantic slave trade.)
I've had multiple prospective tenants in the past say to me that they have a "emotional support animal" as a way to justify their possession of such...even when I make it crystal clear in the listing that pets are allowed.
Yes, this drives me crazy. It's not uncommon at all for me to get a "letter" from their "doctor" saying that they "need" this "emotional support animal" and this "letter" is full of spelling and grammatical mistakes. When I try to call the "doctor" to confirm the number is just some person who "doesn't have an office" for me to check up on.
I make exceptions for people on our no pets rule if they can convince me, but these people get an automatic "nope".
Since I'm fine with pets, I just say "chill out, I said pets are OK, no big deal" and that deescalates things just fine--yet probably also proved your point.
But in this case there is a point to the terminology, they are trying to prove that they NEED the animal for their mental health, and not "just because" they like to have an animal.
That this isn't a matter of those people trying to be politically correct and demonstrate their progressive credentials by using a P.C. synonym for "pet", but to claim that their pet is a specific TYPE of pet, one medically or psychologically necessary, not just any pet.
You can see through older film and photography that our worlds rich and vibrant colors are in fact quite a recent development. I have no idea why Matt is trying to obscure this. Lying about colors won’t make ‘birthing people’ sound any better to most ears.
I dunno... The ancient world (Egypt, Manoa, China, even Greece) had pretty colourful art and clothing.
So did the Western world's aristocrats. I see the palaces and cathedrals.
The peasants, the poor people Could not afford those expensive pigments. And with industrialization many every day objects were purely made for utilitarian purposes in dull metal and wood. Only in the 60s did attractive design become a thing. for the masses.
I think one of the reasons the “language is power” take remains so common is because it makes analysis (1) easy and (2) satisfying.
Arguing a point with language is mostly deductive. You don’t have to do much research. There’s no numbers, and barely any theory. And it comes especially easy to the type of people who enjoy politics and arguing about it, who (like me and others in my policy grad program) are usually humanities-types who enjoy reading and writing, and like to think of ourselves as better people for that.
It’s also super satisfying to argue about language, because it keeps politics in the realm of aesthetics. Arguing about exactly how much higher a carbon tax should be is boring; arguing about what to call a carbon tax is fun.
Do you think, in general, that many of people who are in your grad program A) Don't like math? And if so B) Went into politics because they don't like math, or C) Not liking math is incidental to going into politics?
I think that politics attracts more humanities folks because it’s a humanities thing, maybe the most humanities thing: social rules, structure, and power.
But I think the reason so many humanities people aren’t *also* math people is because of stupid ideas that still pervade our culture about the duality of math versus linguistic/social skill sets. I think a lot of people still think about humanities stuff and math stuff as separate fields that aren’t particularly relevant to one another, that necessarily involve different personality types, and that don’t draw from the same skill sets. I think a lot of people understand math as just about calculations, and social stuff as just about narrative. I think all of these are wrong.
I agree with your last paragraph. I was curious because when I was in high school history/civics was my best subject, but I was also good at math and science. I ended up going into a STEM field instead of the humanities, history, or law (I considered all three of those) because I found science professions more enjoyable. I do wonder if our politics plays out the way it does in part because most everyone who participates in it are humanities types and are more romantic (in the classical sense) than science and math people, who tend to be more straightforward. And would politics work differently if there were more science and math people in it?
I think it politics work marginally differently, yes - and in a good way. But I’d stress “marginally.”
I think the type of people who participate in politics are much less of an influence than the type of political messaging voters demand (highly emotional, aesthetic-focused, etc.). And I think math and science people, while maybe on average slightly better than humanities folks at focusing on the substance over the rhetoric, still suffer from the same human proclivity for appeals to identity and narrative.
"Mr. Rostow has a powerful, brilliant, and creative mind. How could such a mind produce such trash? The answer lies in the corruption of power and the defenselessness of the intellectual in the face of it. ... When an intellectual finds himself in the seat of power he is tempted to equate the power of his intellect with the power of his office. As he could mould the printed word to suit his ideas so he now expects the real world to respond to his actions."
I'm reminded over the whole to-do about "person-first" language, e.g., saying "person with autism" rather than "autistic person" on the grounds that putting the word "person" first emphasizes the person over the disability. When I first heard of it, I thought it was absurd, since the contortions involved in putting the word "person" first in a sentence could easily end up highlighting the thing that one was trying to de-emphasize. In short, one may mean to say, "PERSON with autism" but end up saying "person WITH AUTISM." Emphasis is never as simple as word order.
I was not surprised to find that the response of other autistic people to person-first language amounted to "Thanks, I hate it."
At least "with" doesn't have the syllabic assault that "experiencing" has--i.e. the "person experiencing homelessness". A couple of months ago, when Eric Adams triggered the whole debate on the phrase "low skilled", I quickly thought that someone was going to invent a term like "person experiencing diminished demand for one's skills" as a replacement, and then in turn quickly felt like I needed a shower to clean that thought out of my mind.
Why do people keep trying to develop "ideal" terms for groups of people, when they could just go ask the group what they want to be called? (also see: Lantinx)
In the case of terms like Latinx, what seems to happen is that a community of activists/academics from the group adopts the term, which left-wing white people then take their cues from.
The issue can be that the representatives of a group that progressive white people here from can often be unrepresentative.
What is acceptable criticism coming from insiders in an ethnic group takes on a different meaning when it comes from outsiders, e.g. English Speaking activists about Spanish speakers.
I believe the point of Latinx Is about gender inclusivity and therefore a criticism of the very gendered Spanish language, which of course does not go over well with most Spanish speakers…
In my experience, “Latinx” is a word that is driven by members of the community, while autistic people actually drive a movement that is “identity first” as opposed to the “person first” preferred by some other disability groups. I suspect this is because autistic people (like Deaf people) are a community with an identity, while people who use wheelchairs see themselves as less separate from broader communities.
In this case I think people with other kinds of disabilities did themselves advocate for person first language, and this was extended by default to autism by well-meaning bureaucrats even though many autistic people don’t consider themselves disabled.
We should all decide to refer to ourselves as "persons who subscribe to Slow Boring" rather than "Slow-boring Subscribers"... let alone the antiquated "Yglesians".
Fun example in this vein is the Niger-based adaptation of Purple Rain titled Rain the Color of Blue with a Little Red in It. Clearly they are talking about the same shade even if there is no word for it.
My 5-year-old son's native language is Hebrew. In Hebrew, there are different words for "blue" and "light blue" (כחול "kahol" and תכלת "tchelet", roughly). I speak both Hebrew and English natively, but usually "think in English".
Once in a while, my son will be playing with a light-blue toy, and I'll call it blue. He'll get very angry at me and explain that of course it's not blue, it's a completely different color. I think of it as just another kind of blue - a light blue. He thinks of it as תכלת which is something else.
I completely agree that the way the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is thought about is pretty ridiculous, with a few books convincing me that it's completely overblown (Pinker's Language Instinct I think is one such book.)
