To be fair, compaining about that makes about as much sense as compaining about the racist implications of the term "good Samaritan", although I agree that, in retrospect, it's pleasantly surprising that social justice warriors haven't tried to ram though a de facto ban anyway.

It's on the list. Don't worry.

If I understand correctly, Samaritans have the same ethnic roots as Jews. The differences were more religious and ideological than racial. So with that in mind, saying the term "good Samaritan" is specifically racist doesn't really hold water. Xenophobic, maybe. The lines kind of blur when you're talking about groups that are divided by some odd combination of ethnicity, religion, and nationality.

Regardless, if you look at the actual context, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is arguably meant as a message against racism and preconceived notions about people from other ethnic groups or countries.

> If I understand correctly, Samaritans have the same ethnic roots as Jews. The differences were more religious and ideological than racial. So with that in mind, saying the term "good Samaritan" is specifically racist doesn't really hold water. Xenophobic, maybe.

According to the Australian Human Rights Commission (an independent government agency) [0]:

> Racism takes many forms and can happen in many places. It includes prejudice, discrimination or hatred directed at someone because of their colour, ethnicity or national origin

So, even if a difference is "ethnic" rather than "racial", it can still be "racism" (at least by that definition of "racism"), since "racism" can be based on "ethnicity" or "national origin" rather than "race".

Contemporary science does not support any distinction between "race" and "ethnicity": the distinction is just a cultural construct specific to certain societies. So culturally-specific, in fact, that it even differs between different countries in the English-speaking world: US government publications officially acknowledge a distinction between "race" (e.g. African-American) and "ethnicity" (e.g. Hispanic) – even while admitting the distinction is grounded in the particularities of US culture and history rather than anything scientific or universal. By contrast, Australian government publications studiously avoid making any official distinction between them, and in practice treat the two concepts as interchangeable.

[0] https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/ahrc_sr_2021_... PDF page 8

Are there any really good synonyms for 'hysteria' though, to describe a sort of crazed panic around a certain subject?

If only we had a means of searching for such synonyms in an online reference book.

I had a quick search, but nothing stood out as a particularly great replacement, hence the question

Rave, Riot, Hullabaloo

Well, we saw ‘Covid Raves’ and ‘Covid Riots’, but they’re quite different things to ‘Covid Hysteria’.

I would wager that 99% of people using the word "hysterical" have no clue about that history.

I'm in my 30s and this is a little fact I just learned today.

I've heard 'testerical' used as a synonym. Possibly in a tongue-in-cheek way.

Why wouldn't it be? Clearly people don't mean anything sexist by it, given that most don't know about it, and nobody as far as I know is offended. Who do you want to ban the word for?

To be clear I think intent matters more than anything else, and I’m not an advocate for “banning” terms or shunning people for unknowingly using a term like this - but the history and what it implies is questionable to the point where it’s probably best not to use it personally

Isn't "person with uterus" the new politically correct way of women? /sarkasm off