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A comment on Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative. Parent comment

Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by mannykannot on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @11:07AM (#34067838)
The commingling of words and phrases which are often used outside of their domain of applicability in order to be offensive, with those that are not, just spreads the contagion to no useful end.

It is particularly bad when the given replacement is nowhere near synonymous. The first one that really got my eyes rolling was 'detail-oriented' for OCD: being detail-oriented is an aspect of safety in a number of areas, and this is nothing like OCD, which has a clinical definition.

If one cares about something, don't make it easy to ridicule and dismiss.

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by PebblesRox on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @11:55AM (#34068601)
I think the intention with non-synonymous examples is to use those as replacements for non-literal uses of the term. E.g. reserving the use of the term "addicted" for someone who actually has an addiction; only saying someone has OCD if they actually do and otherwise calling them detail-oriented.

(I agree that the document is silly but I don't think it's quite as bad as your interpretation.)

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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by mannykannot on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @12:19PM (#34068984)
I agree that's not so bad in general. In this particular case, however, when one wants to say that someone is obsessively preoccupied with irrelevant issues (which could be a valid issue), OCD is not a good choice, but 'detail-oriented' misses the point entirely.
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