But for sure, this blue vs. light blue distinction has an immediate impact on my life :)
This doesn't go into I think the main reason why this is such a big thing on the left today. Today's left includes lawyers, teachers, professors, journalists, and screenwriters, so it is unsurprisingly invested in the power of words. That pretty easily leads to focusing on arguing about words, especially in discussion with other people who care about them. It also means that if you're hoping for some extra advantage for pursuing ideological goals, the left has an advantage in changing language. So it's very tempting to think that this will accomplish something significant.
Which is not to say that the linguistic changes don't matter a little, just that it's easy to see why their impact and significance is overplayed on the 21st century left.
This is like the entire underlying theme of The West Wing (which I enjoyed): That if you can get just the right wording in your communication, you can do anything. Of course, unfortunately the show seems to be a formative reference for many contemporary progressives. So we're now trying to speechify and vocabularize everyone into adopting our positions... aaand it's not working out very well (in my opinion).
As a comparison, I think the right uses sports and war as their political process reference.
I love The West Wing, but it is pretty clear the entire premise of the show is Aaron Sorkin wishcasting an idealized version of the Clinton presidency.
Is "Democrat Party" viscerally unpleasant feeling? I don't say it because to me someone saying it sounds like a slack-jawed piece of white trash and have always thought the Republican trend toward saying it was just a function of party leadership being overrun by such people.
I had always assumed this was because when you refer to a specific person, saying XYX is a Republican sounds correct, but saying that ABC is a Democratic doesn't.
The Republic Party. If Republicans can refuse to use the grammatically correct adjective to refer to the other party, so can Democrats! (but they won't, because that would be grammatically incorrect)
There’s nothing grammatically incorrect about “democrat” as a modifier. Noun noun compounds are totally ordinary English, as the Constitution Party demonstrates.
Well, true, if you think of them as the "Party of Democrats" and "Party of Republicans". But if, as I think both parties intend, their names mean the "Party of Democracy" or "Party of Democratic Belief" and the "Party of Republicanism" or "Party of Republican Belief" then I think it is grammatically incorrect.
At some point, I believe that somebody (I think it might have been the late Sen. Mo Udall?) suggested "Republan" as a kind of absurdist volley in that direction.
Right, it's not at all exclusive. But we do it more, and also the left is more likely (for obvious reasons) to think that the things we have a lot of power to change (like language) are really important for affecting the things we really want to change.
Not the most important part of this, but until I was a teenager I never saw a blue sea. I'd holiday on the North Sea coast and the water was brown, or, at best, a slugdy green.
Indeed. One of the great misconceptions is that "the sky is blue." Actually, it's not, for the large part of the time we perceive the sky. Half of the time it's black (a technical condition called "night.") Much of the remaining time, it's cloudy so who can say what the "sky" is? And in early morning and late afternoon it's red, causing schizophrenic reactions among sailors. So I'd say the "sky is blue" about 25% of the time at best, depending on where you live.
To call the sky "blue" just shows how Plato's sense of the ideal has perverted our thinking, compared to good old Aristotelian empiricism.
Edit: Color blindness is interesting, but as many folks pointed out, a lot of northern latitude oceans just don't look blue near the shore unless they're reflecting the sky. I should know this. I grew up in New England.
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Color blindness is surprisingly common, especially among men (I believe one of the key genes is on the X chromosome). Some people don't even realize it until later in life.
Though what you describe isn't the most common form of color blindness. Usually it's red-green colorblindness where people have trouble distinguishing say a brown (a dark red) football from green grass, at least by hue (tone, shape and movement all matter a lot more).
I don't think "cyan" and "blue" are analogous concepts though; cyan is a shade, while blue is a category. In English, cyan goes under the category of "blue", while I guess in Russian it would go in the category of (not scrolling up to get the Russian name) "light blue".
But it's not part of the major color names English speakers usually know. Most people wouldn't know "Cyan" except maybe when changing toner, and would refer to the color as a shade of blue, maybe a "blue-green" or "teal". Even printers refer to it as "blue" (to be fair a tank full of cyan ink looks blue).
I'm surprised that you think most people wouldn't know "Cyan". I'd grant that it's not as widely used as, say, "blue", but surely most people *know* it?!?
Some linguists distinguish “basic color words” from others. A “basic color word” is one that isn’t considered by native speakers to be a type of another color. Interestingly, the pride progress flag has nearly every color that is said to be a basic color in any language - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple horizontal strips for lesbian/gay/bisexual identity; white, pink, goluboy/light blue chevrons for trans identities; and black, brown chevrons for the people of color that have often been excluded from queer communities. The only one it misses is grey.
I don’t know if any language has both pink and light blue as basic color words, but most languages treat several of these as types of others. (Blue as a type of green or vice versa, purple as a type of blue or red, orange as a type of red or yellow, grey as a type of white or black, brown as a type of yellow.)
Sort of. 색 is “color,” and 파란 is blue, so 파란색 is “blue color,” it’s used the same way we use the English “blue.” 하늘 is “sky” so 하늘색 is literally “sky color.”
I good example of this is the use of the word Gay. Formerly meaning happy, and adopted by what became the "Gay Rights" movement to create a more positive perception of gay people, it ultimately became used as a term of abuse and disparagement. You actually had to do the hard yards of convincing people that they shouldn't verbally attack/diminish homosexual people/homosexuality
The Simpsons really nailed the absurdity of the evolution for me when Lisa developed a crush on Nelson Muntz, one of the bullies, and then the other bullies teased him by saying "You kissed a girl? That is so gay!". They also had Mr. Burns often use the oldest usage of the word around Waylon Smithers, who became the show's most prominent gay character.
There are tons of such ridiculous claims. For instance, I can't track down Daniel Everett's direct claims about the Pirahã people in the Amazon, but his research is frequently reported as saying they "have no concept of time", which is obviously nonsensical. You cannot reason about cause and effect without a concept of time, and there are all kinds of things that existed in humans' evolutionary environment that humans couldn't manipulate without a built-in concept of time: you need a concept of time to track a game animal, to plan to spend the rainy season where the most fruit grows, to resolve paternity disputes. Even without words denoting time, verb tenses, or subordinate clauses, being able to make plans, distinguish between a pattern and an unusual event, or organize a circadian or circannual routine depends on an internal understanding of time.
I'm glad I didn't attribute the claim to him! You should see how ill-informed my comment was going to be *before* I double-checked whether anyone had actually made such a claim. (Based on the search results, the people actually saying "no concept of time" are random bloggers, but several of them.)
What he actually claims is that they have a very simple grammar that reflects (i.e. is not a product of) their lack of interest in long-term thinking. They live in the present. But his claim is the reverse, i.e. that their material circumstances has influenced their grammar and language.
This is a bit late to be responding to this thread, but I do think the Pirahã debates are very relevant here. According to Everett's account, their language lacks some basic terms and concepts that most of us use every day to communicate, and can't imagine doing without. Accepting his findings makes the relationship between cognition and language much more problematic than any study of Moscow subway line colors! I wish there was more published about the Pirahã.
Excellent. For an influential segment of the left, regulating language seems to be the only instrument of political activism they know, with the predictable fallout described at the end of the article.
