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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • That’s not at all the argument I’m making. My argument is that English’s inconsistency is, at this point, the reason it is successful. By integrating everything into it, it has become a good enough medium of communication for almost everything. That would not have been possible unless the language eschewed consistency.

    Really, a better argument against changing the spelling is the classic “standards” xkcd, where now you’re just making another dialect of English where they spell words differently again, and now it needs to be adopted, fracturing the language further. Honestly, though? It doesn’t matter. Fix the spelling if you want. English can take the fracturing. The changes might take, they might not, but I doubt it’ll make the language more consistent overall, for every fix you put in, you’ll have someone who disagrees and doesn’t put it in, making your dialect more consistent, but the language overall less so, but it doesn’t matter. English will continue to be inconsistent, and that’s okay, that’s why it works.


  • The fool’s errand is trying to make the language consistent, when it never has been, especially trying to do it via spelling. English isn’t consistent. It’s not supposed to be. It takes pieces from every other language and integrates them into English whether it makes sense to or not, leading to inconsistency. That inconsistency, I think, is by design. It makes the language more versatile than any other, a “good enough” medium of communication for everything, but usually not the best, which for communication, tends to be fine.


  • To the spelling point: The world, for the most part, has moved away from the grammarian tradition of the 19th and 20th century of having a handful of dictionary makers decide what English is proper and what isn’t - the language evolves on its own, and if a misspelling becomes popular enough, it becomes a proper spelling. For example, facade is a french word, spelled façade, the accent under the C means it’s pronounced like an S. We dropped it in English because we don’t use accents in English, and now we spell it facade. It’s a “misspelling”, but you’ve probably never spelled it correctly. The language was never consistent to begin with, pretending you can fix spelling to make it so is a fool’s errand.








  • Yeah, after reading through, those articles equally contain cognitive dissonance. From how I read it, it’s ableist to insult intelligence because intelligence is primarily a proxy to insult mentally handicapped people, and because its criteria are largely arbitrary.

    What about doing something unwise? Touching a hot stove, poking a bear, trying to jump across a wide gap you’re not sure you can make it over, these are not good ideas. The thing is: the criteria for what is “wise” is equally arbitrary! The arbitrariness of a socially-constructed idea are less important than how important the cultural zeitgeist deems the idea to be. Most socially constructed ideas have arbitrary criteria because their definitions are not strict, that alone is not enough to dismiss them outright. Their harm to the mentally handicapped could be, but I see this as a red herring to solving that problem.

    Policing the language used won’t prevent them from being insulted for being mentally handicapped. People will just make up new terms, as has happened time and time again. If it becomes blasphemous to insult intelligence, another proxy for it will appear, and that will be insulted instead. They’ll insult the unwise, the foolish, the unprepared, etc. In my opinion, the attempt to stamp out ableism as you’ve described it is a thinly-veiled attempt to try to prevent people from insulting each other at all, which, while morally virtuous, is rather naïve.


  • Then ableism will never die. What you are requesting be done is absurd. People say things they do themself are stupid, “I just touched a hot stove without thinking, how stupid of me”, they of course would do the same to others. If that’s the correction you want, you’re going to be in the vast minority and will be fighting a losing war against core fundamentals of human behavior.


  • What alternative word would you use in this case, as a pejorative insult to someone’s intelligence?

    Looking at the list you’ve provided, they’re all generic insults not specifically aimed at someone for doing something dumb. If the problem is that the pejorative is aimed at intelligence…ableism will never go away. People will always insult the intelligence of others when they do something dumb.