The worst of these is that the object of the unnamed actor is…language. How can” The President of Wokism” impose they/their will on language, a product of human interactions and not a human itself?
yeah, "sack lunch" isn't a neologism, it's a regionalism – and a somewhat old-fashioned one, to boot – from the parts of the US where "sack" is the usual term for a brown paper bag, as seen in these dialect maps http://dialect.redlog.net/staticmaps/q_109.html
I swear the ungodly lax standards people use for backing claims is a major driver of why our information environment is so insane.
And the reason it happens is that people who write like this haven’t actually observed primary examples, they’re vaguely regurgitating stuff they heard from others
I mean as fun as dunking on Thomas Chatterton Williams is, I expect this. He occasionally has interesting ideas but he’s one of those “Heterodox (TM)” thinkers who falls somewhere between the Atlantic and the Free Press, and buoys the right while excoriating the left.
Workforce is the only one of those replacement terms I've heard before, and it's certainly not new. I think this author is guilty of straw man arguments, as well as using unsourced information.
I think it depends on the audience. I agree with you, but I can easily see millions of people who would be persuaded by this, unfortunately. And a good number of them are in powerful positions. :/
Oh I think it can be very persuasive. As someone who teaches writing, I think his point is that persuasion absent evidence is manipulation, not argumentation. I took his point to be that an argument can be compelling and also BS at the same time.
I teach, and this would get so much pushback from me because it's so broad and general and just drivel. Like make the argument, don't just gesture wildly
Also ask those making the argument if they have used the phrases “politically correct”, “cancel culture”, “woke”, & “DEI” to mean essentially the same thing? It’s funny how bigoted dog whistle phrases keep evolving as people get hip to the fact that those using these phrases disparagingly are bigots
Exactly this. I found a piece in the NY Times archive by Richard Bernstein, from Oct. 28, 1990, "The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct" that makes this exact same tired argument in the exact same tired way, and it was a dumb cliché of an argument then, THIRTY FIVE years ago. So much stupid!
Here's a fun one: George Will complaining in 1993 that on "shrill and loopy" modern PC campuses you can't even call black students the N-word or tell gay students they belong in mental institutions. https://www.newsweek.com/compassion-campus-193190
And then the same George Will wants to be fake outraged when Trump targets immigrants and trans people as if bigot baiting wasn’t the bread and butter of the GOP, and it’s appeal to white voters, for decades.
I’d bet there’s a piece to be written tracing this back through “counter culture” in the 60’s, “communist” in the 40’s and 50’s, “anarchist” in the 20’s and 30’s until you got all the way back to “abolitionist”
Who were often, at the time, *also* accused of adopting abolitionism for social clout, while ignoring the lamentable plight of working-class whites. Plus ca change...
ah yes-- the over-reach of SACK LUNCH is why we now see all mention of black figures in history being scrubbed from the world. Who could NOT have seen this equal-but-opposite swing?
i am more in tune than probably 99.6% of the country with what activists say, and **never in my entire life** have i heard one inveigh on why the words "brown-bag lunch" must be banished forever
so i double-checked and basically all of this stems from *one guy* in seattle's city government sending a memo that city employees should avoid the term because it might conjure the idea of the unrelated "brown-bag test" in which anyone darker than a paper bag was singled out for discrimination
When I teach persuasive writing to my game design undergrads, I always have to remind them to "imagine a reader that is skeptical but not hostile" and to "show the receipts" when making an assertion.
So much of what they read is just someone vibing that they don't know there are other standards
Given that there IS a phrase that includes "brown bag" that is problematic, I have to wonder if this was written/partly written by AI. AI jumped to the wrong phrase with "brown bag" in it and nobody edited closely enough to notice. So dumb.
It’s badly constructed and glued together with incendiary terms rather than facts or logic. We tend to think mostly of the forensic and deliberative forms of rhetoric, but this text is just epideictic - holding things up for ridicule and blame as a way of affirming membership in a group.
“Chestfeeding” is like those atlases that added fake towns because you can’t copyright real facts but CAN copyright fake ones. It’s such a tell that this person isn’t mad about actual “wokeness” but about Wokeness as seen in the last season of the Fox News cinematic universe
There are trans-friendly places that use “chestfeeding” rather than “breastfeeding,” but IME the vast majority of left-leaning folks still say “breastfeeding” most of the time - and the only time you might be corrected is in spaces that are so specifically left you don’t wind up there by accident.
There’s a running bit with the Dothraki in ASoIaF where one person would punctuate an old wives tale with “It is known,” and one or more in the group would echo “It is known.” This would end discussion of the point – why bother interrogating something that everyone knows to be true?
"People were told to stop saying" by whom? I have contractors working in my house and I told them about something I wanted them to do in the master bedroom. I did not feel like I was violating any woke directives when I did so, or suddenly felt an urge to embrace MAGA.
There is so much puffery to choose from. "Beyond redemption??" There was some "woke" overzealousness that ran aground of its own accord in due time. That aspect wasn't great IMO but became a pretext for platforming fascist/neoNazi shit...and that's on Elon way more than even this butthurt contrarian
FWIW, I travel in the fairly “woke” & occasionally censorious world of left wing college drama departments and no one I know would take any of those examples (Brown bag lunch, master bedroom etc) seriously for a moment. It’s another example of taking a random tweeter as speaking for all of the left.
if i'm being generous to their argument, i do think for about a decade there we were in a place where society was negotiating just how much of social media was "real life," but good news, we've determind that actually they're the same thing and for some reason that means fascism is A-ok now
Also: most of those conversations were happening online in forums/posts like Tumblr, not corner offices.
Those linguistic changes were bottom-up more than they were top-down and were likely appropriated by individuals BEFORE they were promoted as "DEI hires" after George Floyd's murder.
Also also: sometimes we go through several clunky phrases before settling on a genuinely improved one to replace outdated language. Sometimes new language is awkward! That's not evidence that the Woke Mob/PC Police are trying to crush our freedoms.
They even wrote this further down!! They can’t even set up their own argument correctly by choosing words that set the two things they are contrasting in.. contrast
Clearly, “many advocates”=every significant person on the planet; “as it is known”=as stated above, by every significant person on the planet; “is forced”=the law of the land. Every land. Obviously. This is all quite simple.
It’s so endemic to the anti-woke genre. The most intellectually sophisticated version, by Musa al-Gharbi, is one passive voice sentence after another for a couple hundred pages.
Man, how does one get a gig professionally barfing up wrong things, and what point in history would I have to travel to in order to prevent that from becoming a viable career path?
Also, didn't we stop writing "manpower" decades ago after feminists - IN THE 1980s! - called attention to how problematic it is?! I've been taught this since undergrad (I mean, not that the distinction would make a difference here, but just saying...that's some 90s woke shit)
I think it's probably a mistake to assume that this is an attempt at persuasive writing at all. It's affirmative writing, it's meant for people who already agree with the message
So typical in weaponized rhetoric; in same bucket w/ Trump (& @ least 1 MAGA on my FB TL, it seems) to say "everyone knows (e.g. and I quote "that Trump is not racist.")
As we scrape away the rhetoric frosting & notice the word "eugenics" come up more often, that "everyone" becomes more chilling
"Brave" is an incredibly bad faith argument as well. If I say you're brave no one will bat an eyelash. If I talk about the Atlanta Braves, THEN, yeah, that's questionable. Call them Atlanta Bravery and no one (except maybe The Bravery) would care.
PS (and this is a small criticism relative to the rest of it), efforts to make romance languages less sexist began in the Spanish-speaking world in the late '70s.
"as it is known" is one of those phrases I know online from reading conspiracy kooks. It's always something along the lines of "As it is known, the moon is in fact made out of cheese crackers not rock."
The likely answers to "who" and "where" are "people on social media." The right wing somehow believes that everything said on social media is of significance, mostly because they delude themselves into thinking what they say is significant ("free speech"), but also to prop up straw-men.
Thanks for this great example… helping my 7th grader through research writing and this is a really good example to show him how to better refine his writing. I find this very common practice in AI and an easy way to spot it being used in the discussion posts he has to read and respond to.
The technique in UK is often "You can't say that any more."
It's often seasonal too.
April: they won't let us celebrate St George's Day (The Mayor of London has a big event every year)
International Women's Day: when's international men's day? (19th November)
Pretending these things did not happen does not help us. Professional orgs & local, state, and fed government bodies engaged in this kind of language policing. While not binding, people who objected to such prescriptions were often subject to derision and accused of bigotry.
The social enforcement is most clearly obvious in the case of women who dared object to the word "women" being phased out amid increasing use of terms like "pregnant people" & "menstruators." Such objection received (& will here, I bet) screeching accusations: "nazi" "bigot" etc. See: Pamela Paul.
It's not credible to claim government bodies like the State Dept & DoD, media like AP & NYT, universities like Stanford, professional orgs like ALPA (largest airline union) & Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine are not "significant."
We on the left would do well to:
1) recognize "woke" language policing happens/happened
2) engage in critical introspection about where it results in alienation rather than inclusion
3) develop ability advocate legit reasons for evolving some language w/o calling anyone who disagrees a "bigot"
Okay this is so funny, replace American with US citizen as if the USA were the only United States in the world when they're literally not the only United States IN NORTH AMERICA
This doesn't make any sense. Conventional uses of "American" mean 'people residing within the borders of the nation known as the USA, including its territories.'
"US citizens" is not appropropriate analogue because not everyone has citizenship.
My point was that it's not an appropriate analogue because the official name of their southern neighbour is literally United Mexican States, so referring to USA as "THE United States" is arguably even dumber.
Mr. Chatterton, how long will you live?
Always to receive, but never to give
Always carry news all over the place
Mr. Chatterton, you are a big disgrace
Your teeth and your tongue a-go let you down
And a-when them let you down, we a-go batter you around https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUn3HrjJwXk
Seriously. I don't know how many times I have clicked through, seen the byline,and bounced because life is too short to bother reading X, Y, or Z's nonsense.
Also, the link provided as evidence of rejecting the word "brave" references this Stanford initiative that suggests ditching the word "Brave" as a proper noun used to refer to Indigenous people. Certainly not a sweeping rejection of the adjective implied by the author.
Isn't that also the Stanford initiative that wasn't an initiative, it was a PDF on a hard drive in the archives somewhere and was never remotely close to being put into practice?
Paywall. Plus, it's The Atlantic, so likely low-yield anyhow. I did subscribe to The Atlantic for years, but just got fed up. I mostly stayed for Adam Serwer but it got too expensive to sub just for him.
Back when a lot of pieces of technology were switching from "master/slave" to "primary/ secondary" etc to indicate the condition where one of a set of items was authoritative, there were a lot of complaints that it was performatively woke and one of the mockeries was "are they going to tell us...
... we can't say 'brown-bag lunch' because it's offensive to non-white people?" The expanded argument was something to the effect of "If we can't use any terms that might be related to slavery, next they'll stop letting us use any terms that might even be conceivably related to race/color."
because a single memo from a random employee of the seattle city governmrnt suggested not using it due to its assiciation brown bag color tests which was to discriminate within the black community. a memo published in 2013.
