wow!
just wow. 
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Wow indeed.
And almost within reach:
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Anton Chekhov was born 29 January 1860.
HELENA. What a fine day! Not too hot.
[A pause.]
VOITSKI. A fine day to hang oneself.
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I actually agree with them.
Compare the following two sentences:
- “The Russian invaded Ukraine, therefore the Russian are bad.”
- “Russia invaded Ukraine, therefore Russian people are bad.”
The first sentence it trying to throw a big label around everything and everyone to which we can apply the label “Russian”. The second sentence is a bit more honest in its labels, and therefore the flaw in logic is more apparent.
Same goes with “the poor”. By just saying “the poor”, it makes it sound like it’s a label that defines people and is set in stone. I could have an income below the poverty line this year, and then get a bigger income next year. It would certainly affect my quality of life, but it wouldn’t define me.
This reminds me of two things:
- xkcd: What if people’s incomes appeared around them as cash in real time? How much would you need to make to be in real trouble?;
- bbc news 2014: Anti-corruption investigators in China have confirmed the reported seizure of the equivalent of $33m in cash at an official’s home in May - the biggest such haul to date. More than 200m yuan (£20m) were found and four out of 16 counting machines broke whilst measuring the notes, a prosecutor said.
The xkcd what-if is fun and discusses how much income would put you at risk of drowning in your money if your income was raining in coins or in banknotes.
The arrest of the corrupted Chinese official was later adapted into the first scenes of the popular Chinese TV series 人民的名义 / Rénmín de míngyì / In the Name of the People. It’s a really fun scene, the anti-corruption police enters the house and finds cash everywhere. Cash stacked against every wall, in the fridge, even in the bed. I tried to find an extract just with that scene, but it actually takes the police so much time to count all the money that it takes three episodes to explore the house and count all the banknotes.
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The AP stylebook Twitter account had recommended writers avoid using “the” in phrases like “the disabled, the poor and the French”.
This sentence does sound funny, as if Frenchness was considered as ignominious.
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There was a big controversy a few years ago in the YT beauty community.
Nikkie Tutorials (who is Dutch) mentioned a “cheap” product, and all American viewers lost it because apparently it’s only proper to say “affordable”.
Nikkie explained that the nuisance doesn’t exist in her language, but you know how some people are…
For the record, I remember when the whole “shift to affordable” discussion started, and I found it pretentious, as I do now. It’s worse to call something cheap “affordable”, because it implies that you at the very least can afford this thing, right? If it’s affordable, what’s your excuse for not having it? It somehow demonizes cheap, when cheap can be a very good choice of product.
Being considerate with our words and trying to bubble wrap everything are two different things, but I find the internet mob overwhelmingly gravitating towards the second.
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Still the 100 rmb banknote is one the smallest of highest banknotes so it needs much more to reach the same amount of money… Not unusual to see deposit of a large quantity.
We use milder words and nice labels, but the attitude doesn’t change. The milder the terminology, the scarier I find it.
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As I usually say “if you don’t know how to hide it, don’t steal it”.
Here I should also add, “if you don’t read your own “7+1 anti-corruption traps for dummies” government handbook, you are too stupid to steal”
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Happy to do so.
This sentence:
“The Russians invaded Ukraine, therefore the Russians are bad”
is factually inaccurate, because it is the Russian country that invaded. In fact, a significant amount of the soldiers on site are not Russians at all (e.g. mercenaries).
This sentence is still factually inaccurate:
“Russia invaded Ukraine, therefore the Russian people are bad.”
The government REPRESENTS the country and the country represents the people, but it is not the people, nor does it reflect the will of each infividual person.
If the content of the suggestion was “please do not label whole groups and attribute them decisions and characteristics they do not have” then I would have agreed with the article that this makes sense.
If the content of the suggestion towards reporters was “please use the language properly and do not write misleading stuff for clickbait” then I would have applauded.
However, the point of the suggestion of the article was just to create a multi-word euphemism to change a simple direct label, to an indirect complex label and then pretend that “hey we did the right thing”. Here is the quote:
“Writing French people, French citizens, etc., is good. But “the” terms for any people can sound dehumanising and imply a monolith rather than diverse individuals,” it wrote. “That is why we recommend avoiding general ‘the’ labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the wealthy, the disabled, the college-educated,” it wrote.
For example, a better term than “the poor” was “people with incomes below the poverty line”, it added.
Lauren Easton, the vice president of AP corporate communications, told the French daily newspaper Le Monde: “The reference to ‘the French’ as well as the reference to ‘the college educated’ is an effort to show that labels shouldn’t be used for anyone, whether they are traditionally or stereotypically viewed as positive, negative or neutral.”
To use Carlin’s example, it is grotesque to pretend that saying “negative cash flow position” is better than saying that someone is “in debt” or just plain “is broke”.