Orwell was right. Controlling language can make some concepts slightly more or less accessible, but it doesn't actually prevent people from thinking of with those concepts (or disagreeing with them, depending on which end of the scales one puts their thumb). Making people use your preferred language is, however, an effective way to humiliate them and demonstrate your power.
When aunt Sally starts talking about "the death tax" at a party, the primary consequence is that it reminds everyone she cares a little too much about Fox News - or in certain social circles, it reminds people that she's "one of them". Unless she's especially charismatic or beloved to the degree that other people want to copy her for social reasons, it usually stops there.
The bitter war for people's hearts over the terms "pro-choice" and "pro-life" has culminated in a surprising situation: outside of pitched political battles, people I know simply refer to pro- and anti-abortion activists by their preferred terms without changing their own views on the matter.
The "magic words" theory of language influence is inferior to one rooted sociology that comprehends how the primary impact of terminological differences is how they indicate that other viewpoints exist at all.
Any notion that people in ancient times (i.e. very recent in terms of homo sapien history) differ >fundamentally< from modern people should be treated as suspect, and requiring very strong evidence. The idea that humans only developed the ability to see blue in recent times should immediately have stopped people in their tracks to ask if that is plausible. I mean, maybe noted historical writer Homer was using some kind of metaphor instead of literally describing what the sea looked like to him?
Another curious hypothesis people have is that schizophrenia only came about in the 18th century because ancient texts about people with mental disorders do not precisely match descriptions of modern schizophrenia.
I think Homer was describing what the sea literally looked like to him, but he didn’t care too much about differences in hue, as much as darkness. This is just how English speakers do use the word “red” to literally describe the color of someone’s hair or the color of a cabbage, because they don’t care about the ways these colors diverge from the paradigm of red, but care about the ways in which it is similar.
The bigger issue is that, to the extent Homer even actually existed as an individual person (which is itself debated), he was undoubtedly in large part relaying prior oral traditions and played more of a role of a compiler/editor.
But the Mediterranean around Greece is actually pale blue or aqua, unless maybe during a storm, isn't it? Unlike the sea in more Northern climes which is more dark grey...
I think whenever he's talking about the "wine-dark sea", he is talking about the sea around a ship that is out in the open ocean. I think the light blue that you're thinking of is the shallow coastal water around the Greek islands.
This is also the basis for my favorite pseudoscientific/alt-historical theory, "The Bicameral Mind".
> Bicameral mentality is a hypothesis in psychology and neuroscience which argues that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind, and that the evolutionary breakdown of this division gave rise to consciousness in humans. The term was coined by Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,[1] wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, near the end of the Mediterranean bronze age.
While I disagree with some particulars of Jaynes' theory, I personally find the overall point incredibly persuasive and don't understand how someone can study the ancient world to any degree and not find that it at least has some merit. (A tremendous amount of stuff about the evolution of language, culture, and technology makes a lot more sense if narrative consciousness is a much more recent phenomenon than the evolution of anatomically modern humans themselves, especially as the date of the latter gets pushed further and further back in time.)
that's exactly where I land: I think some of his evidence is lacking/contradictory, but damn if the idea isn't extremely compelling.
If you haven't read Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson uses this idea as a great jumping-off point for a cyberpunk narrative about using a "mind-virus" to reenable the bicameral structure.
Thanks, I haven't read "Snow Crash" yet, but it is on my "to-read" list. (I will note that I first learned about Jaynes' theory from a comic book of all places - the "Anarky" mini-series by Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle, published in 1997 by DC Comics, which gets into the political implications of the bicameral mind hypothesis and included a bibliography with "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" on it.)
I think there is a huge non-sequitur here. Current science suggests that language does not fully *determine* our perception, but at the same time does show that it *can* help (or hinder) the ease with which we perform certain cognitive tasks. It’s a great non sequitur and straw man to conclude that because language is not all powerful and insurmountable it doesn’t matter at all. Likewise, just because Reagan could achieve more liberal immigration policies with more hostile language and today we fail doesn’t prove that language didn’t have a role here at all. Maybe he did so *despite* a linguistic hurdle, and today likewise we fail despite a linguistic leg up?
In other words showing that something isn’t the only or the primary factor doesn’t mean it’s not a factor at all. It might still have *some* influence and thus could be argued as being a “low hanging fruit”, provided people realize it’s not the be all and end all.
That might be true, but the idea is sort of far-fetched when considered a priori and the burden of proof that it has really any substantial political effect is on the people who claim that it does. After all, humanity has huge variations in language. If language were even somewhat significant, it should be possible to find significant differences between those cultures: after all, we are able to tell that Russians are marginally better at distinguishing shades of blue. But as far as I know, nothing like this has ever been demonstrated.
I would argue that the causality is in the opposite direction. Changes in public feeling drive changes in language that accommodate the underlying conceptual shift. People are less racist, and they feel ashamed of the recent deeply racist past, so they start saying "Black people" instead of "Negro". They don't start saying "Black people" and suddenly change their opinions, even modestly.
This feels like the most "right" explanation in all of this, and the simplest way to logically demonstrate it is by looking at words that AREN'T political. People needed a word that meant "looking up information on the internet by typing in a few key words and then rapidly scanning through the resulting data," and so we coined "googling."
The word googling doesn't somehow determine our ability to search for things on the internet. It's just a descriptor for a pre-existing structure of ideas in our heads. In the same way, blue is a word for a predetermined spectrum of color. If you have two words for blue, it means you have mentally separated out that part of the spectrum and now have one word for one piece of the spectrum and one for another.
The fact that people aren't idiots means that "illegal alien" and "undocumented immigrant" are just two terms for the same pre-existing idea in their head. If they're predisposed to be negative toward that idea, the term that elicits the idea isn't going to matter, unless it's somehow so new or unexpected that it creates a NEW structural concept in their minds that, ideally, they don't associate with the pre-existing structure.
For example, I'm willing to bet people who automatically have negative reactions to illegal alien don't even think of their concept of illegal alien when they're thinking of Ukrainian refugees, while they absolutely do think of the concept when thinking of Central American refugees.
And I'm willing to bet even more money that those same people wouldn't suddenly magically believe Central American refugees should be given a pathway to citizenship if we started mandating that they use the term "undocumented immigrants". I think most people have the cause/effect here exactly backwards, and the constant updating of terms every decade or so just shows that the polite term of today will end up being associated with the same negative things as the prior ones precisely because the prior words were describing the exact same things as the more polite ones do.
IIRC, the ACA used to poll differently depending on whether you called it 'Obamacare' or 'The Affordable Care Act'. It's also the case that people will feel more or less affiliation with others based on how they talk, i.e. sounding Midwestern might be more appealing to someone from Wisconsin than talking like a New Yorker.
I think the thing is that sometimes fights over language are exclusionary b/c it signals that the person picking the fight is different or is acting superior. Also, there are limits to what adjusting language achieves is successful. I 100% feel pissed off when people pick language fights b/c I get the impression that they feel superior to me. But I do think there's some effect to the language we use.