The Atlantic used to have some good writers. Now it’s a collection of people who create strawmen and lies and spin it into sounding wise/considered but lacking in actual substance due to misunderstanding or more likey the lies. High on their own supply. “Chestfeeding”! Never read that until now
It's funny that they're still calling the right hypocrites about policing language. They don't realize that they were acting in bad faith the entire time, and these centrists were just dupes who believed them because some people online were rude to them one time.
This is precisely the problem. One that Trump seeks to perpetuate, manipulating the ignorant by distorting history and reshaping the future for their movement.
"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact." - VP,Henry A. Wallace
“When both public and private responses to racist speech are rejected by first amendment abso- lutists as contrary to the principle of free speech, it is no wonder that the victims of racism do not consider them allies.”
The only "dictates" I've seen are where school boards banned certain books from their libraries, for using forbidden words or concepts. Or Governors and legislators in certain states passing laws doing so.
If someone going to make a wild claim like that, they need to provide citations.
Because I'm pretty sure the only examples they can give will either be specifically about the names of public school sports teams, or some bizarre person who no one in the left actually listens to or is even aware of.
It's not at all a reach to say that the shattering + devolution of the American Right into whatever it is now began after the unanticipated defeat of the Romney campaign in '12.
Notice how Trump and F-Elon went from using “woke” to “DEI” as their dog whistle du jour right after Ron DeSantis ruined the use of “woke” as a pejorative with his “Noun, Verb, Woke” failed POTUS campaign?
Also hilarious that they seem to attribute THIS as the cause of Hamas’ attack on israel, and not israel’s brutal occupation, land theft, oppression and apartheid.
And here I thought the Atlantic would be worthy of subscribing. Probably still will - and it will be nice to ask the editorial staff WTF is this guy talking about. Ask why their claims are not referenced. Ask why 'people say' is any different than a two-year-old blaming an invisible playmate.
Probably not true for the article author, but for many people influencing the zeitgeist (especially on social media) it's probably true that they have no adult memories before 2013 (if not even later than that) & (judging by what I read on social media) no sense of history either.
History matters!
I was so baffled at that. Like I read it as lower case b, never occurring to me that upper case B was what he really meant. Jesus in a fuckin sidecar with these people.
They said we cannot refer any longer to a black child as a "young buck," with such stifling censorship, what choice had we but to go full fascist & destroy all vaccines and hunger aid and fire every federal employee who had not sworn fealty to Trump??
As a reference to an Indigenous person, "brave" is not capitalized; it's a generic noun, but the Elimination of Harmful Language initiative mysteriously caps it. So, the Atlantic writer is correct in lcing it but should have noted it's the noun form and a specific use of it that's in question.
Huh? I say Brave all the time, as in “exceptional act of personal courage under extremely adverse circumstances”, and I’m German, and we get to capitalize WHATEVER WE WANT 🥰
We used sack lunch since I was a child. I am approaching my 50s. Next they are going to say that the regional differences between ppl using cola, pop, soda & coke are somehow woke inventions that began in 2013.
after 1945 a wave of woke advocates in Germany obsessed with policing designs and costumes forced people to stop using a popular and pretty symbol on their military uniforms...
It’s true that such debates go back to the ‘70s with the heading “PC”. But it’s also wrong to deny something qualitative did change around the 2010s (probably the impact of social media making those debates more unpleasant).
Republicans were already completely off the deep end before the 2010s. This has nothing to do with them being Nazis today.
It's just the same 'culture war' excuses and BS that laid the groundwork for their complete disconnect from reality and embracing fascism. It's ironic in that way.
And here was I, a non-native, thinking that brown bag lunches were so named because of the color of the paper bag in which the food was, and then I asked why the hell a training session during lunch was called "brown bag" since there was no brown bags to be seen anywhere.
I guess I narrowly missed the gas chambers, as I bravely continued to use terms like ‘master bedroom,’ ‘breastfeeding,’ and ‘brown-bag,’ and spoke/wrote Spanish with traditional gender vowels. Guess I was overlooked when others were ‘forced’ to do those things. Some real projection going on.
I'm so glad that we have right-wing authors & media personalities keeping us updated on the new woke terminology, because a ton of that stuff never comes up in the convos I have with other progressives about, like, livable wages or whatever. So embarrassing to have missed the news!
There's definitely been cases of "brown bag" being discouraged in favor of other terms, and I'm pretty comfortable saying it's overreach in the "we made a list of potentially problematic terms without sufficient context" mode, but it hasn't had much staying power.
Same same. Also, not for nothing, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary (online version)(see how I cited an authority) "the earliest known use of the noun workforce is in the 1910s. OED's earliest evidence for workforce is from 1910, in Los Angeles Sunday Times." I could go on.
Ughhhh…tcw is a relentlessly bad (and boring!) writer. He’s a derivative scold who scolds ppl for scolding ppl but manages to position himself above it all on his own mind.
He’s easily the worst of the high-minded bad writers of “the center” and I’m absolutely flummoxed as to how he gets work
The AEI is just another bloated right wing troll farm like the Heritage Institute and the Federalist Society. They’re all anti-intellectual institutions created and shepherded by billionaires as their private, personal source of discourse manipulation and historical denialism…
The obvious thing to blame this on is Romney's loss, but I'd actually argue Gamergate was a way bigger influence -- if not on the world as a whole, definitely on the culture that these contrarian, say it as it is, anti-SJW/CRT/DEI/woke psuedo-intellectual assholes who work for The Atlantic are in.
I can see how gamergate re-ignited incels, but why Romney? I'm certainly not defending him in any way, but I'd drop this (like many other things) at Reagan's door. Pat Buchanan and Roger Stone's long and vile association with Nixon also come to mind.
There are people who don’t think in the past. They are very much the “here and now” kind of personalities. They really don’t see or think of the big picture, past present and future.
Every personality type has its good points, but it also has weaknesses or the negative aspects. 1/
That’s also why they take what Trump said ‘today’ rather than words AND actions of his past and seeing the big picture of what that means for the future.
You knew. I knew. They can’t.
2/2
Yes, as if language doesn't change. If it didn't, English wouldn't look or sound like what it does today. These people want to arrest language to the Jim Crow era.
I work in wastewater, and every once in a while, I'll have an old timer tell we're not allowed to say manhole anymore. Next time I'm going to ask him by who? Because I never got that memo. 😄 🤣
Yes, absolutely. Limiting history so that it started with one specific event or action, usually the action of an opponent, is how they distort cause/effect and make irrational arguments seem reasonable.
The obvious example of starting history at a strategic point to rationalize your argument is the Hamas attacks on Oct 7. I condemn that act. AND that act has a seventy-year context that's relevant to understanding it. To ignore what came before it is to deliberately misunderstand it.
When I was an Undergrad in 2002, we were given a list of words not to use that included stuff like "master disk" and "disseminate" and we thought it was a bit too 90s at the time!
If they didn't start it at the 'rise of Trump' they'd have to accept responsibility for having created the base of the Republican party, over the past 5 decades, that elected the guy who "says what I think!"
One of the plus sides of being Old is remembering how railing against "political correctness" never stopped, it just hid and kept coming back with new words instead 🙄
Are they railing against "political correctness" or just change? Not enough is said about how truly resistant some people are to change. If they have to learn & use different terminology, it pisses them off. If it happens often enough, they join MAGA & the culture wars & call everything "woke."
I’m 45 years old and I’ve been hearing people bitch about political correctness for as long as I can remember. It’s definitely not something new and it sure as shit started long before 2013.
I've spent my career in advertising where my job is persuading people. My first rule: Never underestimate your reader's intelligence - or overestimate their knowledge.
I know we've got the trope of the White Savior lefty bravely getting offended on behalf of minority groups who by and large don't actually care about the purported slight...
but I have NEVER seen any Hispanic person get half as offended about "Latinx" or "Latine" as white Anglo conservatives do.
This reads like an assignment given 6 weeks ago that the author then banged out in 2 hours the night before. The anger comes from the hangover still pounding their skull from the Saturday night pledge initiation.
What is it about conservatives that write about mythic infractions against all sensibility, that are completely made up and just part of right-wing dogma?
South African Nazis have taken over their party and they're still apoplectic about pronouns in signature lines?
Respectfully, I would put it precisely at 1/20/2009. History to them goes like 7/4/1776 yadda yadda yadda 12/15/1791 yadda yadda yadda World War II yadda yadda yadda 1/20/2009
my favorite thing about this is that "sack lunch" isn't a neologism, it's actually a regionalism – and a somewhat old-fashioned one, to boot – from the parts of the US where "sack" has been the usual term for a brown paper bag, as seen in these dialect maps http://dialect.redlog.net/staticmaps/q_109.html
Having been born long before 2013, spent time in left/left adjacent spaces and sent a daughter to a women’s college in California, I can assure you most people started using work force in the 1980s and no one has ever used chest feeding with a straight face.
I’ve also noticed that utter absence of sociopolitical memory in a lot of these writings. I like how he also misappropriates what woke means, and doesn’tseem to bother to point out that the hypocrisy he’s talking about is the biggest tell that the right’s issue was never
freedom of speech or expression, which in turn should lead you to question what their motivating animus was and if, just perhaps, their interpretation of what woke means shouldn’t be adopted wholesale.
Also, I didn’t even need to look it up to know exactly who wrote this 🙄
it's not funny or surprising at all that the ppl who signed the Harper's letters have become even worse. TCW is such a clown. his piece about Emily rajatowski was so horny and he didn't think she was smart. awful dip shit
The writers like this have no self-awareness of how they helped create modern Republicans with articles like this in the 80s, 90s, and 00s that legitimized conventional Republican nonsense as 'serious' thought.
George Will and others are cut from the same cloth as this.
I guess Williams hasn't read "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn" by Diane Ravitch. It was published in 2003. (A paperback edition with a new Afterword was published the following year.)
besides the hack writing and bullshit content, but its not 'syntactical etiquette'. nobody is fucking changing syntax, its word choice and semantics, and if you can't be bothered to choose words careful in your essay about word choice why are we here?
The "woke" time-line coincides with the year they were made fun of in college for being conservative to the time they got divorced and stopped having any normal person around them.
I say this with absolute sincerity: I’ve never read a single thing he has written and came away feeling like I learned something new or made a connection I hadn’t before, and certainly, never convinced.
It's not possible to convince ignoramus like you of anything no matter how good an argument one presents. If you dropped your self righteousness and pulled your head out of your ass for a second perhaps you would understand why DEI horseshit is failing everywhere. It's about time.
In all seriousness, this is what The Atlantic is doing with an influx of protesting WashPo reporters? Can people in the industry explain what’s happening? How do we get closer to functioning media?
Seriously, I don’t know anyone who has used Latinx except to mock it. It’s a stupid term that no one but ignorant, though well intentioned, people tried to use and here he is acting like it’s widespread and we all immediately adopted because we‘re “woke.”
/The Atlantic/'s LLM deal will be to create some kind of cyber-Cornelia-Cannon and it falls to us all to not read them as passive-aggressively as possible.
This man provides ample evidence that white-led (sorry, TCW, White-led) institutions & publications love to throw money at mixed-race intellectuals who use fancy verbage to imply that they've overcome their Blackness.
