an argument of syntacticians

Them runs

I see them

"etymologynerd" is at it again and this time i do feel i have to say something. the disability advocates have it covered on addressing the impact, but there's also a serious problem with the linguistics.

in a video shared on may 16, adam aleksic begins by saying: "i think we have to accept the fact that the 'r-word' [retard/retarded] is permanently coming back and it's functionally changed meanings to no longer directly refer to disabled people."

this first sentence alone betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of language change in several points.

this word never went away. what we're seeing now is an attempt at re-normalization by people who sense that they will not be socially punished by openly using this term.

we actually don't have to "accept" its return to mainstream use. for decades, disability advocates have worked to inform the public of the harm caused by casual use of this term. the harm has not disappeared, and neither will this advocacy and its impacts.

now i'm just mad. how tf does it NOT refer to disabled people? the entire point of a pejorative term is that it negatively invokes comparison to a person, group, etc. the assertion that the r-word has changed meanings is categorically false. at most, its primary context has changed from clinical to casually pejorative, but the insult fundamentally rests upon the original reference.

he goes on to refer to the "euphemism treadmill," another concept he misrepresents by extending the metaphor to say that terms which have been sufficiently distanced from their original reference are no longer pejorative. to quote: "...once we sufficiently distance a word from its historical usage, it stops taking on the same offensive power and just becomes colloquial instead."

which... what? what the fuck is he talking about? the words he uses as examples – idiot, imbecile, and moron – are definitely still offensive, if perhaps less impactful. "just becomes colloquial instead" is a nonsense phrase. are offensive words not colloquial? the only english word that comes to mind as having changed so much in definition as to no longer be offensive is "nice," which has been shifting in meaning for more than 700 years and was never a weaponized clinical term.

he ends by saying, "it is undeniably true that the people who are afraid to say the r-word right now are going to get old and die out, while younger generations keep saying it with no knowledge of where it came from." again, fundamentally misunderstanding language change in society over time. it rests on the assumption that we're all going to start or re-start using this slur and never have a conversation about its harms, which just completely ignores both the abovementioned disability advocacy and the fact that people tell each other not to use offensive words. you think i'm just not gonna teach my kids that using slurs is bad??

the whole video is devoid of both empathy and an understanding of long-term semantic change.

this is to apologize for using the phrase "devoid of empathy." it was a bad choice on my part because i framed the lack of empathy as malicious, which dehumanizes and demonizes people who lack empathy as part of their neurotype.

Here’s the list taken from that version of the article:

armadillo bug

billy baker (South Somerset)

billy button (Dorset)

boat-builder (Newfoundland, Canada)

butcher boy or butchy boy (Australia, mostly around Melbourne)

carpenter or cafner (Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada)

carpet shrimp (Ryedale)

charlie pig (Norfolk, England)

cheeselog (Reading, England)

cheesey wig

cheesy bobs (Guildford, England)

cheesy bug (North West Kent, Gravesend, England)

cheesy lou (Suffolk)

cheesy papa (Essex)

chiggy pig (Devon, England)

chisel pig

chucky pig (Devon, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, England)

chuggy pig

crawley baker (Dorset)

daddy grampher (North Somerset)

damp beetle (North East England)

doodlebug (also used for the larva of an antlion and for the cockchafer)

fat pigs (Cork, Ireland),

gramersow (Cornwall, England)

granny grey (Wales)

granny grunter (Isle of Man)

grumper-pig (Bermuda)

hardback (Humberside, England)

hobbling Andrew (Oxfordshire, England)

hobby horse (Isle of Purbeck, Dorset, England)

hog-louse

horton bug (Deal, Kent, England)

humidity bug (Ontario, Canada)

jomits (Cloneganna)

menace (Plymouth, Devon)

mochyn coed (tree pig), pryf lludw (ash bug), granny grey in Wales

monkey-peas (Kent, England)

pea bug (Medway, England)

peasie-bug (Kent, England)

pennysow (Pembrokeshire, Wales)

piggy wig

pill bug (usually applied only to the genus Armadillidium)

potato bug

roll up bug

roly-poly

saw bug (Dingwall, Nova Scotia)

scuttlebug (New Zealand)

slater (Scotland, Ulster, New Zealand and Australia)

sour bug (Cambridgeshire)

sow bug

water bug

wood bug (British Columbia, Canada)

so they were trying to figure out if children use syntactic knowledge to learn new vocabulary, specifically in this case they were researching two year olds. with verbs, some are done to a person ("x hit y") and some only have a doer ("x laughed"), and they wanted to see if these different sentence structures had an effect on how toddlers learn.

they got some grad students, put one in a rabbit costume and one in a duck costume. they had the rabbit repeatedly push the duck into a crouching position using their left hand. at the same time, both the rabbit and the duck were moving their right hands in a repetitive circling motion. they had a bunch of two years olds watch this. with half of the kids, they said "the rabbit is gorping the duck!" and with the other half, they said "the rabbit and duck are gorping!" afterwards, they showed two videos at the same time to the kids, one with the rabbit pushing the duck down but no circling motion, and one with both making the circling motion but no pushing. then they said "where's gorping now? find gorping!" and the kids who had heard the first statement would consistently look towards the video of the pushing motion, while the kids who heard the second statement would consistently look towards the video of the circling motion.

"UniSeg, preciso que você fique parada aí até eu chegar."

[SecUnit, I need you to stay still (female form) until I arrive]

"Elas não eram os robôs-assassinos mais astutos, (...)"

[They (feminine plural) weren't the (masculine plural) most astute murder robots, (...)]

...feminine pronouns for Unidades de Segurança, SecUnits, and masculine pronouns for robôs-assassinos, murder robots...

That's not what the French translation of Murderbot does though, it uses "iel" which, while the most common gender-neutral neopronoun used by nonbinary French speakers I know, is also exclusively used by people. Like, a chair, table, etc can't be "iel", it has to be "il/elle". So "iel" preserves the gender-neutrality, but it's much less dehumanizing than "it" in English, something that I think the Portuguese solution does a particularly good job at.

The Japanese one is still really good and more people need to appreciate it:

In the Japanese translation of the books, Murderbot uses the genderless neopronoun 弊機 (heiki), which means through its characters "both “bad/evil robot” and “this second-rate, humble company machine"." It's also a homophone for 兵器 (heiki), meaning "weapon." The Japanese translator is Naoya Nakahara, and her translation of the first four Murderbot novellas won a translation award in Japan in 2021. 

clavicular = the protagonist of our tale. a frail man desperately clinging to the semblance of virile strength given to him by his looks but understood by most and even by his loyal followers to be a pathetic and clownish figure

almost caught a career-ending cortisol spike = almost had an anxiety attack that could've ruined his career and reputation as a streamer

after a larpmaxxed stacy = after a woman just as desperately pretending to be gorgeous and confident

tried jesterfying him on stream = attempted to make him into an object of ridicule in front of his live audience as he streamed

by calling him a good boy = by calling him a good boy (this is supposed to be sexually emasculating)

while he was mid-mog = while he was in the middle of winning a contest of unbothered masculinity

between 2 low-tier normies = between himself and two other young men less concerned with projecting an ill-conceived ideal of virility