References to brothers or sisters, or mothers or fathers, is offensive to nonbinary people? In all seriousness, not trying to start a flame war, why is that? Is a reference to hair offensive to a bald person?
I think the reason here is pretty simple: Turning someone into patient for life is profitable.
The reason to replace an aggregate ‘brothers and sisters’ with ‘siblings’, ‘mothers and fathers’ with ‘parents’, or ‘boys and girls’ with ‘children’ is because for all of these the replacement suffices without calling attention to gender when it’s not necessary to do so.
There’s also an argument that the ‘X and Y’ phrasing makes the ‘X’ seem more important than the ‘Y’, or makes it seem like the ‘default’ - just a little, but with repetition the impression is reinforced. If there’s an alternative collective word to use, it avoids this ‘ordering’ issue with no real downside.
Note that all these arguments make sense in even if you consider gender to be a binary thing.
I do now attempt to use the single-word non-gendered collective nouns in speech myself for the reasons I gave, and I think it’s a good idea to do so.
To discuss the edits to Dahl’s work: I would argue that for these ‘Xs and Ys’ examples he was probably just using the popular idioms of the time rather than choosing them to convey a specific meaning as you say. That would certainly be what I would’ve done, without much consideration, 20 years ago!
But that’s obviously not the case for all the edits that are reportedly being made.
The edits in aggregate do make me uneasy. I’m not sure how I’d feel if they were more limited.
I hate to be the guy that cries “1984,” but do we really have to completely neuter our language to avoid every imagined offense? Are there people out there’s who egos are so fragile that they can’t handle “gentlemen” coming after “ladies?”
Regarding the first occurrence being conceived as more important, it’s the reason usually females appear named first, a sign of courtesy to them. That was sorted out neatly long ago.
Yes, of course you’d need to be specific if it was important. I’d use ‘10 parents’ only if it wasn’t important.
Your example isn’t great though. Even if you assume binary gender for all parents in the group, you couldn’t replace ‘10 parents’ with ‘10 mothers and fathers’ because it’s unclear whether there are 20 people or 10. You’d need to be specific (‘6 mothers and 4 fathers’ or the like).
I don’t think your second paragraph refutes mine at all. I obviously don’t agree that it was ‘sorted out neatly long ago’. You could assume that from the fact that I’ve rethought my own behavior. This world would be a much worse place than it is if people never reconsidered whether the status quo from long ago was optimal.
[Edit: I see now that this comment was not on the same branch as the one where I said I’d rethought my own behavior from a default of e.g. ‘boys and girls’ to ‘children’, so I take back the sentence about you not seeing that. The rest stands though.]
Using the perspective from the OP, it's a kids' book, using a couple of different synonyms might help them better understand what they're reading and not walk away believing that there's something wrong with their family or themselves.
Write new books. Make them as inclusive or exclusive as you want. I just think it's very telling that you hear so much about "erasure" and yet changing an author's words and intent like this is celebrated.
That's not what they mean when they say empathy. They misuse empathy when they mean compassion.
I think they do it because even they understand it's indecent to say they pity all of these people.
empathy: The ability to identify with or understand another's situation or feelings
compassion: Deep awareness of the suffering of another accompanied by the wish to relieve it.
Ask for empathy in a preface, or an introduction, if you have to. Stay the fuck out of Dahl's work. You don't have to like it, but changing it is obscene - Dahl is not alive to permit these changes, and would probably be horrified. They're his fucking words.
You, GP, and anyone else seeking justification for silently altering beloved works into newspeak ought to grab a hold of yourselves. That isn't empathy, it's Orwellian censorship to an obvious and absurd degree. As pointed out all over this thread and elsewhere, this is worse than burning books in some ways.
And no, shrill isn't "gendered" any more than "screeching" is. For fuck sake. Every word an author chooses is chosen with care for flavour and tone. Leave them the fuck alone.
Again: none of this --- nothing I've said, and nothing about the comment you've chosen to angrily respond to --- implies that these changes are good. Maybe the previous commenter believes that; I don't know. But I can't read that out of anything they actually wrote.