P.S. This guy lives in France with his white (oops TCW, White) French author wife.
TCW’s current analysis of “wokeness” is the same shallow laundry list of prejudices as his early-career analysis of the supposed degeneracy of black culture
Once I saw this was The Atlantic, I didn’t even have to click to know who wrote it. I don’t know why he insists on writing the exact same thing over and over.
This WILL be a good case study in how to look lawyerly, logical, and literate for an audience who cannot read between the lines, never mind read. Yet they hear every dog whistle.
This "brother" is really that ignorant, to contend with a straight face that "woke" (and the capitalization of the word "Black" began with the death of Trayvon Martin?) It is clear that his white mama had a lot more influence over him than his Black father did, or he'd know his own people's history.
Dear Atlantic, I am very concerned about the women's libbers and their attempt to police language by being called "Ms." and "Congressperson." I would like to write a couple thousand words about this phenomenon and how it drives people to the right. I am not a crank. Honestly, I do this all the time.
To save folks a click. Not doing a deep dive on this, haven't read any of his work (incl. this piece), & I know nothing about the Atlantic's hiring process, but it isn't it possible that at least some of his earlier work was great & this marks a huge decline? Shit happens, & this may get him canned.
Behind a paywall. But from the first few paragraphs, you know he's someone who can't see the forest for the trees. "Pronouns" and grammar are throwaway excuses, a.k.a. distractions. Bigotry, fear, and lies are the real motivators.
Language matters. Ambiguity and vagueness is intentional to promote fear or to remove humanity from someone. The most important thing I've taught someone is to always be specific and ask "Who's 'they'?" Oh how quickly an argument crumbles after that.
People use the passive voice because social media tends to give a million unnamed voices an opportunity to champion dubious causes with little to no consideration. To your point, who exactly coined the term Latinx? Its adoption was likely the result of well-meaning but careless groupthink.
Imagine trying to legit argue their point which is, inevitably, “every left-coded utterance that’s annoyed me over the past several years is, no matter who said it, attributable to the national Democratic Party and was a decisive factor in the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.”
Remember that a big part of their media narrative for decades has been that every aspect of left culture is part of an organized conspiracy to take "traditional" culture from them.
I mean, nobody told me not to call it breast feeding or brown bag lunch. The primary suite was held up as an example of a nice thing to do. Manpower and workforce mean two different things & some editor somewhere probably noted a connotation & somebody took offense.
Most effectively paired with the exculpatory tense, for when you need to explain that somebody interacted with a bullet in the general vicinity of a police officer, and it never would have happened if so may people weren't so sensitive these days.
Red flag for me was the passive use of "the death of Trayvon" while we are meant to be frightened by "Hamas's assault on Israel" once again influencing the reader that black/brown people just so happen to die (murdered in cold blood) and Hamas=bad, Israel=good (justifying genocide)
The United States executive branch excluded an entire, well-respected news agency from attending official governmental events because they wouldn't use "latinx!"
Or was that "Gulf of America?" I can can't keep my forced orthodoxies straight... be right back, gotta ask google.
I (middle-aged white dude) have worked in academia this entire period and I've never felt forced to do or say anything, and I teach on some pretty sensitive social-science topics. All you really need to do is operate in good faith and not be an asshole to your students or colleagues
I always say this, it's actually much harder to talk to a right-winger because they have very strong feelings on words like "racism", "socialism", "queer"...
My fav is saying "he's hot" about a man on TV and getting weird looks or being laughed at as "gay". Insecurity is a prereq for Those Guys
It's wild to me that these people believe there was some entity forcing these things, when really it was just people and companies deciding on very granular levels to do these things out of respect or comfort.
And some of these things were never real societal changes! This is all just fake outrage. Like we still call it breastfeeding, but some trans men and nonbinary people might prefer to call it chestfeeding. I wonder if they purposefully threw some of those in as straw men?
I had the same critiques you did—this is lazy writing. It’s worthwhile to read to bio of the author (and then google him). He *ought* to know better. This linguistic manipulation is deliberate. He’s a nonresident fellow with the AEI. Also—this claptrap is his whole schtick. (I’m sure Jamelle knows.)
"Many advocates" are fully as real as all those hordes of tutters who (checks notes) keep telling us not to say (checks notes two more times to be sure) "brown bag."
Those things aren't even Wokeness. Those are minor things the Right defined Wokeness by while co-opting the word. And this just parrots that uncritically.
Yeah, but their argument would be even weaker if they just came out and said, "Some liberal people on social media would call us ignorant when we used these words, and also in that DEI session our employer organized there was that one person from HR who said we shouldn't use them".
What this *could* teach a room full of students is how to reverse engineer a house of cards to support your knee-jerk reactionaryism, though I don't know who's in the market for this.
And? There were similar episodes in the UK, Canada, & Australia. The word was being championed all over the place. None of it was mandated, but a focus on language inclusivity, in this case while barriers to breastfeeding persist, particularly for minority & low income mothers, alienated people.
Probably some rando in a scientific article somewhere where most of the content is in Latin or is a footnote, elevated to national DNC spokesperson by the right, in an astroturf moral panic designed to annoy pampered men whose biggest challenges in life is remembering new definitions or words.
Do not besmirch the Neanderthal people! They loved art & music. Their brains were larger than the homo sapien's. They cared for one another and DID not have dubious podcasts exalting tinpot dictators.
Right?! Is "woke" in the room with us now? As if it were some sort of all powerful non-corporeal entity in the sky. Maybe tossing out rules like "thou shalt not..."
The power of the messages rests in its vagueness—painstakingly crafted ambiguity that allows the message to be at once impenetrably murky and crystal clear depending on who reads it.
This message isn’t designed to persuade. It is intended as a signal, a secret handshake, to denote belonging.
I tune out whenever I see passive voice, especially in newspapers. If the writer doesn't know what the subject of his sentence is, he shouldn't write it
I'm suddenly taken back to when I was teaching and had to explain, "Your uncle's opinion is neither a primary nor a secondary source, nor anything you can use for this term paper."
It’s a tin can in and empty wagon - pointless noise. Trying DESPERATELY to sound authoritative but just sounds like a first semester paper written by a divethead high on their own fumes.
Whenever one asks for specifics, there's never a response. It's the same reason these people use AI generated images to make fun of because there's no actual or worthwhile instances.
“I need you to sit here, in front of God and men, look me in the eye and say who told you “brown bag lunch” was offensive. Did they say blackboard was racist? Red ink? Why did you think anyone took them seriously other than that it fit your stereotypes about lefties? Go on man, I’ve got all day”
On the other hand, one of the defining features of Donald Trump is his ability to twist and hyperinflate borderline-nonexistent issues into existential threats to his followers' peace of mind. The word "woke" provided shockingly persuasive cover for a backlash against even the mildest progressivism
If they could read, weasels and other mustelids would start getting very annoyed at all these weasel words deployed in articles like this? If not the term itself.
This is a mixed race Black dude that notoriously wrote a book about how he "unlearned his racial identity" and moved to France where he writes about American culture and helps white supremacists fuck over Black people.
I am shocked, shocked, I say, that someone named Thomas Chatterton Williams could make such a short-sighted and aggrieved argument. Can one even call himself White with a capital ‘w’ if he doesn’t put real pennies in his loafers?
I'm obv in the minority, but I think there are a couple nuggets of truth here.
We on the left would be wise to look inward and think about how much of what's occurring is a direct, "equal/opposite" reaction to this sort of thing - but we cannot help ourselves from dying on stupid semantic hills
It's not remotely accurate. The right spent decades building up a lie machine. It got rid of the Fairness Doctrine, which let people like Limbaugh and Fox News thrive. Bush and Rove encouraged extremism and outrage to win elections.
This was already out of control and sanity by 2008.
It has nothing to do with people being more aware of systemic racism or how language can reinforce bias. Language talk has only ever been about trying to be more aware and kind when talking about marginalized groups. It didn't make anyone go Nazi. Republicans did that on their own for political gain
But how much of that effect results from the actual language policing, and how much results from the right-wing parodies and hysterical screeds about language policing? Because those screeds are loud enough that one person saying "actually, I prefer they" then gets greeted as OMG THOUGHT POLICE.
This is a thing on Leftbook, but outside of that has only been pretty minor and stuck with pretty reasonable stuff such as sports mascots that are offensive such as the Cleveland Indians.
There's no evidence it has had any electoral effect except for how the right manufacturers outrage.
I'll amend my statement to removal of FD and other regulations led to Limbaugh and others on a national scale.
Limbaugh and the explosion of right-wing media laid the foundation for Fox News and it thriving. Roger Ailes and tried out a show with Limbaugh before Fox was a thing.
I lumped Limbaugh and Fox together like that because there's a relationship and I was trying to be space succinct with things in the 80s/90s.
Similarly, it's not just Fox News but other sources of right-wing news misinformation that are part of the problem. But I was trying to avoid an essay.
YES PLZ to all of this and - while it did not appear here - would love for this theoretical class to include misuse of "we." can't believe how many columns of this sort include a "we" that is just a big cartoon arrow pointing directly at the column writer
Except, this is exactly what works today and has been working for years now to convince a wide swath of people to buy into right-wing media. Even overlooking the fringe extremism in the process.
A writer (apparently): language never changes, style guides don't exist, dictionaries never get updated, taxonomy/linguistics/etymology don't exist....
Just realized all this furor is based on one elite university's style guide (because I'm engaging in snark with rage baiting myself by reading the whole article), which is kind of hilarious.
Like, do you HAVE a face to which we can associate these ambiguous accusations? An article or a lecture or a news broadcast not taken out of context or deliberately misunderstood? No?
Having lived in Idaho for 25 years, I believe a lot of those coastal folks thinking that the pendulum has swung TOO FAR don't realize that in a lot of parts of the country it has barely started to move at all. The energy needed to move culture might feel intense but its essential.
That you correctly ascertained that the writer is deeply detached from American culture, not because he's from a coast, but because he lives in France. I was just adding information to your astute post.
Failed journalism like this article is so dated. I am nostalgic for Reader’s Digest. At least there are positive, timeless skills for daily living articles for adults challenged by tedium https://www.rd.com/article/cleaning-schedule/
They have this bullshit, just has to be said simply enough to post to Facebook for it to be perceived as reality. We have the hbomberguys of the Internet, takes months or years to be correct and compelling enough to be shared with a few million people that already agree.
I did similar fun in college essays(JR/SR level):
Who is “they” - they said that. …
Using correct English, subject/verb/object not a strong point anymore.
I had early and intensive training in writing clarity from a similarly possessed teacher such that I still hear his voice when I'm writing ANYTHING. 'By Zombies?' was always his favorite go-to, also
i get writing about this once, but why dwell on all the ways you think public life is "woke"? everything the author writes is about what he misunderstands as "woke" ideology. weirdest fetish.
He's a dude whose entire self-conception revolves around the idea that a racial identity was forced on him and he "saved himself" from being a "typical Black hip-hop" person by reading a lot of books and moving to France. The deeper you dig into TomChatWill, the more obviously fucked up he is.
