This reeks of artificial engagement. HN should avoid buying into it.
This bot may be a "joke" but it represents the thought police and the author should be sternly reprimanded.
And you are asking us to treat this as a representation of a real threat to free thought, and not only to respond, but to respond as it were an emergency or natural disaster.
Do you hear how absurd that sounds to my ears?
It represents the thought police in exactly the same way that anyone having any opinion represents that.
But this is part of a cultural phenomenon, unless you want to argue that wokism doesn't exist.
Besides, there's nothing particularly wrong with cooking on a Wok.
It's not vague at all.
> Besides, there's nothing particularly wrong with cooking on a Wok.
Lol, I had to look up what a wok is. Blessings of learning English as a second language.
Don't you agree that there's a relationship between having pronouns in the bio, reading Ibram X. Kendi, being "intersectional", believing words are violence, and sporting purple hair?
I didn't imply anything, I explicitly stated that the term “wokism” as currently used, doesn't refer to either an actual ideology, cultural phenomenon, or even a set of ideas or groups of people more connected than that they are things the dominant faction of the political Right disagrees with at the moment of the use of the label.
> Don't you agree that there's a relationship between having pronouns in the bio, reading Ibram X. Kendi, being "intersectional", believing words are violence, and sporting purple hair?
No, I don't. Believing (certain uses of) words are violence seems to be common across the political spectrum, though which uses of which words varies, purple hair is pretty orthogonal to politics (as is the more common feature used in this context, blue hair), intersectional isn't something a person can be, and while the first two things do correlate with political positions the Right opposes they (and the political positions they each correlate strongly with) don't correlate very strongly with each other. (In fact, that's a perennial complaint of the group that represents the intersection of those two communities.)
> In the six years since Brown’s death, “woke” has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of “woke” is bipartisan: It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right.
https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-hist...
That was written in 2020. Now, as Democrats fear a red wave in 2022, it seems they want to distance themselves from the ideas they embraced just two years ago, and some claim that "wokeness" is a fiction invented and used exclusively by the right, obscuring its true history: a term invented by BLM and used as "a shorthand for political progressiveness" by progressives themselves as recently as 2020.
(We might almost overlook that two other terms Democrats are also trying to distance themselves from were casually used in that quote: "a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory". Before right-wing criticism of these ideas became overpowering, they were all widely embraced by the left.)
And...it was confused, muddled, and largely inaccurate then.
> Now, as Democrats fear a red wave in 2022, it seems they want to distance themselves from the ideas they embraced just two years ago,
Even if the articles description of the use of “woke” as an encapsulation of leftism were correct, you would be making the common mistake of associating the center-right Democratic Party with leftism. Within the left, there is debate over whether supporting the Democrats is acceptable or counterproductive, and the Democratic Party itself is generally anti-leftist and pro-corporate-capitalist, though arguably not as strongly soa s the Republicans (arguably, OTOH, more strongly so, as the Republicans culture war positions compromise the advancement of corporate capitalism.)
> Before right-wing criticism of these ideas became overpowering, they were all widely embraced by the left.
The original meaning of both terms is still widely embraced on the left, even after they’ve becoming meaningless epithets in the mouths of Republicans. They’ve never been embraced by Democrats as a whole, and the Republican use of term (which generally is not attached to anything vaguely resembling a criticism) doesn't even refer to the same thing that people using the terms positively refer to with the term.
No, I'm recognizing that even the centrist New Democrats embraced woke/progressive ideas in 2020, or at least didn't dare to challenge them. Now they're distancing themselves from those ideas, so they avoid the terms as well. As Clinton strategist James Carville said: "Wokeness is a problem and we all know it."
> Even if the articles description of the use of “woke” as an encapsulation of leftism were correct
It is correct. It may not be how you use the word, but it is how many people, including Democrats, use the word.
Here's another example in which CNN uses the term to encapsulate the Green New Deal and open immigration along with Defund the Police and the culture war, while advising Democrats to distance themselves:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/12/politics/woke-green-new-deal-...
> it was confused, muddled, and largely inaccurate
Here you're just descending into insults instead of substantive debate, while dismissing contrary evidence without any reason. You might try to open your mind and realize that your opinion doesn't encompass or limit all human experience.
I think it's also clearly the case that some segments of the political landscape are using it principally as a slur for anyone who seems to be disagreeing about whatever.
Mo Brooks (Republican congressman from Alabama) was just prominently labeled "woke" by Trump for not falling in line about election stuff. I don't think very many people would place Mo Brooks in (or near) any of the clusters described above.
it sure is incoherent, but it sure is persistent
This is clearly just a badly programmed bot. However, if you look at one of the (less) buggy PRs it submitted, you'll find an actually helpful change[1]: replacing gendered pronouns with neutral ones makes sense in the context of documentation, wherever that documentation is in fact gender-neutral in disposition.
[1]: https://phys.org/news/2020-01-chronicles-history-gender-neut...
In other words, the dictionary added it 3 years ago due to political pressure. It's never been correct English, and it still isn't.
(I’ve also never heard any English dictionary make a claim of linguistic completeness, so “it’s not in Merriam-Webster” doesn’t strike me as an important standard.)