I understand the urge to find someone, anyone, to take the other side of your argument. It's no fun to yell at the clouds! But you have to wait for someone to actually make the other argument. You can't just attribute it to people and then hammer away at them.
Since we just asked you to stop doing it and you've kept doing it, I think we have to ban this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I made a point of turning off the flags on this submission—I don't have any problem with the article and you can see from my comments in the thread what I think of these edits to Dahl. But you still can't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how provocative someone's comments are or you feel they are.
FWIW, while tptacek's comments to you were probably slightly edgier than usual and maybe a bit over the line, 'gaslighting' seems like a big exaggeration to me.
Moreover, when I feel empathy with someone who feels different and unrecognized by society, something still keeps me from advocating for the censorship and misrepresentation of a writer's ideas and internal logic.
I think what's stopping me is the knowledge that if I'm fortunate enough to write something that lasts beyond me, I sure as heck don't want anyone updating it for the sensibilities of 2053. Putting myself in someone's shoes, I think there's a word for that
Come on guy, it's not that hard to see. People have been pointing it out to you for hours now.
What is your relationship to tptacek? Every time I see him winding people up, you're there behind him, threatening anyone who stands up.
I didn't see personal attacks from tptacek. Some of his comments in this thread were edgier than I would like but I didn't see any that broke the site guidelines badly enough to warrant a scolding the way your comment did. Based on what I saw, this isn't a borderline call and (in case you're worried about this) it has nothing to do with disagreeing with you—just look at my posts on the actual topic.
> Every time I see him winding people up, you're there behind him, threatening anyone who stands up
The active ingredient there is "I see". What people see, and fail to see, is basically determined by their passions on a subject. If all these years of moderation have taught me one thing, it's that.
Re "twisting of people's comments" - that's your interpretation based on your priors. People make these judgments all the time—in fact they come up in nearly every argument as soon as emotions get activated. You're overestimating what moderation can do if you think we should impose our own such interpretations. And they wouldn't agree with your interpretations in any case (how could they?) so you wouldn't get what you wanted even if we did. No one would! In fact it would amplify the complaints about moderation by many orders of magnitude.
If someone is wrong or you think they are, the helpful thing to do is respectfully provide correct information. If you can't or don't want to do that, please just chalk it up to someone being wrong on the internet and walk away. The one who stops posting first in tit-for-tat exchanges is the one who wins anyway.
Also, HN conversations are basically never good once people start arguing about what each other is really saying, so when things take that turn, it's a sign that it's time to stop.
> once you take a position of empathy.
...and the usual thinly veiled "if you don't agree with my opinion you're a Bad Person". How about taking position of sensibility for once ?
The same argument can be made about people who are triggered by this edition of the book. You can just not read the new edition instead of pushing for and celebrating the silencing of its owners.
But it won't happen because that would be honesty and we can't have that from people that push for the changes
Nobody would be upset if they were just making a new version of the book. The issue is they're trying to sweep the original under the rug and eventually memoryhole it.
The "owners" (who likely don't have a imaginative bone in their entire skeleton), if you'll pardon my vernacular, should stay the fuck out of the authors original work instead of mucking around with it, particularly inane changes like the removal of the word fat.
And by pushing a new addition of the book while discontinuing the originals they seek to erase the authors original work. If anything this particular addition should have a large CliffsNotes banner on the cover.
Have you read Heart of Darkness?
If it turns out these beloved stories become out of fashion because of stuff like this, so be it.
Twisting it into something it isn't, to fit current tastes doesn't seem right.
But … retired stories don’t sell and don’t get turned into remakes, ticket sales, etc…
Rewritten stories are fine, I like lots of them (the new ghostbusters, I adored..) but this, to me, seems like prep work for a lazy hollywood..
It's easy to figure out why these changes are being made in particular, and it has nothing to do with empathy.
Meh
Use of gendered language is marginalizing to nonbinary people.
It's easy to figure out why these changes are being made in particular, once you take a position of empathy.