Y'all on here like you haven't seen the thousands upon THOUSANDS of arrests for people saying "brown-bag lunch." You don't remember the Muncie Indiana's Clodfelter Construction Annual Picnic Raid of 2023? It was a bloodbath. Read a book, libs.
I don't even need to Google to know who wrote this. Atlantic font, idiotic centrist take, self-congratulatory tone, needlessly pedantic language - show me TC WILLIAMS! I'm still embarrassed that I read Self-Portrait in Black and Full of Shit.
Chatterton also blamed Cancel Culture on making the Republicans turn into Nazis in another article.
This is the same sort of 'serious' thinking that's plagued the right for decades and gave a sense of legitimacy to lies and distortions. They now seem unable to realize their role in getting us here
Today is the first time I have ever heard the term “chestfeeding”.
I also never heard anyone complain about brown bag lunch, because that term came from the color of the bags…?
So much made up rage.
Wikipedia article on bbl padded w/weasel words eg "was believed by many" "are said to have" & "It is rumored" & cites unreliable sources just as weaselly "We have all heard stories" & that lack sources for claims. Not to say it couldn't've happened, but needs solid sourcing not rumors.
The POTUS channel radio host and long time journalist Julie Mason called it "POUTRAGE" (perforamtive outrage). These ppl just need to be mad at *something*
I can totally imagine people really mentioning these terms. Heard some critique about brown-bag myself. But to imply "the woke movement" was pushing the use of these terms is just dishonest to the core.
"The woke movement" itself is academic discourse blown way out of proportions.
Yes, this writer must have cast a wide net to come up with these. (Reminds me of when a Humane Society spokesman made a joke about calling dogs "Canine-Americans" and the right-wing commentariat had a full news cycle claiming that was the newest phase of wokeness because they don't get humor).
I do harbor the suspicion that an inability to detect irony is one of the main things that drives people to the political right. Which is also a main reason why right-wing attempts at humor are so terrible
Well the Humane Society joke and ensuring freakout was from some time ago, before the talk of kids identifying as cats and dogs, but no doubt it's been resurrected on other occasions.
Happened at the university where I worked about five years ago, apparently because of the association with the “brown paper bag test.” I was absolutely gobsmacked.
Apart from anything else, who is taking their lunch to work or school in a paper bag in 2025? This is obviously written by someone who never takes lunch to work or makes lunch for their kids.
Being woke and trying to describe something that is either the darkest color or that other color that is also usually dark the one that is kind of like orange but darker (is darker ok? can we say dark? The concepts of light and dark do contribute do opression, i understand that)
I remember there was a push to refer to "Breastfeeding" as "chestfeeding" to be more inclusive of Trans men but it never really caught on because a) chestfeeding sounds like something a xenomorph would do, and b) Breast is traditionally a gender neutral term for the chest area of humans and birds.
"Chestfeeding" was specifically suggested as a term to use with trans men who had given birth and with nobody else, you know, just a polite suggestion which as far as I know nobody actually followed through on. Anyone saying it's being enforced is at best a gullible idiot.
Mammary feeding would always be the most correct term.
Mammary glands are not breasts and breasts are not mammary glands (note many mammals produce milk and do not have “breasts”).
But I digress.
Only time I saw an unironic use of Latinx was maybe ten? years ago, in a local foodie FB group. Some1 posted asking to recommend a Latinx restaurant, a Puerto Rican chef in the group replied w "never heard of a Latinx one, are you wanting a hipster restaurant?" And that was the end of that non-issue
Sack lunch is a phrase from England, I think. This just feels like another in a long line of examples of England and America swapping slang terms as were exposed to more and more popular media.
I think sack took over because so few people actually use a brown bag anymore, and also what I think is the majority reason it's used more now - less ink, less space used up on flyers and announcements, and fewer letters to type in an email. It's pure american laziness and thrift (cheapness).
Of course, this is not really argumentative writing--it attempts to persuade nobody.
Rather it exists to reinforce a bogeyman that the intended audience already fears (or uses to arouse fear in the most uninformed segments of the Republican and MAGA base).
Perhaps the more interesting story tho is that despite the flaws you identify, it probably WILL be persuasive? This specious form of rhetoric is likely highly effective at nudging people who are already inclined to believe this, even more fully indulge in their motivated reasoning?
Imagine being hung up on how someone said a tumblr-brained thing but it never caught on because it's the most forced, dorky version of inclusive language
I taught many classes on argumentative writing, and I used to say "you are building an argument, not winning one." Tell me how you got to that conclusion and show your work. Then I don't have to know you in order to trust what you said.
That made me feel pretty great. I never really think about what i taught or said in class much. If that idea was helpful to you, that was the only paycheck i ever cared about.
That last line. “Then I don't have to know you in order to trust what you said.” THAT encapsulates the intersection of logic and rhetoric and good sense embodied by careful writing, while also perfectly explaining why it’s so necessary. (The economy of language in that sentiment is also noteworthy!)
You might think that someone who writes the same article over and over might eventually improve their argument but not this Atlantic writer. This happens when starting with a flawed conclusion then backfilling with thesaurus words to make people predisposed to agree feel smart.
Reads like it was composed by a douchbag who is tetchy at being criticized for being prejudiced, homophobic, misogynistic and moronic every time they speak!
You can call this stupid. But it explains why a large group of Americans supported Trump. Even the oblivious and the cruel get to vote in a democracy. Until they lose the democracy through their self-absorbed ignorance.
No, it doesn’t. The lies told about it - of which this article is a part - go some way to explain it. Focus on the liars, not the ones about whom the lies are told.
I'm assuming that they meant Hamas' attack signaled the end of "The Social Justice Movement's" influence in the world since we obviously showed our ass by saying Gazans/Palestinians weren't subhumans who Israel has the moral right to massacre in droves (and we were so influential before!)
I think it's suggesting that once American social justice warriors started supporting terrorists the writing was on the wall. It's a position so untenable, literally allying with rapists, that the Great Awokening had to end
Literally I have never heard anyone say “sack lunch,” never mind recommend or demand that someone else say it. If this is what you think woke people wanted, as opposed to an end to extrajudicial killings of black peoples by police officers (e.g.), your analysis is going to be a little lacking
Most of us say things like I got takeout, or I brought my lunch today. Even when I literally had it in a brown bag when I was a kid, we just called it lunch. We don't eat brown bags for lunch!
I hear "sack lunch" all the time but only because it means a lunch you carry in a sack vs a lunchbox. The only objection I can imagine to "brown bag lunch" is teachers wanting to avoid having students think the brown bag is a requirement. (I know those kids!)
I’m pretty sure it’s a regional difference. I’ve heard each in different parts of the country, but I have never heard anyone proscribe one or the other.
Sack lunch is a term I grew up hearing & I’m in my 60s. It’s not a new ‘woke’ term. It’s regional.
To imply that we were suddenly all forced to use that term because “wokeness” is bullshit.
I grew up saying “sack lunch” in the South in the 80s but not because of wokeness, just regional language variation. I’m guessing some conservative snowflake used to “brown-bag” got invited to a “sack lunch” meeting one time and made some very bad assumptions about why it was called that.
IIRC, the background of that story was literally a HR exercise and it wasn't banning the use of "brown bag lunch" but just pointing out how our language is filled with terms that might have different immediate connotations to different groups.
"You know, brown bag has a different meaning for many Black people than it does for you" is literally a GOOD THING TO KNOW.
When I started in offices and everyone said "I'm going to be out of pocket" to mean "unavailable" I was confused because that term, to me, meant "acting inappropriately".
"Sack lunch" is a regional term. But I've never heard anyone promote it as being a better term. (I am not sure if I picked it up in Indy or Kansas, but one of those. "Chuck hole" was definitely Indy.)
When i was little at my school it called sack lunch vs buying lunch.
The kids who brought lunch (in a sack/bag or lunch box) were considered to have better lunches except those who bought school lunches got ice cream in little cups so trading in the lunch room was serious business.
“Sack lunch” is common in parts of the US. It’s like saying pop instead of soda. It’s definitely not any kind of woke response to “brown bag lunch.” This author needs to get a grip
My grandfather, who was raised during the Depression, found work in the CCC, and then served in the Pacific during WWII, used the phrase "sack lunch." He was a good man who lionized FDR and was wholly supportive of civil rights for all, but that was long before the "woke" scare.
I think the annoyance at having to (excessively?) police their own language compared to the annoyance at being beaten to death (strangled? Suffocated?) by someone else's excessive policing says all you need to say about the Right and their capacity for empathy, nah, humanness.
It really feels with all of this that what they actually are railing against is half-remembered stories of someone-somewheres' HR departments being a bit overzealous, and mentally extending that to be the mainstream or earnest position of democrats as a whole
From 2010 "Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture" to 2019 "Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race" and the litany of articles here, this is propaganda
Someone else in this thread linked to Williams' Wikipedia page. That's not nearly as important to understanding the purpose behind these articles as the page about AEI.
Note the history, the reasons for Frum's termination, and how funding has changed.
I literally was in the last two weeks had someone from the HR department complained in the email to my boss and my boss's boss about the use of the word "they" because "trump said so"
>95% of the time I’ve encountered the term Latinx, it has been a liberal or progressive talking about how stupid this term is and that someone should have taken 5 min to talk to some Latinos and Latinas before foisting it on people.
I have literally never encountered anybody that likes it.
If you are in politics and messaging what ppl are going to hear & remember is as important as what is said.
Obviously this piece is way overstated but insisting on things like Latinx and justice involved individuals was dumb messaging & politics.
It is the same in the trans panic state. My mom! thought that dudes claiming to be trans walking around naked in spas was a problem, when it was ONE incident in LA AND the person was arrested and PROSECUTED for felony indecent exposure.
Can't believe the democrats want me to spend an hour each year watching this flash video about not bribing foreign officials, not clicking on phishing links, and how to submit expenses through SAP, and that's why I had to vote for etc etc etc
Remember when the DEMOCRATS tried to change how we teach math so that children would learn actual mathematical concepts and not just memorize algorithms?
I had a hard time helping my 3rd grader with his homework and became convinced of the international indoctrination conspiracy!
I will vote for the first candidate who stops the UC mandated cybersecurity training where you are supposed to click on what looks like a phishing link to take the training, only to be bombarded with "if you click on the wrong link the CYBERCROOKS WILL KILL ALL THE PUPPIES AND/OR KITTENS!"
I laugh in sympathy because I have received a very similar, phishing-like email for a security training from a three-letter government agency. Just gobsmacked by that.
A very long time ago but was once at a company that sent out phishing links that contained your email address as part of the URL, and merely clicking it caused you to "fail". And anyway long story short you could make, say, the CEO and head of security fail by editing the URL. Could you imagine
Anyway will die on the hill that phishing trainings are not about testing your staff, they are about testing your security team, and if either your company or the phishing testing company doesn't make that clear, your company is bad at security
I had to sit through training at work because a very tired me on a Monday clicked a link in an email. I didn't enter my credentials or anything. When I pushed back, I was told that a malicious website can hack you just by going to the url. Is it 1998?
I just literally took an anti-foreign bribery CBT the other day, like one day after Trump tried to make it legal via EO to bribe foreign officials lol.
