Is it really just a poor choice of words?(Etymology topic)

Started this topic in response to posts in Star Wars thread,

So,offensive words,we all know what those words are without examples,it's considered impolite and illegal to use them in some cases,others words,it's less clear,there's nothing saying you can't use these words but then someone tells you (as I learned today) that they're apparently an attack on someone's mental health,that they're usage is ableist,and of course not everyone agrees with this because the way language works means words have different definitions for different people.According my interpretation of the word it's harmless,it;s basically saying "'you're being ridiculous!" said another way and is in no way related someone's mental health

So the word is 'Nuts',but is it any different from calling them crazy,loony,barmy,mad,insane or bonkers?Is it really attacking their mental health?

New theme music also a box

I'll allow this but only if it remains civil.

TBH, I've never heard any ablelist associations from the word "nuts". As insults go, it's pretty mild in my experience.

edited 6th Jun '18 5:40:48 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

'Nuts' has been used as a slang alternative to 'crazy' or 'insane' since the 1800s, coming from 'nut' as slang for 'head' - someone who was 'insane' was 'out of their head/nut'.

Of course these days we don't use 'crazy' or 'insane' as actual medical descriptions like we did then, and the terms tend to be viewed negatively when used in reference to actual mental illness. Phrases like 'driving me nuts' or 'I'm going nuts' are used now to mean 'making me angry' or 'making me confused' rather than any belief that they are actually becoming ill. However 'are you nuts?' still means 'are you mad/insane?', and someone who's had to deal with mental illness either personally or indirectly might not take kindly to it.

Avatar from here.

I’m not quite sure about the ableist connotations of words like crazy. It always strikes me as a little weak, considering the popular definition of those words has changed so much.

Obviously using them as a pejorative to refer to someone with a mental illness is a different thing, but in their common usage they’re essentially disconnected from their original meanings.

They should have sent a poet.

That felt like an cultural clash to me. In a way, it's good to have diversity. But the problem is that certain things that might not be offensive to most people apparently has the weight as calling them retarded and it becomes into an "Nobody is allowed to use that word, even if those people say that it's ok!" excuse.

Maybe some people are more sensitive than the general populace nowadays? Not quite ableism, but I believe that this is an similar movement that's causing the mindset. TL;CR: If we can't say this convenient term or that slang expression because it has the potential to hurt someone's feelings, than what can we say without diving into an thesaurus everytime that we want to talk? Why not get used to it if it's not directly insulting whatever it is that you have?

Answer no master, never the slave Carry your dreams down into the grave Every heart, like every soul, equal to break

Because it insults whole groups of people? And gives them a marginalized place in public discourse.

The problem with slurs is that they insult innocent people, not that they hurt the one you want to insult. It's Misplaced Retribution

Isn't the issue though that people don't see mental health issues as normal?

Every time someone makes new term that is okay to use to refer to mental health issues, over time they get turned into insults because people keep using them as insults, and then someone makes new term and it gets corrupted again while nobody addresses the problem of people thinking its insult to say you have mental health issues <_<

While some folk probably do use those insults without realizing they are offensive(because they are so commonly used and accepted in public stuff like tv or comics or such), the folk who don't realize they are offensive most likely weren't first ones to start using them as insults in the first place. So its rather hard issue to deal with since telling those same folk using those insults doesn't stop people coming up with new insults which also hurt the same group..

edited 6th Jun '18 10:38:31 AM by SpookyMask

Well, my problem is that what words can I use to describe someone if an lot of them are offensive? Since I feel that calling them mentally ill is too big of an generalization and it'll cause an problem. And that in order to call them by whatever they actually have requires some research and knowledge that an lot of people really don't have. Of course, you could be off the mark and cause an bigger shitstorm over misrepresentation.

Not everyone has an degree in psychology and I don't have one either, yet we have to interact with these people on an irregular basis.