Right, but people who hated "Obamacare" didn't realize that it was the ACA, so it wasn't the way you said the same thing that mattered- what mattered was using language to actively conceal the meaning of something. That's a dramatically different situation than saying that we have to use slightly better sounding words to describe identical things that everyone knows are identical under the theory that doing so will cause huge shifts in people's cognition.
Yeah, I think it's a lot more nuanced than saying language manipulation is good or bad. It's clearly a signaling device and a way to draw distinctions between concepts.
Like, 'illegal alien' and 'undocumented immigrant's technically mean the same thing but convey different connotations.
It doesn't magically change minds and I personally hate debates of terminology but I think choosing different terminology does package what people think efficiently into all numbers of words.
The "IA vs. UI" is the most common example I see people use, and every time someone does I think "but those two words mean exactly the same thing and I know that immediately." It might tell me something about the person saying them based on their choices, but the words themselves don't have any special power to change my own mind or influence me precisely because I understand the meaning of words and how to interpret them in context. When someone says either of those terms I'm exactly the same on the issue regardless- my views on UIs (or IAs depending on your preference) don't magically shift, even subtly, based on different terminology describing exactly the same thing.
Agree about the point on efficient packaging. More important than directly changing how people think, the terminology people use is a way of communicating affiliation. And since people are social creatures who form their beliefs by looking around and seeing what others in their peer group or vicinity think, there is a secondary, indirect effect of changing belief because more people will look around and say to themselves, That seems to be the correct accepted belief in my group based on the words people are using, so I'll conform my beliefs to that.
Combine this with the point that control over language is a marker and manifestation of power, and we arrive, inevitably, at Foucault --who was right about this stuff all along.
And this is why us designers use numbers — hex/RGB, CMYK or Pantone — to describe colors rather than using vague terms like "sea foam" or "cerulean". People can, and have, measured the colors all humans* can see and have created standards[1] describing not only which colors we can see, but how bright[2] and colorful they're perceived to be.
[2]: Yellow light looks brighter to people than blue light even if they have the same physical power. This is called luminance or luminosity and is again universal.
Thank you, this is one of my personal bore-people-to-death-at-parties hobby horses: it’s absolutely common folk wisdom around the “left”, especially (and ironically) in academic contexts that that Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not just true but settled and accepted science, which is crazy-making since the actual experimental and empirical evidence for it is… “highly contested” is about the kindest term I could possibly use.
What it actually is, of course, is a belief in _magic_, specifically of a strain that Ursula LeGuin poetically described in “A Wizard of Earthsea”: things have their common names and their secret true names, and if you know the latter you can control them. It makes for dazzling fantasy literature but rather less dazzling political practice.
Another interesting bit from LeGuin: in the Dispossessed, there are a number of short vignettes about Shevek's life on his homeworld, an anarchist colony that has all manner of weird differences with the statist planet his species originates from. She spends a lot of time talking about Shevek's childhood and how he was raised in an anarchist education system. I know a lot of lefty people who *love* this book (and so do I, it's a great book!) who seem to think that the key takeaway from the anarchist education system of Anarres is that if you just teach people the right words and right concepts they will be perfectly good anarchists.
Which is bizarre, because the really significant differences are all political, social, and material! It's not the words, it's the underlying concept. The kids are allowed to do whatever they want and imprison one of their friends for fun, and become disgusted with prisons as a result. But somehow all these people who are ostensibly Le Guin's political allies seem to read this segment and take away the fact that all you really need to do is tell people prisons are bad, and they will think prisons are bad.
Another example is Shevek derisively calling someone on the capitalist planet a "profiteer", which is basically a high-grade insult on Anarres, and the dude takes it as a compliment. And somehow, a leftist can read this book and say "man it would be so cool if profiteer was an insult so people knew it was bad to be rich" instead of "wow, if you rebuild your social mores so that seeking personal gain makes you an outcast and destroys your social capital, words associated with profiteering will become insults".
Neither here nor there, but I find "The Dispossessed" at once utterly compelling and intensely frustrating as a book. It's hard to imagine a basic premise that I'd be more naturally sympathetic to ("militaristic state capitalism is bad, and leninism/stalinism no better") and yet it somehow gets from there to "actually, starvation is kinda good since it imparts good morals and politics in the long run" and there's an uncomfortable lesson there about how good basic premises are no guarantee of good outcomes.
One of my pet peeves in this matter is people objecting to the term "pet" and wanting to use the term "companion animal", for example.
I point out that "pet" in French is precisely that, " animal de compagnie", but the French or not more humane towards animals than Anglophones. So is the intent to spare the animals' feelings?
Real estate listings no longer refer to the largest bedroom as being the “master bedroom.” Apparently “master” triggers some weirdos.
I keep hearing this, and yet every real estate listing I've ever read doesn't shy away from the term, my wife's brokerage hasn't so much as whispered they shouldn't use it, and no client or potential client has ever considered it offensive.
Are we sure this isn't an apocryphal "this happened once, somewhere, maybe" anecdote gone wrong?
Not the same thing, but multiple real estate podcasts and youtube channels I sometimes consume all use phrases like "primary bedroom" instead of "master".
People do it, but I don't really have an issue with it because the term "master" doesn't actually tell you something useful about the room. It's not like that room gets to boss the other bedrooms around or something.
For the nerds out there, a similar thing that happened where a lot of people using the software versioning system git renamed the `master` branch of their repositories to `main`. There was some kvetching about this at the time from some of the OG programmers, but again `main` is actually a better description of the main branch and how it works, so I think the change will stick.
TL;DR is that you can make a culture war issue about this if you want, but at the end of the day people are going to mostly look at the issue functionally, and `master` is just not the best word to use in a lot of the places where we see it today.
> `main` is actually a better description of the main branch and how it works
I know you're legit because you used markdown :0
But I don't think I agree here. The term 'master' in this usage is the same as a 'master' in the recording (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastering_(audio)) sense: the final version with all the edits applied. I don't think 'main' conveys that same sense. I mean, there's a reason 'master' was chose in the first place, but you are implying it was totally arbitrary.
It was also dumb to pretend that it was in any way offensive, and I don't think that "kvetching" was unwarranted. It really only became a thing because there _was_ a somewhat offensive term used in another part of software development: the master/slave server types. That one I could get behind, but like many words 'master' can mean different things and we shouldn't pretend because it's somewhat offensive in one context, it's necessarily the same in other contexts. My company spent close to 500 dev hours switching master -> main for no real purpose, so it's not like it had no cost.
Agree to disagree- it's definitely true that the main/master branch is special in the sense that it's usually the one that is integrated into the rest of the codebase, but it's never really "final" and you can swap it out with others, etc. and I'm kind of surprised that you lost 100 dev hours on a change like this (but architectures differ). I'll grant that there is some subjectivity about whether `master` is a better word to describe a branch that does that than `main`, however.
Anyway, my point is that complaints that might seem off point like this can actually lead people to adopt a better practice anyway, as I claim the renaming of bedrooms and git branches represents.
P.S.- I think that the master/slave server example actually cuts against my point, because AFAIK the master server does in fact completely control the slave server (I'm not in Dev ops, so I don't know). In a case like that I think you really are making the language change because it's offensive, full stop.