Axing all the flash video training is an easy win the administration is leaving on the table, but I guarantee it won't happen because the CEO of Skillsoft is a member of one of Trump's golf clubs or some shit like that.
companies don't do it because they are required to, but because it lets them later say it was the employee, not the company, at fault in later misconduct lawsuits
and, if things continue on their current trajectory, the can stop the training because the grounds for the lawsuits will no longer exist (except for discrimination claims filed by cis white males).
There's one federal online training about the U.S. Constitution which basically starts with the textual equivalent of a long sigh and something like "this training is required by law."
Agreed. The stuff mentioned in the article 100% happened in my workplace. But that doesn’t it mean it was happening everywhere or that it was part of the democrats’ platform.
So much of this is that liberal ideas get judged by their most poorly articulated, least thoughtful versions that just boil down to any group big enough to matter including folks who understand only a strawman version of the position.
22 years in HR and I can assure you it doesn't have anything to do with HR. Sack lunch sounds like a 1950s description to me. It can probably be found in Project 2025.
Adrian Daub writes about this. Many of these pundits had some sort of personal encounter with changing norms and it became their reverse MeToo moment. But while MeToo stories have to be hyperdetailed and local, their anecdotes get to be vague and universal.
LITERALLY YES THIS. Alex Jones' ENTIRE SHOW at this point is finding someone who is mad on twitter because they claim they were asked to use pronouns & then getting his audience frothing-at-the-mouth mad by telling them trans ppl are literal demons coming to castrate your sons.
All of these right-wing influencer guys are shadow-boxing against the most hyperbolic versions of an unverified rage-bait story they heard online somewhere. We do not need to give them the benefit of the doubt that anything they are mad about actually happened.
This is the entirety of Fox “News.” Rage farm over some imagined “radical Left” insanity and attempt to paint anyone left of Joe Manchin with that brush. Reality be damned.
My work DEI committee wants an end to extrajudicial killings of Black people but also started calling our brown-bag lunches "lunch and learns" -- not to police others' language but to be aware of the language we use. It's a single tree in a forest, I know, but it was easy enough to do, so why not
I spent the last 8 years working in local government and I absolutely heard all of these (except brave, which I'm pretty sure is a disingenuous example) and more. I thought they ranged from reasonable (circle the wagons) to silly (brown bag) but managed not to become polarized into a nazi about it.
I do get angry about "feeding two birds with one seed" though. "Feeding two birds with one scone" is silly but cute. Whatever. Changing it to seed because... scones aren't good for birds I guess? You've lost the cuteness and your analogy no longer makes sense, one seed isn't enough for two birds
I've heard both sack lunch and brown-bag. I can't for the life of me think what is non-woke about brown-bag. The bag is brown. It is a brown sack. I put my lunch in it. WTF?
I recently had someone tell me brown bag lunch had racial origins and they were trying to avoid it so I looked it up and there apparently are a couple places in I think like Oregon doing it. So not completely off base, but one very small example.
The Stanford Harmful Language initiative is what they're complaining about--it says "historically associated with the 'brown paper bag test' that certain Black sororities and fraternities used to judge skin color. Those whose skin color was darker than the brown bag were not allowed to join."
Huh. I don’t see that that has anything to do with brown bagging lunch - it was a literal brown bag, - but I’m not married to the term or anything’. I usually just say leftovers
I don't think it does. I think the idea is because "brown bag" was litmus test for Black sororities/fraternities, the phrase might jar Black Americans who hear it in "brown-bag lunch." I'm a copyeditor, so I have witnessed many debates in recent years about various words.
We use "sack lunch" or "cold lunch" to talk about food kids bring from home (vs ordering from the cafeteria). Not sure I've ever said "brown bag lunch"!
It's a regionalism that has been in use for decades. I've been saying "sack lunch" since I was a kid in the 1970's. The only time I ever use "brown bag" is I might occasionally say "I'm brown bagging it".
Millenials & younger have grown up in the plastic bag era and may be unfamiliar with brown bags
A “brown bag lunch” is a set thing that IS NOT THE SAME as a “sack lunch”. The former is a short, educational talk on some topic for a small work audience, usually at lunchtime. The latter is just lunch, brought or provided to people.
KC and my hometown is more "pop" ... I picked up 'soda' in college. I still get some glares when I say soda here. KC is blending ... my hometown up north IS NOT.
I grew up saying that. “Brown bag” lunch was something you took to an office. I grew up in southern Idaho, so maybe that matters, but yeah…. Sack lunches or hot lunches…
We were told not to use it at the university where I worked maybe 5 years ago, apparently to avoid the association with the “brown paper bag test.” I was amazed. And I take the larger point, but to deny that stuff like this has transpired—especially in academic settings—doesn’t seem helpful.
So much of this backlash is predicated around taking cringey, often isolated actions on progressive college campuses and pretending like that's what's happening all across America
People who write these anti-woke screeds are telling on themselves: They're the ones living in a liberal bubble
I was also a Wokesville resident at the time but I heard a LOT more of this kind of thing in the university context than I ever did out in the world—it sometimes felt like a different planet.
I sometimes think when I hear, see, read about what often is offense taken at nearly everything all of the time, that it may not be a 'me' or a 'we' problem. It is really disturbing to find folks too frequently demonizing their own allies over perceived differences [of the genetic kind].
Never used brown bag lunch either. We were either "buyers," which meant we bought the school cafeteria lunch, or "carriers," which meant we carried packed lunches from home. Ahem...I was a carrier.
I’ve just heard brown-paper bag lunch and “brown-bagging” and even the supposed reason it could be offensive and STILL think it’s ridiculous for anyone to think this is the goal of being “woke.”
My grad school department had Brown-bag seminars every week, of course at the end of the month us poor grad students skipping meals called it the No-bag seminar.
In any case, "sack lunch" and "brown-bag lunch" were interchangeable when I was growing up. If I hear "sack lunch" more these days, it's because fast-food bags aren't brown.
I feel the was an excessive amount of language policing... I considered them like ad hominem attacks, because they usually came out when there was no real substance to an argument.
I’ve heard both “sack” and “brown bag “ pretty interchangeably my whole life and never heard any argument about which was preferable and have never thought about the term really on any level before this moment.
Is it a regional thing? I grew up in the woke utopia of … Utah, and I’ve never heard someone say “brown bag lunch.” Been calling it a “sack lunch” my whole life.
Grew up saying “sack lunch”, never “brown bag lunch “. Joining with other commenters that it’s a regional thing. Once upon a time, only about 10 years ago, some right wing twit was probably invited to a “sack lunch” and thought it was some lib forcing them not to say “brown bag lunch”.
(we used the term sack lunch when I was a kid in the 60s...but then at work people used the term brown bag as a way to define certain lunch gatherings. It may have more to do with regional language, like soda vs pop.)
1/2 One of the many problems with this right-wing intellectual dishonesty is that "sack lunch" is just a dialect thing, and it's been used by some for decades. "Brown bag" is the more common term because it works better... "brown-bagging it" sounds right while "sacking it" doesn't, etc.
That's the CLASSIC example! How a phrase that encompasses any of the various holidays during what's often referred to as the "holiday season" or "the holidays" somehow became an attack on one of the holidays it's including... Did Bill O'Reilly invent that one or was there prior art?
I just know I hear it every year. I even remember a Starbucks boycott over a red cup ... but when Chick-fil-A had a general holiday greeting years later not a single complaint was amplified by the same people.
2/2 They don't even put much effort into making stuff up to accuse their ideological enemies of doing, because they know their slack-jawed followers will believe the easy dumb lies.
That was exactly the example that jumped out at me too. A brown bag lunch literally references bags that are brown! I’ve also never heard of chestfeeding, and I’m pretty “woke”. What planet are these people on? Are they stupid? Or, are they just gaslighting for fun?
"Chestfeeding" is a term exclusively used in reference to pregnant FTM people. So you're unlikely to hear about the term unless you're 1) an obgyn 2) are FTM, or 3) helping someone FTM and pregnant. This is a small group, but I think the largest group is 4) ppl looking for something to be mad at.
The Left are like women. If one person says or does something that is a bit weird or can be seen negatively, regressives like to generalize to all members of the group.
Probably one person said "hm, chestfeeding?" and regressives assumed everyone was pushing that.
The brown bag thing led me to search on whether it’s a regional thing: the term refers to a standard brown paper bag used to carry lunch, which is a widely understood concept across North America, meaning it's not specific to any particular region. That said I also found a link to a silly situation
There was an unnecessary policing of terms that was going on for awhile. "people with vaginas" vs. "women" wasn't a boomer-level complaint, it was a ridiculousness that traversed generations (one example.)
Silly stuff like this allowed the right to latch on and exaggerate, but it was there.
that was not "policing" that was people using different words. do you understand the difference between people using different words, and the actual government enforcing it? NOW we have language police, we never did before. DOGE is even getting political officers stations across departments
even at companies or universities you were not punished, you might get called to HR, but no one would get fired unless they repeatedly disrespected coworkers or students. every time they say "I was fired I ONLY did x" there is always a lot more than that x that happened before. that's not policing
At most, these interactions should amount to either an eye roll or a bit of self-reflection. They’re not a genuine reason for the right wing gallop into fascism. The right went from decrying “safe spaces” to banning entire concepts without skipping a beat.
Or as I like to say “handing them the stick with which to hit us with later”. The GE add found most effective was on this very point. Saying it’s stupid is both true and unhelpful at the same time if you want to win elections rather than arguments on socials.
This only works because media enables it by amplifying minor online commentary. The response should be “who cares,” followed by a clear message about something that actually matters. Self conscious handwringing never moves anything in a better direction.
Do you really think Fox News or even Sinclair broadcasting is reading this and planning to take your advice? :)
The response should be 'who cares' - what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter what the response should be, they have a cudgel when we police the term 'guru' as being offensive to Mumbai
This boils down to “look what you made us do.” It’s victim blaming. Your discomfort at someone challenging the language you use on an Internet forum doesn’t justify the Republican project to embrace resegregation and stuffing gay & trans people back into the closet.
I didn't say my 'discomfort' justifies anything MAGA does, I'm saying that this particular subject (public vernacular term policing) allows Republicans to kill us in areas of the country we should be almost winning
You imagine the electorate to be as clued in to nuance as you are - they are not
Cynical opportunism allows it. I’m not someone on the vanguard of using or promoting inclusive language, but I’m not sure how they’re supposed to operate in a world where they get blamed for giving the GOP ammunition, when the GOP is using openly eliminationist rhetoric and lies.
"People with vaginas" and "women" are two different things. I know some people with vaginas who are not women. I know some women who do not have vaginas. It does actually make a difference when you're talking about who needs particular kinds of medical care vs. what pronouns you should use.
I see you're having trouble parsing - what I mean is that a doctor wouldn't care what I or anyone labels a woman or trans person, it doesn't affect their medical care.
I see you're having trouble writing and understanding - what I mean is that these are two distinct things, and there are cases when one should be chosen in favor of the others. Good doctors and scientists do care, because accuracy is good and it makes a difference to patients.