We both know this. Why pretend?
Whitelist may be a bit different. I understand that language shapes how we think, but master seems like it would trigger people who have a but of a victim mentality. It's like the word dick, it has a meaning outside of genitals, and if all we can think about is genitals when the word is spoken maybe the problem lies a bit deeper than the word itself.
I don't know.. with whitelist and blacklist I could see how unconsciously that could cause people to see black as bad and white as good. But still.
Everything has tradeoffs and I also believe that Obama led to Trump. Too much change too quickly leads to backlash and the pendulum swinging violently in the other direction.
This increases polarization.
I think the solution is more likely not in trying to force our language to change, but is to change our technologies and culture into one that promotes empathy, listening and understanding, and for us to count our blessings instead of running around seeing who can be the better victim, which as a non-american, is what USA looks like to me.
If anything the language is more of a symptom of culture than the other way around, even though I agree there is a bidirectional relationship.
Hormones change our thoughts more than our thoughts change our hormones, even though there is a bidirection there as well. But to me, to attempt to change culture through language is going to be as effective as trying to will ourselves out of anxiety and depression.
I wouldn't be surprised if our generation simply feels powerless in this world. We face a lot of issues ranging from inequality to climate change, and since those issues seem so depressing and insurmountable instead we go on a war against what we feel like we can change, for example words, and then justify to ourselves that this is actually making enough of a difference to steer the ship. But is there any proof of that? All I see is feelings-based decision making without any actual evidence.
Again, aside from blacklist vs whitelist which might actually have some substance to its argument.
What I really want to know is how whoever is trying to force it deals with languages with grammatical genders.
But we do have another similar phenomenon going on. Feminitives. It's when some people assign the female gender to words that don't have a female form, or that do have one but it's not cringy enough. So автор becomes авторка, врач becomes врачка (instead of врачиха), учитель becomes учителька (instead of учительница), and so on.
On the other hand, "autor" and "autorka" are normal forms; same for "lekarz" and "lekarka", "nauczyciel" and "nauczycielka". These seem to be equivalent to the shorter forms you list. I'm not sure how to translate your longer forms, "nauczycielniczka"? There's no such word.
Interesting to see that different languages can have perfectly opposite grammar rules, even if the words are similar and the grammar also shares some similarities in other areas :)
Nope, no equivalent to "sibling" at all, not even plural. If you want to say "siblings", you say "братья и сёстры".
edit: "родня" might be kinda like "rodzeństwo", but it's not just siblings, it's relatives in general.
> I'm not sure how to translate your longer forms, "nauczycielniczka"? There's no such word.
"Учительница" (or short slang form "училка") is the correct feminine form found in dictionaries. "Учителька" is the cringy one coined by feminists. They both mean "female teacher", but apparently the correct one is somehow worse or not modern enough? I don't know.
What about дитя? Isn't that a neuter in Russian? I know the equivalent "dítě" is a neuter in Czech. (For obvious reasons this is why the neuter is not being used in Czech either for referring to adult people -- it's completely infantilizing.)
What I found interesting about this particular bot is that it wants to replace "actress" by "actor". (Yes please!! You don't know how good you have it in English, where most occupations are gender-neutral.)
In contrast, the current progressive push in German is to replace generic/masculine Schauspieler (actor) with der*die Schauspieler*in (think "actr*ess"; male, female, and everything in between, a bit like latinx). Maybe it makes sense that German has a tendency to become ever more complicated like C++, while English becomes simpler? But it shows how fad-driven this whole thing is: Either gendered nouns are good or bad, why would it depend on the language?
How could you have one? You have inflected nouns and adjectives -- you'd have to come up with new endings for those if you could use neither masculine nor feminine ones (not the neuter ones in case that this were offensive in German). And teach everyone to use them.
English is in this weird place where pretty much the only morphological remnant of gender is in the third person singular personal pronouns. Even if someone felt that to be a problem in general (not everyone obviously does), in other languages, this is either a non-existent issue (say, in Finnish), or an outright unsolvable issue (say, in Slavic languages). So basically English speakers get the benefit of even being able to virtue signal just with tiny language changes that cost you very little. Pretty much nobody else has this option to begin with - either lacking opportunity (like in Finnish) or the ability (like in Slavic languages).
Two proposals that I've seen replace all endings with either -x or -ens.
German source - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lann_Hornscheidt#Gendertheorie...
Now one might think that these are outlandish ideas that will never fly, but...
> And teach everyone to use them.
...that's easy, because languages changes are implemented top-down. Considering how unpopular the neutral forms using : and * are in polls, it is absolutely fascinating to see them spread so quickly from academia, to tech (macOS, Spotify), to local governments, to normie coworkers. Nonbinary people wouldn't have to do the teaching themselves.
Edit:
> ...not the neuter ones in case that this were offensive in German...
My first intuition was that using the neutral gender would indeed be offensive. But children (das Kind) and girls (das Mädchen) are neutral - and it doesn't feel rude to refer to them as "it"? I think it could work.
It literally wants to replace gender specific language with gender neutral language it’s literally like 1930s Germany… jfc