• RedClouds@lemmygrad.ml
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    4 months ago

    I’m gonna take your question at good faith and assume you’re not just trying to be racist or bigoted, and looking for an excuse.

    I also did check out your other post on it and my answer is going to go about along the same lines.

    The reason some words are considered bigoted and marginalized groups is because… That’s how people use them.

    I’m only speaking about English in this example because that’s the only language I know. But this language is extremely flexible, and super tight definitions don’t really exist. So people use words however they intend to use them, which is probably true universally, but again, I only know about English.

    It’s weird to wrap your brain around because it’s kind of inverse of what most people think. It took me a while to understand this, and I needed a English major to tell me exactly how to approach this. But all definitions of words and all ways in which words are used are determined by the community. If racists and bigots are using a term in a racist and bigoted way, then it is a racist and bigoted term.

    How come “the gays” would be considered bigoted while “gay people” or “lgbtqia+” are not considered bigoted? That’s just how we decided to use that language over time. Now that we use words that way, it would take a looong time, and some major cultural changes, to change that.

      • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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        4 months ago

        How is that ableist? It was “coined” by Horatio Nelson who himself was blind in one eye and ignored an order from his superior officer by raising a telescope to mockingly “look” at the signal flags of his superior’s ship while saying that he quote, “had the right to be blind sometimes”.

        If you’re in circles where people are preformitively picking apart every single phrase known to man then the answer is ignore it.

        This sort of thing almost 98% of the time happens online. No one is going around real life and getting mad at people saying phrases like that, unless said phrases include slurs or are egregiously racist, sexist, etc.

      • FishLake@lemmygrad.ml
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        4 months ago

        I mean… didn’t you just answered your own question? Are you trying to understand how phrases like that are coined in the first place?

  • Pat_Riot@lemmy.today
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    4 months ago

    You need to be more specific, because it sounds like you are looking for excuses to use words you probably shouldn’t be using.

    • The Free Penguin@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      4 months ago

      I’m not looking for excuses to use words that I shouldn’t be using lol. Referring to my previous post on a similar topic (https://lemmygrad.ml/post/508144), say the term “Debian” was used metaphorically, such as describing someone or something as “Debian”. That would often come across as bigoted. Now, I’m not denying that it’s bigoted, I’m just wondering why.