By policing, what do you mean? I’ve never not used women, and I run in pretty progressive circles, never once had a problem, didn’t even know that was a thing.
For a while it was impossible to have a discussion about this subject on someplace like Jezebel without being lumped in with right wing idiots if your opinion strayed past a certain threshold of acceptability. Terminology was one area that was a surprise minefield, and people got very angry quickly
.. Now maybe it doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things what the Jezebel crowd demanded, but if it's a stance that's angrily maintained, that allows the right wing to present that front and center as 'this is how democrats want to change the country when they're in power', and that 1/2>
So, you're saying that the GOP conjured a controversy based on a few writers from a niche website being mean? And the Dems should've, what? 'Cause I assure you the people who are angry aren't angry cause they can't say mankind. Meanwhile, the GOP is erasing anything that doesn't fit white supremacy.
The right wing was and is going to find ways to present anyone who is not them in a bad light, no matter what words you or the Jezebel crowd or anyone else use.
I’m kidding in some ways, but I gotta be honest; as different and understanding, as I am and can be, some “inclusionary” language has gone past the pale. Luckily, I virtually never hear any of that despite being deep in the progressive community.
It’s similar to trying to have an opinion about Israel and Gaza. “Reasonable” is a word that everyone gets define for themselves. Calling for the open murder of Jews in Berkeley is different than doing it in New York City.
"it forced romance languages to submit to gender neutral constructions" ROTFLMAO what an absolutely absurd fantasy. no one can "force" a language; no one had to "submit" to anything.
(reality is often quite the opposite, like in germany where the new forms are getting banned in conservative states)
That’s a bit much for me. If people would just be polite & not try to control the way others live, it might be a good start at communicating once again. I understand why the people who are not happy trying to sculpt their lives to fit in a premade box are not happy. For example not all men like to
play football & not all women are happy being the traditional subservient wife-model. If everyone would take the time to see things through someone else’s eyes, life would be better.
I'm nearly 40 years old and I think I've heard "brown bag lunch" instead of "sack lunch" like. Four times in my entire life. And this article is literally the first time I've ever seen mention of "chestfeeding".
"Chestfeeding" has shades of the same obscure yet vehement outrage as Anna Kasparian's claims of being called a "birthing person". This is not a trend; it's never happened.
Maybe it's a regional thing? Been a common term in the Midwest AFAIK. Kids would make fun of you at school for "brown-bagging", because it implied your family was too poor to buy a cool lunchbox. That was in the 80s.
It's more conniving than stupid. They are trying to take words that support intelligence and empathy and honor and make them unpopular, targets of ridicule. There's a solution. Set good examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbiSakOp9ck and
I’m left of center, and I have felt like sometimes the “language policing” by the left was annoying. Mostly the whole “folx” thing. BUT, that justifies zero of what is happening today. No one was forced to use Latinx or any of these terms, this was never in any EO or demanded by a Dem administration
Now you must use place names mandated by Donald Trump, and you're not allowed to use any word, no matter how harmless, that might fall foul of the DEI police, on pain of dismissal or cancellation of funding.
For example, the term 'female'... [this message has been redacted by the DEI police]
Don't forget, he canceled programs with the word "transition" in it, so now kids with disabilities "transitioning" from high school will receive zero help.
Tbf, the english language has always bullied the romance languages. That's how it gets new words. Just corners them in dark ally's, beats them up, and takes any shiny words it likes and tosses them in the Wordhoard.
He’s been on the forefront of centrist hand wringing on how the right is right, woke really is the most terrible thing. He bought it hook line and sinker. Seems like he doesn’t see himself as abetting in getting us here, or maybe he does a little.
Also never heard "chest feeding" in my life, but the idea that some members of .02% of the U.S. population (Portland) may have felt inclined to roll eyes while laughing doesn't sound much like oppression?
Oppression? Are you ok? It's funny, it's silly, it's ridiculous, but it isn't oppression. Or are you one of those anti-intellectuals who see the world through the binary or "oppressor/oppressed"? If so, kindly block yourself
I hang out with a lot of queer people in Portland. I am queer. So maybe it’s not common in straight or non-ally demographics here, but it is not uncommon. I have heard it plenty. But thank you for saying you’re not hanging out in the same circles. That clarifies it.
It may be stupid but if I had a dollar for every time I've heard that exact criticism, even from fed up Dems, I'd be rich. You may wish to dismiss it as stupid, but that would be the most tone deaf thing you could do
The reason it’s offensive is because they used to use the color of a brown paper bag to determine if you were too black to join their stupid whitey clubs. If you’re darker than the bag you’re out.
This is such a pathetic justification for everything that’s happening now too. This writer is complaining about capitalization and vocabulary so that justifies letting babies die of tuberculosis and Nazi hackers into the IRS? These people are the biggest fucking babies I’ve ever seen in my life
they made shit up on Twitter then spent a decade being mad about it. Their entire existence is an argument they had with themselves in the shower, it’s pathetic.
With any luck, the hubris of this billionaire ruling class may just make the class war a more pressing issue than the culture war (despite the best efforts of stupid assholes like Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro to convince them that it’s all woke’s fault).
The biggest baby part is they don't just want to say the R word (etc.), they want it to be 100% fine to say it. Guess what?! It was never 100% fine. We said it in the 80's in elementary school and a friend was like hey that sucks I have a cousin with a disability and so we stopped.
if i was writing formally, i'd capitalize "White Nationalism." it just ain't a movement i support. if i'm just tapping on a phone, ima barely capitalize anything.
But it really serves a purpose, not any fan of republicanism or such, but a Republican. Not any democracy fan or practitioner, but a Democrat. Not a congress but the Congress.
Exactly, and you know what? I’m happy that when I was 19 in 1990, people gradually started saying “chair” instead of “chairman,” “humankind” instead of “mankind,” “flight attendant” instead of “stewardess,” and so on. I was a young woman who’d seen the ERA fail as a little girl, and it mattered.
Ditto in my first year of Uni in 1984. We fought hard first non-gendered language and super hard against biological determinist (BD) structures. Very sad to see those wins being degraded. (And I fucking hate the way a certain breed of feminists have re-embraced BD to beat down Trans rights)
Words like ‘staff’, ‘personnel’, ‘team’, ‘employees’, ‘colleagues’, ‘human resources’, … cover all the various uses of ‘manpower’ but avoid the capacity to cause offence. It’s not about ‘correctness’, simply respect.
I drink black tea. I ask for ‘tea without milk’. This is not to avoid hurt - ‘black tea’ is descriptive, not pejorative - but a recognition that people only register the last word or idea they hear.
‘Black tea’ they hear as ‘tea’. ‘Tea without milk’ makes them stop briefly and think what I said.
I disagree. I think it was the invention of Alpha Male. The definition does NOT describe anything that a true Alpha is, was, or would be. And we are supposed to follow the Alpha.
Have they not heard of 'packed' lunches?! They're just making shit up now.
Also obviously written by someone young. Of course, there was no social progress before 2012. None at all.
Man I can't believe I got that. What's with him being so recognizeable, I don't even follow him or anything I just hear about him when he's getting dunked on
Interesting. He told us when you use “white” or “black” as racial signifiers you leave them lowercase since they’re colors, whereas “African American” or “Hispanic” would be capitalized.
I have never once met a human being who was actually *white* or *black*
lots of pinks and browns
both words mean more than their most simplistic definitions as colors. they have specific sociocultural meanings and connotations. ignoring that is educational malpractice.
Damn! I’m an old white man and I somehow missed all that. The only person who regulates my language is my wife. But then I’m not a quivering coward suckling at the poisoned teat of Fox.
Maybe you're the stupid one. Wait. That was rude of me to say.
Maybe you've been brainwashed into not knowing what's actually true and what's been a blight on the American culture for the past 15 years. Inclusive language has only been used to...
The relative station of democracy and individual liberty vs. blind hatred in the American collective unconscious is betrayed by the fact that folks were so threatened by capitalizing the word Black that they voluntarily installed a fascist dictator staffed by literal neo-Nazis.
There's a good reason to capitalize Black and not white. Many Black people don't know what their lineage is, where in Africa they came from, as it was erased. Most white people do: specific nations in Europe. Black is an equivalent to Italian, German, etc., not to white, caucasian, etc.
"White" is not an ethnic group, or a nationality, or a culture, or a group of people with a shared history. It's mostly been used as a means of exclusion — it didn't always apply to people from Southern or Eastern Europe, or even Ireland.
As an editor, I belong to an association that hosts discussions of how words are used. We’re not the language police, we’re here to help authors communicate their ideas. If a word interferes by offending some readers, the author should know and then choose whether to change it. It’s a choice.
No one gave me that list of words. It’s almost like you have free will to learn and do better, watch your words with certain people. Other cultures have had to do it for like, ever.
The irony is that many of these newer terms were a choice for the person speaking them. No one forced the other to change the original words. Spanish didn’t change when I spoke it, simply because a more inclusive version (Latinx) was included. This is weird. They want to be oppressed so bad.
Nothing stupid here. This moral policing of language by the left began when I was in college during the 80s and I saw it for what it is. There is a genuine problem when the left focuses on this at the expense of working to limit the deleterious effects of capitalism.
For people who are so anti-woke, isn't it interesting how easily butt hurt they get by the littlest things. There has never been a more sensitive group of "manly" men.
Cancel culture isn't real. This is a nonsense opinion piece.
Sorry this picture doesn't demonstrate that there is any form of mechanism to coerce or force people into any of these things. In contrast to the trump dictatorship barring news orgs who continue to call it the gulf of Mexico.
That's not how Burden of proof works. As I can easily reply with. Nobody of significant power or influence to actually make this an issue for every day Americans.
Well, complicated question. One reason is the political left gets painted as behind everything a non-rightwinger says or does, even if not by a left person or a political act. And the punditry gets up in arms. 1 person said ‘use this word not that’ and suddenly it’s the political left forcing it
Don't lose the thread. This writer is shit. But he's on the winning side. We lost. And unless we do an honest post-game evaluation, it's going to happen again and again.
To act like people on the left haven't been thought policing language over the last decade, is a trumpian denial of reality.
As an Older white Guy it’s embarrassing to have gone to a premier Liberal university and having to read up on Reconstruction a few years back.
I know more about the Risorgimento.
It never crossed my mind that the “Master” bedroom meant anything other than the big one with a bathroom.
Seriously, I'm looking at some of these assertions and wondering if maybe the author might have stumbled onto a few satire pieces and not understood the joke.
To me, changing a few phrases and thinking about the words we chose is low hanging fruit, much easier than creating fairer material outcomes. These folks freaked the fuck out over the easiest, most basic suggestions without ever even entertaining the idea of making society better for minorities
At the end of the day, When you do wrong and it’s justified, a certain segment will feel the need to continue justifying the wrong that’s currently being done.
Are people being stopped from capitalizing the W in white? Y'all white supremacists can capitalize your "white", I'm not gonna stop you. But I will judge you. 😂
My university, here in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, has official events called "brown bag lunches". Here's the term being used by an LGBTQ group: http://www.reu.umb.edu/olli/sigs/stonewall-at-olli/
Well she’s a disgusting object-racist! Personally, I don’t see object color, and nobody else should either. Now if you’ll excuse me, off to grind some peppercorns of various light refracting capabilities on my omelette and drink some frozen concentrated Florida citrus fruit juice
I don’t know. After listening to the Dead Kennedys I personally started those forest fires. Of course that was after shooting myself in the face due to that Judas Priest album.