Answer no master, never the slave Carry your dreams down into the grave Every heart, like every soul, equal to break

Broadly speaking, you can call someone a jerk or an asshole or something along those lines because those insults don't contain any implicit prejudice (or -isms, if you will). If you really want to go down the road of extreme pedantry, any denigrating term that implies a disability could be considered ableist, and you aren't qualified to diagnose a medical condition unless you're a physician and the person in question is under your care.

Personally speaking, I think it's possible to go too far in removing negative words in case they might hurt someone's feelings, because there is an important line between battling prejudice and making it so hard to speak freely that people shut down out of fear of offending someone. It's a lot like the pronouns some people like to insist we use to refer to LGBTQ+ people to avoid accidental misgendering. However supportive I may be of equal rights for all persons, I'm not going to carry around a notebook listing every personal pronoun that someone has invented and quiz every person I meet on which one(s) they prefer. I might as well not talk to anyone ever if that's the burden.

I'm completely in favor of taking deliberately offensive words like "retard", "faggot", "sperg", and the n-word out of the common lexicon, because they are so often intentionally used to cause harm. I do not believe it is appropriate or necessary to remove all potentially offensive words in case someone gets triggered by them. Real life is not a safe space, and trying to pretend it is sends a very bad message: that the world owes people protection against accidental offense.

edited 6th Jun '18 4:53:52 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

At the same time, if someone does want to point out that the use of said words is ableist or some other -ist and explains why, I'm not going to try and pretend it's not just because I want to be able to keep using said insults. If I insist on using said insults anyway around that person even knowing why that makes said person uncomfortable, that sends the message that I care more about being able to use certain words than I do about that person's feelings. Which would probably make me an asshole.

As for misgendering...it's probably excusable if I'm dealing with strangers I'm meeting for the first time. But if I keep doing it to someone, that makes me an asshole.

It's a bit of a hassle, since so many common insults have roots in racism, sexism, and ableism.

Disgusted, but not surprised

Taking faggot out of my dictionary would be inconvenient. They taste quite nice.

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If I'm correct about what you're referring to, I'd counter that it's because they destroy your sense of taste (and smell, too). Those things are nasty, not just for you, but for the people around you.

Outlawing Tobacco would be all the more reason to make Hate Speech laws, even if its just a side effect

To be serious, that there are words that seem harmless in one region but are slurs in another should be addressed, as focusing on one nation's standards for an international level hate speech law would allow loopholes to be exploited.

On a related note. I want to to ask explicitly how many insults to ones intelligence are derived from terms for the mentally disabled? It seem like its such an inherent issue with those types of insults that a blanket inclusion would probably be more efficient (and serve to future-proof such regulations).

edited 7th Jun '18 12:53:52 AM by MorningStar1337

I don't get that line of thinking. Surely, if you're stopping before you say something because you fear it might be harmful to other people, that's just a sign that you have one iota of common sense and decency toward other people.

Like, how is someone physically stopping you for saying something that might offend someone just because you might get called an Internet dickhead? If you get backlash, hey, maybe it's time to reevaluate.

Nobody's going to physically stop you from being an asshole, they're just going to call you on it because they think you're being an asshole.

Off the top of my head, 'retard/retarded' and 'hysteria/hysterical' are the two ones that have explicit medical terminology. As well as OCD, ADHD, ADD and so forth which people like to call themselves when they have a moment of compulsory thinking/can't sit still/are too distracted by their cell phones, etc.

edited 7th Jun '18 6:12:42 AM by math792d

Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.

Yeah, to "retard" something is to delay or hold back it's development. It's actually still used in some scientific contexts. Usually physics.

I believe the term was originally introduced as a euphemism. That's the issue with sensitive topics. There'll be a word, and then people will start using it as an insult, so it becomes a slur, so they introduce a new word, and that becomes an insult/slur, and so on. And eventually we run out of words.

I think that's a trope actually. Euphemism Treadmill?

They're also a type of spiced meatball, which is what I was referring to.

Though I get regularly asked for cigarettes by total strangers for some reason.

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Huh, so it is.