Here’s an example:
https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/26-million-japanese-inspired-new-build-lists-in-los-angeless-trending-encino-neighborhood-01631310665
Click through the photos and you’ll see one captioned “The primary bedroom…”
The primary bedroom, of course, is where the master sleeps.
I glanced through about 40 local listings just to see, and found "main" or "primary" used in lieu of "master" on 8 of them, disproportionately in the rich, white suburbs. Master was used on 25 or so, the rest didn't have anything, mostly in the city, probably because a lot of older rowhomes don't have a master suite.
So 20% or so of my non-scientific sample. Not nothing, but also hardly evidence of a nefarious plot. The fact that the words "primary" and "main" are perfectly serviceable substitutes that effectively convey meaning just means that I don't really have to care about other people's preferences.
Anyway, you seem to understand the value of markets, so I'll point out that this is an inevitable offshoot of having a market economy: everyone with any money is going to have their preferences catered to by *someone*, even if you think them stupid or "weirdos".
As with Facebook and Twitter having the ability to ban people, my response is: if you don't like it, nationalize the industry. Lol.
Don’t get me wrong: I couldn’t care less if the entire residential real estate industry changes from one standard term to another. But I think it’s likely that the change is being driven entirely by a tiny number of people who really, really care (the weirdos*) and the vast majority who care very little or not at all.
*In this case the weirdos are also ignorant, but that’s not always the case.
I always assumed it referred to "the masters of the house" as in Upstairs, Downstairs, not slavery...
It is a reference to "master of the house."
Those penny-pinching Thénardiers!
Exactly, but which kind of "master" though, the Southern plantation kind, or the European aristocrat or bourgeois kind?
That's kind of a false dichotomy since the use of "master" to describe slave owners just grew straight out of using "master" to describe the head of a feudal household. The word in North American English just got particularly associated with slavery because, outside of slaveholding regions, you really didn't have the dynamic of manor houses, great houses, etc., although you still had the expression, "master of the house." (Also worth noting that the use of master/servant in English law to describe employment relationships went back centuries before the transatlantic slave trade.)
Of course that’s what it refers to. But the weirdos who object have a couple screws loose.
If I told one of them that I have a camera flash that can be both a master and a slave their heads might explode.
I've had multiple prospective tenants in the past say to me that they have a "emotional support animal" as a way to justify their possession of such...even when I make it crystal clear in the listing that pets are allowed.
Yes, this drives me crazy. It's not uncommon at all for me to get a "letter" from their "doctor" saying that they "need" this "emotional support animal" and this "letter" is full of spelling and grammatical mistakes. When I try to call the "doctor" to confirm the number is just some person who "doesn't have an office" for me to check up on.
I make exceptions for people on our no pets rule if they can convince me, but these people get an automatic "nope".
Since I'm fine with pets, I just say "chill out, I said pets are OK, no big deal" and that deescalates things just fine--yet probably also proved your point.
But in this case there is a point to the terminology, they are trying to prove that they NEED the animal for their mental health, and not "just because" they like to have an animal.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Could you expand?
That this isn't a matter of those people trying to be politically correct and demonstrate their progressive credentials by using a P.C. synonym for "pet", but to claim that their pet is a specific TYPE of pet, one medically or psychologically necessary, not just any pet.
Like Doc Memory, I'm grateful for this post.
It means more to me than I can say.
You can see through older film and photography that our worlds rich and vibrant colors are in fact quite a recent development. I have no idea why Matt is trying to obscure this. Lying about colors won’t make ‘birthing people’ sound any better to most ears.
https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/7obgtr/calvins_dad_explains_color/
Exactly
I dunno... The ancient world (Egypt, Manoa, China, even Greece) had pretty colourful art and clothing.
So did the Western world's aristocrats. I see the palaces and cathedrals.
The peasants, the poor people Could not afford those expensive pigments. And with industrialization many every day objects were purely made for utilitarian purposes in dull metal and wood. Only in the 60s did attractive design become a thing. for the masses.
I think Nick may have been making a joke in this case.
You can't fool me, I've seen The Wizard of Oz.
I think one of the reasons the “language is power” take remains so common is because it makes analysis (1) easy and (2) satisfying.
Arguing a point with language is mostly deductive. You don’t have to do much research. There’s no numbers, and barely any theory. And it comes especially easy to the type of people who enjoy politics and arguing about it, who (like me and others in my policy grad program) are usually humanities-types who enjoy reading and writing, and like to think of ourselves as better people for that.
It’s also super satisfying to argue about language, because it keeps politics in the realm of aesthetics. Arguing about exactly how much higher a carbon tax should be is boring; arguing about what to call a carbon tax is fun.
Do you think, in general, that many of people who are in your grad program A) Don't like math? And if so B) Went into politics because they don't like math, or C) Not liking math is incidental to going into politics?
A) Yes
B) No
C) No
I think that politics attracts more humanities folks because it’s a humanities thing, maybe the most humanities thing: social rules, structure, and power.
But I think the reason so many humanities people aren’t *also* math people is because of stupid ideas that still pervade our culture about the duality of math versus linguistic/social skill sets. I think a lot of people still think about humanities stuff and math stuff as separate fields that aren’t particularly relevant to one another, that necessarily involve different personality types, and that don’t draw from the same skill sets. I think a lot of people understand math as just about calculations, and social stuff as just about narrative. I think all of these are wrong.
I agree with your last paragraph. I was curious because when I was in high school history/civics was my best subject, but I was also good at math and science. I ended up going into a STEM field instead of the humanities, history, or law (I considered all three of those) because I found science professions more enjoyable. I do wonder if our politics plays out the way it does in part because most everyone who participates in it are humanities types and are more romantic (in the classical sense) than science and math people, who tend to be more straightforward. And would politics work differently if there were more science and math people in it?
I think it politics work marginally differently, yes - and in a good way. But I’d stress “marginally.”
I think the type of people who participate in politics are much less of an influence than the type of political messaging voters demand (highly emotional, aesthetic-focused, etc.). And I think math and science people, while maybe on average slightly better than humanities folks at focusing on the substance over the rhetoric, still suffer from the same human proclivity for appeals to identity and narrative.
A "tax on net CO2 and methane emissions," please. :)
"I think one of the reasons the “language is power” take remains so common is because it makes analysis (1) easy and (2) satisfying."
Reminds me of one of my favorite essays in the New York Review of Books, Hans Morgenthau reviewing W. W. Rostow's "View from the Seventh Floor" in 1964. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1964/07/30/the-sweet-smell-of-success/
"Mr. Rostow has a powerful, brilliant, and creative mind. How could such a mind produce such trash? The answer lies in the corruption of power and the defenselessness of the intellectual in the face of it. ... When an intellectual finds himself in the seat of power he is tempted to equate the power of his intellect with the power of his office. As he could mould the printed word to suit his ideas so he now expects the real world to respond to his actions."
I'm a (retired) theoretical linguist and I endorse this essay.