Wow, so stupid. I have spent exactly zero time in recent years worried about the “policing of language,” especially the examples he cites. Yet this attack on “wokeness” has unleashed vicious hate way out of proportion to the use of email pronouns.
Activists did not force me to add “she/her” to my email signature. I did it because a trans man worked in my department and I wanted him to feel comfortable sharing his pronouns. What is this slop?
You defied the ruling bigoted autocrats by treating him (& yourself) as an equal human being in control of his identity. They don't like it, makes them look bad & not in charge. Abusers don't like it when you don't support abuse. So they demand that everybody stop that right now or they'll hurt us.
I can attest that I was directly told not to say "brown-bag lunch" (like the eat and discuss gathering) by someone with authority. (I looked up the alleged reason this was problematic and found it specious and irrelevant.)
Wow, that’s really stupid. Obviously, we all know about the brown paper bag test, but nobody in their right mind would associate that with a brown bag lunch. Someone needs to go to UC Davis and lock these idiots in a windowless room for like 3 months.
The real high point of the piece is "almost immediately, the president did the opposite of what he’d promised" - was screamingly obvious from anyone who *watched* a Trump rally that he would do this. It was absolutely a promise. "no-one will have to watch their language" absolutely wasn't!
Putting aside the essential problem of it not being a thing, I feel like this guy is the last person I'd consult about terminology relating to the workingman's bagged lunch?
"I know that comparing Leftist SJWs scolding you online and far-rightists mobilizing the power of the State in service of the violent goals of white supremacy is absurd, dishonest, and dangerous. Yet, I do so anyway to pretend like my earlier writing on the former had insight into the latter."
The American Enterprise Institute is a collective of dipshits pontificating on the vicissitudes of right-wing ideology. They veer from "here's my most current stupid think piece" to "here is the think piece I shat out a year ago that does not bolster a goddamned thing."
In theater there is equipment where a main controller sends out signals to subordinate devices. These are often called the master unit and slaves. It took working with a performance troupe from Africa who over heard us discussing the setup to realize how fucked up that was. @luxtheatrum.bsky.social
I remember the coercion every time my shoulder aches from when “they” twisted my arm to put pronouns in my email signature. Or did I do it in solidarity with my non-binary coworkers to help them feel more comfortable? Dunno. It’s all so hazy since the Woke Army bashed my head in.
Wait, are you saying gender can sometimes be challenging to determine and pronouns aren’t simply a product of the woke mind virus? And why are you working with foreigners with strange names? This is raising some flags… and I don’t mean our glorious stars and stripes.
My first full-time job out of college involved calling up businesses and confirming their corporate officers were still the same, and let me tell you, I quickly put together a running list of homophone first names to confirm spelling/gender cuz there are MANY and you won't realize it.
I'm gonna be honest, like 50% of why I started putting pronouns in my email signature at work was selfish reasons of wanting to be referred to correctly in the 3rd person (and then of course the other half was allyship/solidarity/etc.)
like "oh damn this is a thing now? thanks trans people!"
Written by someone who has never studied any time in history outside of the ten years of pop culture he needed to write this mess. And did no research into what he wrote here.
Lol.
*A word for travellers. (Non-Roma, that we lived with in Argentina and Brazil.)
*A 90's London Squat name. (I lived there.)
*A fire I misnamed.
*The name my own indigenous dad called himself. A Laplander.
Sue me.
I don't watch ANY American TV. So I have no idea about your pop word morality.
That guy is literally the one and only reason why I cancelled The Atlantic and refuse to resubscribe.
Like entirely too much of legacy media, some influential person decided he’s a good writer and everyone else in that orbit is afraid to point out that he sucks.
Please source this. Who wrote it? Black is capitalized as is Caucasian. White isn’t a race. What a dumb, lazy writer. Just take two seconds to think about what you are saying!!!
Well to be fair “Black” shouldn’t be a race either, it’s a skin color. In fact homo sapiens has no races, it has ethnicities, and if we did a better job at cataloguing African genetic heritage, they’d be more defined in Scientific literature by now.
We capitalize the names of shared geographic ancestries. But many people of African descent in the US had their ancestors stolen from their homes and sent to America to be enslaved. Thus they have no record of their ancestry other than "Africa."
Africa is a vast continent with many cultures and nationalities. Calling them "African-Americans" is just as incorrect as calling whites "European-Americans." Sure, it's maybe *technically* correct, but not in any helpful sort of way.
The difference is that white Americans know which European country or countries their ancestors came from, even if they were (like mine) criminals sentenced to transportation. Black Americans do not have access to their history in this way, so "Afr.-Amer." or "Black" is as specific as they can get.
Well, sort of, or at least for now. As I mentioned, we need more DNA data from African countries to better understand the different ethnicities and genetic families in the continent, but there’s been a lot of progress, so it is technically possible for a Black American to find out where they’re from
However, they do share a common experience: that of enslaved and emancipated PoC in the US, who routinely face discrimination and constantly have to fight for the equal rights guaranteed to all Americans.
Outside of the US, Caucasian stopped being used to signify race at the same time as Negroid and Mongoloid. Capitalized White is considered a race as much as capitalized Black is.
If you really want to see the truth of this, come to Europe. Any country will do. If white is a kind of person, no one has told anyone here, lol. You can't lump an English person with a German person and tell them both 'you're the same'.
Black isn’t a race either. Also the very concept of “race” among humans ignores the fact that ethnicities blur those racial lines. This is due to the fact that whenever there is a tiny bit of genetic drift others find that group and mix with them. We’ve been doing it since Neanderthal was a race…
And with groups such as Neanderthal you could argue an actual races separate from us. That and maybe aboriginal Australia but keep in mind they’re absolutely still homosapian. With little extra drift from isolation. It’s all arbitrary. Medically ethnicity matters, but “race” not so much.
Well technically we’ve been doing it since before we were homosapians. There are far older examples of mixing. It’s something we’ve always done. It’s part of what makes us successful as a species. A wider genetic pool is necessary for punctuated equilibrium in most cases
Also “policing,” “banishing,” “forced” by *checks notes* continuing to allow people to say whatever they want? They can still say the N word, just because they’re too cowardly to do it doesn’t make it banished.
Yeah I mean you won't go to jail or anything, it's just that people will judge you based on your behavior, and more and more people are going to think you're a huge weirdo. 🤷
Comments
And the reason it happens is that people who write like this haven’t actually observed primary examples, they’re vaguely regurgitating stuff they heard from others
This kind of hokum is winning elections.
Yes, balls. Women are not allowed to use it at all.
STRAW EMPLOYEE
STRAW SOMETHING ELSE ARGLBARGL
...sorry, I was trying to be the humorless progressive shrill envisioned by this article. who has the time?
https://rhetcomputx.dwrl.utexas.edu/files/original/dd05cac3330c87c346b359db297a58bdc9535129.pdf
https://www.newsweek.com/compassion-campus-193190
So much of what they read is just someone vibing that they don't know there are other standards
Wow, who knew >.>
Worse case scenario when a private entity restricts their services is that you can't use their service.
Worse case scenario when government restricts behavior can enslave and kill people.
"as it is known" — known by who? advocates? critics?
"it forced" — who is it? what specific people or institutions? are they significant or of consequence?
I’ve never encountered “chestfeeding”
A broad and super unspecific “many people” (or variant) say X and it is because… blah blah blah
And people still gobble it down.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-worst-magazine-in-america
Just very imprecise writing in addition to being 100% brain-missing
The only time that they're specific is when they are naming their targets & even then, their cowardice asses will use dog whistles.
They need deniability because they know they have no real arguments.
Q: Which words do you feel pressure to avoid saying in public?
98% A: n-----, c---, r-------
Q: Any others?
98% A: ???
Atlantic, NYT, Wapo columnists:
100% A: I will need to write five 2000 word essays to catalog all of them
Those linguistic changes were bottom-up more than they were top-down and were likely appropriated by individuals BEFORE they were promoted as "DEI hires" after George Floyd's murder.
So many take writers need to re-read (or just read) this classic before writing another word.
As we scrape away the rhetoric frosting & notice the word "eugenics" come up more often, that "everyone" becomes more chilling
Duh!
It's often seasonal too.
April: they won't let us celebrate St George's Day (The Mayor of London has a big event every year)
International Women's Day: when's international men's day? (19th November)
1) recognize "woke" language policing happens/happened
2) engage in critical introspection about where it results in alienation rather than inclusion
3) develop ability advocate legit reasons for evolving some language w/o calling anyone who disagrees a "bigot"
"US citizens" is not appropropriate analogue because not everyone has citizenship.
"American" similarly doesn't reflect the...
This is one reason many people prefer the neologism "USians".
It accounts for all of these histories/realities and is specific in its geographical reference.
It's like saying "she made me rape her bc she looked pretty."
yeah that checks
Always to receive, but never to give
Always carry news all over the place
Mr. Chatterton, you are a big disgrace
Your teeth and your tongue a-go let you down
And a-when them let you down, we a-go batter you around
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUn3HrjJwXk
There wasn't a warning label, so I'm providing it...
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-worst-magazine-in-america
What % of the supposed woke advocate population?
"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact." - VP,Henry A. Wallace
Charles R. Lawrence III, 1990
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3115&context=dlj
It's like they're just trying to pack in as many points of agitation as possible.
Liars and more liars. Bigots and liars. Worthless.
Because I'm pretty sure the only examples they can give will either be specifically about the names of public school sports teams, or some bizarre person who no one in the left actually listens to or is even aware of.
So yes...?
Why is that.
History matters!
I don't think people stopped using those words.
This is like the "war on Christmas" where people kept saying it was illegal to say "Christmas" and it was never illegal.
It's just the same 'culture war' excuses and BS that laid the groundwork for their complete disconnect from reality and embracing fascism. It's ironic in that way.
If people didn't see it through an iPhone camera, it's myth and legend.
He’s easily the worst of the high-minded bad writers of “the center” and I’m absolutely flummoxed as to how he gets work
https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/may-2019/the-true-story-of-chicagos-welfare-queen/
Every personality type has its good points, but it also has weaknesses or the negative aspects. 1/
You knew. I knew. They can’t.
2/2
In a masterpiece of willful ignorance, many of them are also levelled at "Health and Safety gone mad" and sometimes "Europe".
but I have NEVER seen any Hispanic person get half as offended about "Latinx" or "Latine" as white Anglo conservatives do.
South African Nazis have taken over their party and they're still apoplectic about pronouns in signature lines?
Have they never read "G-d and Man at Yale"?
Do any of them know the history of their own movement?
Also, I didn’t even need to look it up to know exactly who wrote this 🙄
"Political Correctness" for the 80s/90s is the same basic complaint as "Cancelled" and "DEI"
George Will and others are cut from the same cloth as this.
To an administration banning science and words outright.
"You hurt people's feelings and turned them into fascists!". These are people who have never taken responsibility for anything ever.