(Wikipedia's page on it)

edited 7th Jun '18 6:52:55 AM by M84

Disgusted, but not surprised

But see, being homosexual is, gradually, becoming normal. Being mentally disabled, however, will almost certainly never be considered "normal." And given our complex, tech-focused society, being mentally behind the average person will always be something to use as an insult. Now sure, you can insult someone by just calling them stupid - but that doesn't burn as badly as calling them "retarded", and once a new "non-offensive" term comes into popular use for them, it'll take negative time before the edgelords and assholes of the world are using it as an insult for anyone they don't like.^note Also, what if I want to call things that are being held back, like the GOP, retarded? That redirects to Political Correctness Gone Mad, which I think doesn't actually fit what we're discussing here.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

This could make for a funny SNL skit. How come no one ever asks you for a bundle of wood?

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

^^Lemme ask you this then: Would you insult someone "You have flu!"? No because it is normal to have flu or be ill.

Well, they do also ask for something to light them...

The Euphemism Treadmill itself is relevant here: it's exactly what's being described, where the clinical, neutral terms become offensive and so new clinical terms are created which themselves become offensive...

The only escape seems to be creating a term so purely unwieldy that nobody can use it for a quick insult. But those are also hard to use in normal conversation.

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I would like to additionally note, that I was talking about specifically mental health issues, which is something that EVERYONE has especially if they don't take of their mental health. In other words, yes, mental health issues are normal.

And about mental disabilities: Most people don't use "You are physically deformed!" as insult, because everyone realizes that would be assholish regardless of whether you are deformed or not :P

On sidenote, I'm annoyed by concept of normalcy in general because it really is an illusion. You can't say "Its normal if it matches majority" because claiming what is majority is really hard. I've been asked if I have disability I don't have diagnosis for because I'm introverted, as some people see being extroverted normal. So what does that mean? Does that mean I'm normal only if I go to get my brain patterns checked and if they match extroverted person's brain patterns then I'm normal? Or am I not normal because I'm not extroverted? And even then, who has right to say I'm not normal because I have ADHD/ADD diagnosis? Why is having a disorder not "normal"?

Because it's in some way a significant departure from the range of behaviours exhibited by the majority of the populace, on top of being something that cannot just be developed by anyone. Particularly the part about lying outside range of behaviours exhibited by a majority—tails in distributions are comparatively very sparsely populated.

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And I think there is something wrong about that attitude Why is it not normal for someone being unable to concentrate easily? Normal isn't just "What is common", what people mean when they refer something as "normal" is "Acceptable". Criminals aren't normal because that kind of behavior isn't acceptable. Being a cat person is normal because it is considered okay to like cats. That is why people consider it insult to be not considered "normal".

The term "normal" in and of itself can be deceptive. In scientific terminology, the word "baseline" tends to get used because it designates a template against which things are measured without any sort of inherent value judgment.

Given that every single human is different, both genetically and developmentally, the idea that there can be such a thing as a "normal" or "default" person is complete bollocks. However, we can use statistical analysis to establish the frequency of various traits and then stick our "baseline" tag at the center of the bell curve.

Going back to the original topic, calling someone or something "crazy" does not convey any specific medical diagnosis nor even contain any implied criteria for establishing a diagnosis. It's not like "retarded", where there's actually a clinical definition (or was). In general usage, "crazy" is not meant as an ableist pejorative. However, if you talk to or about someone who does have a mental illness and you use it in a derogatory or belittling fashion towards them, you are indeed being an ass.

This is what I mean by context. Banning the word "crazy" from common conversation accomplishes nothing. We might as well ban the word "short" because it might make a "height challenged" person feel bad. No, what we need is a general sensitivity in our culture towards each other, and to teach people not to see disabilities or disadvantages as things worth of derision. Then the language problem solves itself. And, of course, we need to discourage the use of the nastiest words due to their unavoidable implications.

For example, I've been teaching my son not to use the words "retarded" and "gay" as general-purpose insults, and he's already well-aware of the n-word.

edited 7th Jun '18 8:08:20 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"