I'm reminded over the whole to-do about "person-first" language, e.g., saying "person with autism" rather than "autistic person" on the grounds that putting the word "person" first emphasizes the person over the disability. When I first heard of it, I thought it was absurd, since the contortions involved in putting the word "person" first in a sentence could easily end up highlighting the thing that one was trying to de-emphasize. In short, one may mean to say, "PERSON with autism" but end up saying "person WITH AUTISM." Emphasis is never as simple as word order.
I was not surprised to find that the response of other autistic people to person-first language amounted to "Thanks, I hate it."
At least "with" doesn't have the syllabic assault that "experiencing" has--i.e. the "person experiencing homelessness". A couple of months ago, when Eric Adams triggered the whole debate on the phrase "low skilled", I quickly thought that someone was going to invent a term like "person experiencing diminished demand for one's skills" as a replacement, and then in turn quickly felt like I needed a shower to clean that thought out of my mind.
"[Slow Boring comments are] 90% someone imagining a guy, tricking themselves into believing that guy exists, and then getting mad about it"
Why do people keep trying to develop "ideal" terms for groups of people, when they could just go ask the group what they want to be called? (also see: Lantinx)
In the case of terms like Latinx, what seems to happen is that a community of activists/academics from the group adopts the term, which left-wing white people then take their cues from.
The issue can be that the representatives of a group that progressive white people here from can often be unrepresentative.
Good point.
What is acceptable criticism coming from insiders in an ethnic group takes on a different meaning when it comes from outsiders, e.g. English Speaking activists about Spanish speakers.
Oops, got tripped up by activist lingo myself, that should be "English speakers", not "whites", plenty of Spanish speakers are white.
I believe the point of Latinx Is about gender inclusivity and therefore a criticism of the very gendered Spanish language, which of course does not go over well with most Spanish speakers…
In the case of autistic people, there are a couple reasons:
1) A lot of autistic people aren't verbal, so you can really only ask the subset that are.
2) Often, the *parents* of autistic children prefer person-first language.
In my experience, “Latinx” is a word that is driven by members of the community, while autistic people actually drive a movement that is “identity first” as opposed to the “person first” preferred by some other disability groups. I suspect this is because autistic people (like Deaf people) are a community with an identity, while people who use wheelchairs see themselves as less separate from broader communities.
In this case I think people with other kinds of disabilities did themselves advocate for person first language, and this was extended by default to autism by well-meaning bureaucrats even though many autistic people don’t consider themselves disabled.
We should all decide to refer to ourselves as "persons who subscribe to Slow Boring" rather than "Slow-boring Subscribers"... let alone the antiquated "Yglesians".
Fun example in this vein is the Niger-based adaptation of Purple Rain titled Rain the Color of Blue with a Little Red in It. Clearly they are talking about the same shade even if there is no word for it.
My 5-year-old son's native language is Hebrew. In Hebrew, there are different words for "blue" and "light blue" (כחול "kahol" and תכלת "tchelet", roughly). I speak both Hebrew and English natively, but usually "think in English".
Once in a while, my son will be playing with a light-blue toy, and I'll call it blue. He'll get very angry at me and explain that of course it's not blue, it's a completely different color. I think of it as just another kind of blue - a light blue. He thinks of it as תכלת which is something else.
I completely agree that the way the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is thought about is pretty ridiculous, with a few books convincing me that it's completely overblown (Pinker's Language Instinct I think is one such book.)
But for sure, this blue vs. light blue distinction has an immediate impact on my life :)
It’s exactly like red vs pink in English - a pink toy is *obviously* different from a “light red” one!
I wonder if pink is pastel red rather than light red?
I'm not sure about this, but I suspect there could be light reds that did not have the particular saturation profile of a pastel red (a.k.a. pink).
This doesn't go into I think the main reason why this is such a big thing on the left today. Today's left includes lawyers, teachers, professors, journalists, and screenwriters, so it is unsurprisingly invested in the power of words. That pretty easily leads to focusing on arguing about words, especially in discussion with other people who care about them. It also means that if you're hoping for some extra advantage for pursuing ideological goals, the left has an advantage in changing language. So it's very tempting to think that this will accomplish something significant.
Which is not to say that the linguistic changes don't matter a little, just that it's easy to see why their impact and significance is overplayed on the 21st century left.
This is like the entire underlying theme of The West Wing (which I enjoyed): That if you can get just the right wording in your communication, you can do anything. Of course, unfortunately the show seems to be a formative reference for many contemporary progressives. So we're now trying to speechify and vocabularize everyone into adopting our positions... aaand it's not working out very well (in my opinion).
As a comparison, I think the right uses sports and war as their political process reference.
I love The West Wing, but it is pretty clear the entire premise of the show is Aaron Sorkin wishcasting an idealized version of the Clinton presidency.
Well, yes complete agreement, but it's ideal because they can do all the right things *because* they have all the right words.
Is "Democrat Party" viscerally unpleasant feeling? I don't say it because to me someone saying it sounds like a slack-jawed piece of white trash and have always thought the Republican trend toward saying it was just a function of party leadership being overrun by such people.
I had always assumed this was because when you refer to a specific person, saying XYX is a Republican sounds correct, but saying that ABC is a Democratic doesn't.
I never assumed that Democrat was pejorative.
The Republic Party. If Republicans can refuse to use the grammatically correct adjective to refer to the other party, so can Democrats! (but they won't, because that would be grammatically incorrect)
There’s nothing grammatically incorrect about “democrat” as a modifier. Noun noun compounds are totally ordinary English, as the Constitution Party demonstrates.
Well, true, if you think of them as the "Party of Democrats" and "Party of Republicans". But if, as I think both parties intend, their names mean the "Party of Democracy" or "Party of Democratic Belief" and the "Party of Republicanism" or "Party of Republican Belief" then I think it is grammatically incorrect.
Which is why I've always felt the Democrats should shrug off this alleged insult as a nothingburger. Seems like most of them do.
"Noun noun compounds are totally ordinary English..."
as "noun noun compounds" demonstrates.
At some point, I believe that somebody (I think it might have been the late Sen. Mo Udall?) suggested "Republan" as a kind of absurdist volley in that direction.
Right, it's not at all exclusive. But we do it more, and also the left is more likely (for obvious reasons) to think that the things we have a lot of power to change (like language) are really important for affecting the things we really want to change.
Not the most important part of this, but until I was a teenager I never saw a blue sea. I'd holiday on the North Sea coast and the water was brown, or, at best, a slugdy green.
Indeed. One of the great misconceptions is that "the sky is blue." Actually, it's not, for the large part of the time we perceive the sky. Half of the time it's black (a technical condition called "night.") Much of the remaining time, it's cloudy so who can say what the "sky" is? And in early morning and late afternoon it's red, causing schizophrenic reactions among sailors. So I'd say the "sky is blue" about 25% of the time at best, depending on where you live.
To call the sky "blue" just shows how Plato's sense of the ideal has perverted our thinking, compared to good old Aristotelian empiricism.
Edit: Color blindness is interesting, but as many folks pointed out, a lot of northern latitude oceans just don't look blue near the shore unless they're reflecting the sky. I should know this. I grew up in New England.
--
Color blindness is surprisingly common, especially among men (I believe one of the key genes is on the X chromosome). Some people don't even realize it until later in life.