They are absolute trash
This piece employs the passive voice here repetitively, which is a judgement in itself.
P.S. This guy lives in France with his white (oops TCW, White) French author wife.
https://bsky.app/profile/sababausa.bsky.social/post/3krlyhsmvec2p
Anyway, I now have the name “Tommy Chatty Williams” stuck in my head
No, too much
"Thomas Chatterton Williams is […] a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute."
The sign:
https://bsky.app/profile/michaelhobbes.bsky.social/post/3li5taaxaac2h
I'm glad I've never given them any money.
I mean, nobody told me not to call it breast feeding or brown bag lunch. The primary suite was held up as an example of a nice thing to do. Manpower and workforce mean two different things & some editor somewhere probably noted a connotation & somebody took offense.
Or was that "Gulf of America?" I can can't keep my forced orthodoxies straight... be right back, gotta ask google.
My fav is saying "he's hot" about a man on TV and getting weird looks or being laughed at as "gay". Insecurity is a prereq for Those Guys
Nowhere in the statement does it suggest to stop using 'breastfeeding' except in very specific clinical contexts.
Mistakes were made.
... But of course that would be crazy right?
Some of the terms were 100% off the wall, unnessary
This message isn’t designed to persuade. It is intended as a signal, a secret handshake, to denote belonging.
“Some people say…”
Taking any fact and putting a question mark on it.
excuse me, staradulthumans
Not somebody putting he/him in their email header.
We on the left would be wise to look inward and think about how much of what's occurring is a direct, "equal/opposite" reaction to this sort of thing - but we cannot help ourselves from dying on stupid semantic hills
This was already out of control and sanity by 2008.
I'm talking about the effect that our fervor for 'language policing' has had on the average voter - right or wrong.
Simply put: it's a turn-off. It has hall monitor energy.
There's no evidence it has had any electoral effect except for how the right manufacturers outrage.
Limbaugh and the explosion of right-wing media laid the foundation for Fox News and it thriving. Roger Ailes and tried out a show with Limbaugh before Fox was a thing.
Similarly, it's not just Fox News but other sources of right-wing news misinformation that are part of the problem. But I was trying to avoid an essay.
Like, do you HAVE a face to which we can associate these ambiguous accusations? An article or a lecture or a news broadcast not taken out of context or deliberately misunderstood? No?
Then shush.
https://www.rd.com/article/cleaning-schedule/
She'd have written "by zombies?!?" in red pen after the first sentence.
"... the policing of language." -"[by zombies?!?]"
Where "it" is used as a subject, she'd circle it and write something like, "Plutonium? Fish? Clown cars?"
Who is “they” - they said that. …
Using correct English, subject/verb/object not a strong point anymore.
He's been with Bari Weiss for a while, so I discount everything he writes.
And my life is better for that.
This is the same sort of 'serious' thinking that's plagued the right for decades and gave a sense of legitimacy to lies and distortions. They now seem unable to realize their role in getting us here
I also never heard anyone complain about brown bag lunch, because that term came from the color of the bags…?
So much made up rage.
"The woke movement" itself is academic discourse blown way out of proportions.
Mammary glands are not breasts and breasts are not mammary glands (note many mammals produce milk and do not have “breasts”).
But I digress.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_paper_bag_test
Rather it exists to reinforce a bogeyman that the intended audience already fears (or uses to arouse fear in the most uninformed segments of the Republican and MAGA base).
This paper fails. 🤷
To imply that we were suddenly all forced to use that term because “wokeness” is bullshit.
Non-binaries have to order in delivery
When I started in offices and everyone said "I'm going to be out of pocket" to mean "unavailable" I was confused because that term, to me, meant "acting inappropriately".
The kids who brought lunch (in a sack/bag or lunch box) were considered to have better lunches except those who bought school lunches got ice cream in little cups so trading in the lunch room was serious business.
Where did that even come from
Note the history, the reasons for Frum's termination, and how funding has changed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute
I have literally never encountered anybody that likes it.
Obviously this piece is way overstated but insisting on things like Latinx and justice involved individuals was dumb messaging & politics.
I had a hard time helping my 3rd grader with his homework and became convinced of the international indoctrination conspiracy!
Report it as spam and you get an instant pass!
You must avoid at all costs, being seen as the HR party.
Lots of people work in places with HR departments.
In corporate HR? Not so much.
Methinks he made up these examples.
Since I no longer take a literal bagged lunch I usually just refer to it as lunch or leftovers anyways
Millenials & younger have grown up in the plastic bag era and may be unfamiliar with brown bags
Rural northern Missouri.
Instant "outsider" status.
People who write these anti-woke screeds are telling on themselves: They're the ones living in a liberal bubble
Ironically enough, much like all the things he claimed in this "article".
“Woke” never entered my mind.
It is kind of like they make stuff up.
I just know I hear it every year. I even remember a Starbucks boycott over a red cup ... but when Chick-fil-A had a general holiday greeting years later not a single complaint was amplified by the same people.
EXHAUSTING. They are exhausting the duped public.
The chest feeding thing I’ve heard… conservatives complaining about. I think that’s another one of their made up things to be angry at
Probably one person said "hm, chestfeeding?" and regressives assumed everyone was pushing that.
Maybe woke is better.
There was an unnecessary policing of terms that was going on for awhile. "people with vaginas" vs. "women" wasn't a boomer-level complaint, it was a ridiculousness that traversed generations (one example.)
Silly stuff like this allowed the right to latch on and exaggerate, but it was there.
https://bsky.app/profile/johnbrownstan.bsky.social/post/3lif6zcpcq22f
That's the fact we all really have to deal with.
https://bsky.app/profile/joocifer.bsky.social/post/3lif6ys4fhs2j
The response should be 'who cares' - what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter what the response should be, they have a cudgel when we police the term 'guru' as being offensive to Mumbai
You imagine the electorate to be as clued in to nuance as you are - they are not
I’m kidding in some ways, but I gotta be honest; as different and understanding, as I am and can be, some “inclusionary” language has gone past the pale. Luckily, I virtually never hear any of that despite being deep in the progressive community.
Also, there were lots of guys wearing skirts.
(Tempted to make a "kilt a bear" joke, but nah.)
(reality is often quite the opposite, like in germany where the new forms are getting banned in conservative states)
For example, the term 'female'... [this message has been redacted by the DEI police]
Imma take a nap.
The Creator gave you a Brain—don’t give it away.
and yes, even here in PDX it is uncommon
(and very, very incorrect lol)
*of course* a term with a specific use case is going to be used regularly *within that specific use case*
I'm grateful that you and your folx regularly use inclusive terms. I'm glad they're common within the spaces you occupy. truly.
Oops! I wrote "bitching!"
Is that ok?
Should I use "carping?"
Some is well founded. I no longer say "hysterical" for really funny. It's "hilarious."
Libs: Okay, well if you can't give us real justice, can you at least give us cheap lip service like using kinder language?
Cons: WOKENESS DEMANDS TOO MUCH OF ME SO BACK TO SLAVERY
Words like ‘staff’, ‘personnel’, ‘team’, ‘employees’, ‘colleagues’, ‘human resources’, … cover all the various uses of ‘manpower’ but avoid the capacity to cause offence. It’s not about ‘correctness’, simply respect.
‘Black tea’ they hear as ‘tea’. ‘Tea without milk’ makes them stop briefly and think what I said.
Also obviously written by someone young. Of course, there was no social progress before 2012. None at all.
People voluntarily chose to use different semanticsas they wished.
That is what *intellectually challenged* don't seem to grasp, tho People keep explaining.
Or even FdB?
Black refers to the people of the African diaspora
I have never once met a human being who was actually *white* or *black*
lots of pinks and browns
both words mean more than their most simplistic definitions as colors. they have specific sociocultural meanings and connotations. ignoring that is educational malpractice.
Maybe you're the stupid one. Wait. That was rude of me to say.
Maybe you've been brainwashed into not knowing what's actually true and what's been a blight on the American culture for the past 15 years. Inclusive language has only been used to...
"To be a free thinker and to speak clearly, you have to risk being offensive." - Jordan Peterson.
just makes a target for fash lies
But you could be right about the "dumbass" thing. My PhD advisor might agree, for one.
"White" is not an ethnic group, or a nationality, or a culture, or a group of people with a shared history. It's mostly been used as a means of exclusion — it didn't always apply to people from Southern or Eastern Europe, or even Ireland.
I'll go as far as to say that the orthodoxy was straight hanging out of the left.
We did it to ourselves in an orgy of virtue signalling.
Sorry this picture doesn't demonstrate that there is any form of mechanism to coerce or force people into any of these things. In contrast to the trump dictatorship barring news orgs who continue to call it the gulf of Mexico.
There's a thing you might have heard of. Cancel Culture.
How about the JK Rowling distraction? Remember that bathroom bit 10 years ago?
No one with any actual power has been implementing these things. People have gotten feedback on what they said and they got offended over it.
Seems disingenuous for a movement to bastardise an AIDS awareness slogan.
BTW. I agree with most everything theses commented are saying, but it's gone for a hard look at what happened here.
Q: WHY DO YOU LOSE?
To act like people on the left haven't been thought policing language over the last decade, is a trumpian denial of reality.
https://stock.periscopefilm.com/jc10034-what-color-are-you-1967-race-ethnicity-skin-tone-social-guidance-educational-film/
/sarcasm
https://stock.periscopefilm.com/xd49914-date-etiquette-1952-social-guidance-educational-film-for-teenagers/
https://stock.periscopefilm.com/29224-supervising-women-war-workers-wwii-social-guidance-film/
I know more about the Risorgimento.
It never crossed my mind that the “Master” bedroom meant anything other than the big one with a bathroom.
GUILTY 🥲
AEI has always had an agenda.
(and also the history of colorism and "paper bag" tests is very real and very impactful for nonwhites)
For the record, I accept that brown bag lunch is problematic.
not always good with double entendres
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YJGW7Bby-Cw
i’m embarrassed for them.
https://eps.ucdavis.edu/sites/g/files/dgvnsk2851/files/inline-files/ARAC%20Proposal%20-%20Friday%20Lunch%20Talks.pdf
Wrote that bs
like "oh damn this is a thing now? thanks trans people!"
At least tease me with an interesting argument before hitting me with bullshit like this.
Americans.
Land of hate.
*A word for travellers. (Non-Roma, that we lived with in Argentina and Brazil.)
*A 90's London Squat name. (I lived there.)
*A fire I misnamed.
*The name my own indigenous dad called himself. A Laplander.
Sue me.
I don't watch ANY American TV. So I have no idea about your pop word morality.
I turned your country off when people started "serving cunt."
I have no idea who said it, or what it means.
And I do the lesbianism.
Like entirely too much of legacy media, some influential person decided he’s a good writer and everyone else in that orbit is afraid to point out that he sucks.
Thanks for sharing, but it has raised my blood pressure.
We capitalize the names of shared geographic ancestries. But many people of African descent in the US had their ancestors stolen from their homes and sent to America to be enslaved. Thus they have no record of their ancestry other than "Africa."
Tamils are black. Australian Aboriginals are black.