Comment by duskwuff
3 days ago
It's not a hypothetical situation; I know people with chronic mental health conditions who find this usage of the word "sane" specifically hurtful. It's avoidable; use "reasonable" as an adjective and a phrase like "consistency check" as a verb, or a more specific term like "bounds check" if applicable.
Then those people are unreasonable, and need to adjust their outlook. It is neither healthy for them, nor fair to others, to take such great offense at harmless words.
Sounds like victim blaming to me; who are you to decide what is healthy or fair for someone else, or what words are offensive or harmless?
Because I can guarantee there's words that would make you upset if they were used against you. I mean this thread is because someone had an emotional response to "inclusive language", they zoomed right in on it and ignored every other aspect of the thing, even calling for the whole section to be removed.
How is that different? I don't understand why people get so upset about inclusive language. Those people are unreasonable, and need to adjust their outlook. It is neither healthy for them, nor fair to others, to take such great offense at harmless words.
> I mean this thread is because someone had an emotional response to "inclusive language", they zoomed right in on it and ignored every other aspect of the thing, even calling for the whole section to be removed. How is that different?
Great, you win, it's not different. The person getting upset at "inclusive language" is on the same level as the one getting upset at "sanity check" because everyone's offended by something and therefore all offense is equal. What now?
Nice try turning it around, but no, you didn't find a gotcha. You just tried to argue two opposites ("no amount of offense is unreasonable" and "the people I disagree with are the unreasonable ones") at the same time. You acknowledged there's a line and failed to address its location.
But words evolve, and we do actually change which words we use. We've been doing it since... forever. And, somehow, people still manage to act surprised when it happens. As if it's their first day on Earth.
There's a lot of terminology around just mental illness that we have decided to leave in the past. And, a lot of it is for good.
One benefit of changing our language is we get a second chance. We can be more specific, more fine-grained, or more accurate. For example, sanity check is vague. If it's a bound check, we might say bounds check. That's more accurate. If it's a consistency check, we might say consistency check.
We want our language, particularly in technical pieces, to be both inclusive and precise. What I mean is, we want it to include every thing it should, and nothing it shouldn't.
For example, in Medical literature you'll often see the term "pregnant person" or "pregnant people", or even "people who may be pregnant". At first glance, it seems stupid. Why not just say "women"? Women is imprecise. There's a variety of people who would not identify as a woman who may be pregnant. If they get, say, a form with that verbiage they might mark "no, I'm not a woman". But they SHOULD mark "yes, I am a pregnant person" or "yes, I am a person who may be pregnant". It doesn't even just include transgender individuals - it also includes people born intersex, or people born without a uterus who do identify as a woman. There's women who may be pregnant and women who may never be pregnant, just as there are people who do not identify as women who may be pregnant. The word "woman" is then imprecise, confusing, and includes people it shouldn't, as well as excluding people it should.
Yes, they evolve but only if wider society accepts it. And in this case, most people don't consider that it's reasonable to change the phrasing.
This way leads to people writing blog posts about firing workers they don't employ because they used gender non-neutral language in technical posts.
4 replies →
"Pregnant woman" is more precise than "pregnant person" or "pregnant female“. Pregnant woman specifies the gender as well as implying the sex (female or intersex, since males lack a uterus), while "pregnant person" only implies sex and "pregnant female" specifies the sex but not the gender.
"Pregnant person" is the least specific, "pregnant woman" is the most specific.
1 reply →
> people born without a uterus who do identify as a woman
Those cannot get pregnant. What's the point here? It's obvious that the phrase "pregnant woman" does not imply all women are pregnant.
1 reply →