Though what you describe isn't the most common form of color blindness. Usually it's red-green colorblindness where people have trouble distinguishing say a brown (a dark red) football from green grass, at least by hue (tone, shape and movement all matter a lot more).
I do not have colour blindness, the north sea just is not blue.
I think thats just high-latitude ocean. In the PNW the water is green in most places from algae and plankton.
True, though it looks blue from many angles since it often reflects the sky, though I guess that sky would be cloudy in the PNW.
To second nei I think he meant something like this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Holland-on-Sea%2C_Beach_at_Sandy_Point_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1470929.jpg
While I agree with this article, the color "Cyan" does exist. It is just not used very often.
I don't think "cyan" and "blue" are analogous concepts though; cyan is a shade, while blue is a category. In English, cyan goes under the category of "blue", while I guess in Russian it would go in the category of (not scrolling up to get the Russian name) "light blue".
Cyan is supposed to be kind of right between green and blue on the light spectrum, #00ffff
But it's not part of the major color names English speakers usually know. Most people wouldn't know "Cyan" except maybe when changing toner, and would refer to the color as a shade of blue, maybe a "blue-green" or "teal". Even printers refer to it as "blue" (to be fair a tank full of cyan ink looks blue).
I'm surprised that you think most people wouldn't know "Cyan". I'd grant that it's not as widely used as, say, "blue", but surely most people *know* it?!?
I only know cyan because of AutoCad (software program).
Some linguists distinguish “basic color words” from others. A “basic color word” is one that isn’t considered by native speakers to be a type of another color. Interestingly, the pride progress flag has nearly every color that is said to be a basic color in any language - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple horizontal strips for lesbian/gay/bisexual identity; white, pink, goluboy/light blue chevrons for trans identities; and black, brown chevrons for the people of color that have often been excluded from queer communities. The only one it misses is grey.
I don’t know if any language has both pink and light blue as basic color words, but most languages treat several of these as types of others. (Blue as a type of green or vice versa, purple as a type of blue or red, orange as a type of red or yellow, grey as a type of white or black, brown as a type of yellow.)
Korean has 분홍색 (pink) and 하늘색 (sky blue), which is its own thing and not modified basic blue 파란색.
Ah good, so there is at least one language that has both of these!
Sort of. 색 is “color,” and 파란 is blue, so 파란색 is “blue color,” it’s used the same way we use the English “blue.” 하늘 is “sky” so 하늘색 is literally “sky color.”
I good example of this is the use of the word Gay. Formerly meaning happy, and adopted by what became the "Gay Rights" movement to create a more positive perception of gay people, it ultimately became used as a term of abuse and disparagement. You actually had to do the hard yards of convincing people that they shouldn't verbally attack/diminish homosexual people/homosexuality
The Simpsons really nailed the absurdity of the evolution for me when Lisa developed a crush on Nelson Muntz, one of the bullies, and then the other bullies teased him by saying "You kissed a girl? That is so gay!". They also had Mr. Burns often use the oldest usage of the word around Waylon Smithers, who became the show's most prominent gay character.
There are tons of such ridiculous claims. For instance, I can't track down Daniel Everett's direct claims about the Pirahã people in the Amazon, but his research is frequently reported as saying they "have no concept of time", which is obviously nonsensical. You cannot reason about cause and effect without a concept of time, and there are all kinds of things that existed in humans' evolutionary environment that humans couldn't manipulate without a built-in concept of time: you need a concept of time to track a game animal, to plan to spend the rainy season where the most fruit grows, to resolve paternity disputes. Even without words denoting time, verb tenses, or subordinate clauses, being able to make plans, distinguish between a pattern and an unusual event, or organize a circadian or circannual routine depends on an internal understanding of time.
Everett is a friend and I know his work. He doesn't say this. Of course they have a sense of time.
I'm glad I didn't attribute the claim to him! You should see how ill-informed my comment was going to be *before* I double-checked whether anyone had actually made such a claim. (Based on the search results, the people actually saying "no concept of time" are random bloggers, but several of them.)
What he actually claims is that they have a very simple grammar that reflects (i.e. is not a product of) their lack of interest in long-term thinking. They live in the present. But his claim is the reverse, i.e. that their material circumstances has influenced their grammar and language.
This is a bit late to be responding to this thread, but I do think the Pirahã debates are very relevant here. According to Everett's account, their language lacks some basic terms and concepts that most of us use every day to communicate, and can't imagine doing without. Accepting his findings makes the relationship between cognition and language much more problematic than any study of Moscow subway line colors! I wish there was more published about the Pirahã.
Excellent. For an influential segment of the left, regulating language seems to be the only instrument of political activism they know, with the predictable fallout described at the end of the article.
Orwell was right. Controlling language can make some concepts slightly more or less accessible, but it doesn't actually prevent people from thinking of with those concepts (or disagreeing with them, depending on which end of the scales one puts their thumb). Making people use your preferred language is, however, an effective way to humiliate them and demonstrate your power.
When aunt Sally starts talking about "the death tax" at a party, the primary consequence is that it reminds everyone she cares a little too much about Fox News - or in certain social circles, it reminds people that she's "one of them". Unless she's especially charismatic or beloved to the degree that other people want to copy her for social reasons, it usually stops there.
The bitter war for people's hearts over the terms "pro-choice" and "pro-life" has culminated in a surprising situation: outside of pitched political battles, people I know simply refer to pro- and anti-abortion activists by their preferred terms without changing their own views on the matter.
The "magic words" theory of language influence is inferior to one rooted sociology that comprehends how the primary impact of terminological differences is how they indicate that other viewpoints exist at all.
Any notion that people in ancient times (i.e. very recent in terms of homo sapien history) differ >fundamentally< from modern people should be treated as suspect, and requiring very strong evidence. The idea that humans only developed the ability to see blue in recent times should immediately have stopped people in their tracks to ask if that is plausible. I mean, maybe noted historical writer Homer was using some kind of metaphor instead of literally describing what the sea looked like to him?
Another curious hypothesis people have is that schizophrenia only came about in the 18th century because ancient texts about people with mental disorders do not precisely match descriptions of modern schizophrenia.
I think Homer was describing what the sea literally looked like to him, but he didn’t care too much about differences in hue, as much as darkness. This is just how English speakers do use the word “red” to literally describe the color of someone’s hair or the color of a cabbage, because they don’t care about the ways these colors diverge from the paradigm of red, but care about the ways in which it is similar.
And since Homer has traditionally been thought to be blind, this whole thing is kinda moot, isn't it?
Homer couldn’t see blue. Homer was a Greek. Therefore Greeks could not see blue.
Makes as much sense as the reasoning in the articles Matt linked to and does it with fewer words.
The bigger issue is that, to the extent Homer even actually existed as an individual person (which is itself debated), he was undoubtedly in large part relaying prior oral traditions and played more of a role of a compiler/editor.
There may also be an element of synesthesia: a sense from looking at the sea that evokes the taste or mouth-feel of wine
But the Mediterranean around Greece is actually pale blue or aqua, unless maybe during a storm, isn't it? Unlike the sea in more Northern climes which is more dark grey...
I think whenever he's talking about the "wine-dark sea", he is talking about the sea around a ship that is out in the open ocean. I think the light blue that you're thinking of is the shallow coastal water around the Greek islands.
Ah, good point.
This is also the basis for my favorite pseudoscientific/alt-historical theory, "The Bicameral Mind".
> Bicameral mentality is a hypothesis in psychology and neuroscience which argues that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind, and that the evolutionary breakdown of this division gave rise to consciousness in humans. The term was coined by Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,[1] wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, near the end of the Mediterranean bronze age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
While I disagree with some particulars of Jaynes' theory, I personally find the overall point incredibly persuasive and don't understand how someone can study the ancient world to any degree and not find that it at least has some merit. (A tremendous amount of stuff about the evolution of language, culture, and technology makes a lot more sense if narrative consciousness is a much more recent phenomenon than the evolution of anatomically modern humans themselves, especially as the date of the latter gets pushed further and further back in time.)
that's exactly where I land: I think some of his evidence is lacking/contradictory, but damn if the idea isn't extremely compelling.
If you haven't read Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson uses this idea as a great jumping-off point for a cyberpunk narrative about using a "mind-virus" to reenable the bicameral structure.
Thanks, I haven't read "Snow Crash" yet, but it is on my "to-read" list. (I will note that I first learned about Jaynes' theory from a comic book of all places - the "Anarky" mini-series by Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle, published in 1997 by DC Comics, which gets into the political implications of the bicameral mind hypothesis and included a bibliography with "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" on it.)
I think there is a huge non-sequitur here. Current science suggests that language does not fully *determine* our perception, but at the same time does show that it *can* help (or hinder) the ease with which we perform certain cognitive tasks. It’s a great non sequitur and straw man to conclude that because language is not all powerful and insurmountable it doesn’t matter at all. Likewise, just because Reagan could achieve more liberal immigration policies with more hostile language and today we fail doesn’t prove that language didn’t have a role here at all. Maybe he did so *despite* a linguistic hurdle, and today likewise we fail despite a linguistic leg up?
In other words showing that something isn’t the only or the primary factor doesn’t mean it’s not a factor at all. It might still have *some* influence and thus could be argued as being a “low hanging fruit”, provided people realize it’s not the be all and end all.
That might be true, but the idea is sort of far-fetched when considered a priori and the burden of proof that it has really any substantial political effect is on the people who claim that it does. After all, humanity has huge variations in language. If language were even somewhat significant, it should be possible to find significant differences between those cultures: after all, we are able to tell that Russians are marginally better at distinguishing shades of blue. But as far as I know, nothing like this has ever been demonstrated.
I would argue that the causality is in the opposite direction. Changes in public feeling drive changes in language that accommodate the underlying conceptual shift. People are less racist, and they feel ashamed of the recent deeply racist past, so they start saying "Black people" instead of "Negro". They don't start saying "Black people" and suddenly change their opinions, even modestly.
This feels like the most "right" explanation in all of this, and the simplest way to logically demonstrate it is by looking at words that AREN'T political. People needed a word that meant "looking up information on the internet by typing in a few key words and then rapidly scanning through the resulting data," and so we coined "googling."
The word googling doesn't somehow determine our ability to search for things on the internet. It's just a descriptor for a pre-existing structure of ideas in our heads. In the same way, blue is a word for a predetermined spectrum of color. If you have two words for blue, it means you have mentally separated out that part of the spectrum and now have one word for one piece of the spectrum and one for another.
The fact that people aren't idiots means that "illegal alien" and "undocumented immigrant" are just two terms for the same pre-existing idea in their head. If they're predisposed to be negative toward that idea, the term that elicits the idea isn't going to matter, unless it's somehow so new or unexpected that it creates a NEW structural concept in their minds that, ideally, they don't associate with the pre-existing structure.
For example, I'm willing to bet people who automatically have negative reactions to illegal alien don't even think of their concept of illegal alien when they're thinking of Ukrainian refugees, while they absolutely do think of the concept when thinking of Central American refugees.
And I'm willing to bet even more money that those same people wouldn't suddenly magically believe Central American refugees should be given a pathway to citizenship if we started mandating that they use the term "undocumented immigrants". I think most people have the cause/effect here exactly backwards, and the constant updating of terms every decade or so just shows that the polite term of today will end up being associated with the same negative things as the prior ones precisely because the prior words were describing the exact same things as the more polite ones do.
IIRC, the ACA used to poll differently depending on whether you called it 'Obamacare' or 'The Affordable Care Act'. It's also the case that people will feel more or less affiliation with others based on how they talk, i.e. sounding Midwestern might be more appealing to someone from Wisconsin than talking like a New Yorker.
I think the thing is that sometimes fights over language are exclusionary b/c it signals that the person picking the fight is different or is acting superior. Also, there are limits to what adjusting language achieves is successful. I 100% feel pissed off when people pick language fights b/c I get the impression that they feel superior to me. But I do think there's some effect to the language we use.
Right, but people who hated "Obamacare" didn't realize that it was the ACA, so it wasn't the way you said the same thing that mattered- what mattered was using language to actively conceal the meaning of something. That's a dramatically different situation than saying that we have to use slightly better sounding words to describe identical things that everyone knows are identical under the theory that doing so will cause huge shifts in people's cognition.
Yeah, I think it's a lot more nuanced than saying language manipulation is good or bad. It's clearly a signaling device and a way to draw distinctions between concepts.
Like, 'illegal alien' and 'undocumented immigrant's technically mean the same thing but convey different connotations.
It doesn't magically change minds and I personally hate debates of terminology but I think choosing different terminology does package what people think efficiently into all numbers of words.
The "IA vs. UI" is the most common example I see people use, and every time someone does I think "but those two words mean exactly the same thing and I know that immediately." It might tell me something about the person saying them based on their choices, but the words themselves don't have any special power to change my own mind or influence me precisely because I understand the meaning of words and how to interpret them in context. When someone says either of those terms I'm exactly the same on the issue regardless- my views on UIs (or IAs depending on your preference) don't magically shift, even subtly, based on different terminology describing exactly the same thing.
Agree about the point on efficient packaging. More important than directly changing how people think, the terminology people use is a way of communicating affiliation. And since people are social creatures who form their beliefs by looking around and seeing what others in their peer group or vicinity think, there is a secondary, indirect effect of changing belief because more people will look around and say to themselves, That seems to be the correct accepted belief in my group based on the words people are using, so I'll conform my beliefs to that.
Combine this with the point that control over language is a marker and manifestation of power, and we arrive, inevitably, at Foucault --who was right about this stuff all along.
And this is why us designers use numbers — hex/RGB, CMYK or Pantone — to describe colors rather than using vague terms like "sea foam" or "cerulean". People can, and have, measured the colors all humans* can see and have created standards[1] describing not only which colors we can see, but how bright[2] and colorful they're perceived to be.
*Except those who are color blind of course.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB_color_space
[2]: Yellow light looks brighter to people than blue light even if they have the same physical power. This is called luminance or luminosity and is again universal.