Also, being poor can be so much more than only having an “income below the poverty line” … you can have an income above that line (which is sometimes inaccurate or arbitrary) and still be poor. For example, let’s say you have a normal income, but also have four kids. You do not register as “poor” for these kind of people, because you do not fit their new multi-word label, but you ARE, in fact, poor.
But now you are also poor AND forgotten/disenfranchised, so that claim about “a monolith rather than diverse individuals” is not even true.
A simple, wider-encompassing word sometimes is more useful than multiple word labels because those multi-word labels are usually missing a lot of other categories which the simple word label covers, but the multi-word label specifically ommits.
Precisely. 
(not to mention the peer-pressure/stress this creates in case you cannot actually afford it - but noone cares about that)
Good/aggressive marketing masked as “good intentions” …
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Yes, that’s my point. Using specific words forces the speaker to be specific and accurate, whereas using vague all-encompassing words allows the speaker a lot of freedom.
I can make a vague statement about “the poor”, and many people will agree with me because they’ll associate “the poor” with whoever they want it to designate. And if I’m later accused of having said something false, I can easily deny by changing the category of people that I was talking about when I said “the poor”.
Whereas if I talk about people who have an income below the poverty line, or if I talk about families with many kids, or if I talk about some other specific category, then I have to be specific or factually accurate - or if I’m not, it can easily be pointed out that I said something false.
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Even “poor people” would be better than “the poor”. The word “the” has a powerful effect in English, implying that things are precisely defined in some agreed-upon way. Consider “infinity” vs. “the infinity” for example. Are there other languages which share this feature?
I’m surprised nobody brought up the “the Ukraine” issue yet.
But still, that tweet is hilarious.
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Technically
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As always, let’s get into some linguistic thingies:
I think sometimes it’s the way our brain is wired, based on our native language. For example, in Greek we use articles as part of conjugation, so you would say “The Feijoa and the Gia are having a conversation”. So, the absence of articles with that function in English, although by now I’m used to it, still is not the way my brain originally works.
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Here is how I view this. Both of those things have their usage and value.
Single-word labels is a tool that has its time and place.
Multi-word labels is a tool that has its own time and place.
The problem, as you pointed out as well, is the obfuscation of those two different tools and it appears when people are deliberately using them on the wrong time and place to suit their own needs. The example you mentioned of people using vague terminology in order to evade future extra questions or in order to generate leeway for their statements is true. This does happen.
However the solution is not to “ban all one word labels because it is dehumanising” as the article said.
The solution is for the reporters to actually do their job and call out the hypocrisy of the people that deliberately twist the language for their benefit.
Carlin did that in his speech to the members of the press.
The press however is unwilling to do that for the news stories they are writing.
That is not the problem of the terminology itself.
Since a lot of us here are familiar with basic programming knowledge, I’ll give this example.
The multi-word labels are like the specific clauses of an IF…ELSE_IF statement where a lot of choices and a lot of “And/or” operators can sometimes be needed to achieve the desired result for specific cases.
The single-word lables are the final ELSE statement that is right there to catch all other cases or when we do not need to be overly specific or when we just are not really sure we covered everything.
Any programmer will agree that both things are useful and that if you go around trying to program with only ELSE_IF or program with only ELSE, then you are actually creating a problem instead of solving one.
All I am saying is that regardless of the analysis of the condition/labels/situation, the amount of embellishment of the descriptions of the facts will not change the facts themselves, ergo the more able we are to express ourselves without cutting out important communication tools/terms, the better.
Sometimes things can be offensive. Yet sometimes they are true and there is no way around them. And no matter how much you sugar coat them, the facts do not change.
A friend of mine is losing his hairline and he is getting bald. You think that it would be better if I told him “Hey, you are not getting bald, you are just someone whose ratio of falling versus growing hair is larger than one”? … would it make his hair stop departing? No.
Another friend of mine took a small consumer loan and then lost his job. You think that it would be better if I told him “Hey, you are not in debt, you are just someone whose income is now zero, yet your monthly expenses are still above a thousand euros”? … would it make his wallet full? Fill his fridge? Cover his loan? Ease his anxiety? No.
At the end of the day, all this cajoling who is it for?
To comfort the people that are having those issues or to comfort us and make us feel better and magnanimous?
I have the suspicion that it is latter.
I think it’s neither. I think we’ve allowed corporate PR bullshit language be forced upon us, because they are very good at convincing us that how they phrase it matters (and avert our eyes from the actual issues).
The company isn’t firing people, or cutting minimum wage but giving bonuses to CEOs, they aren’t cutting corners in safety measures but paying for lavish company gifts, they are not targeting unionized workers, no…
They are just “restructuring”.
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I don’t understand how a grouping can be wrong if the context is not wrong.
If I say “The Greeks spend borrowed money and work less than everyone else”, it can have bad connotations.
If I say “The Greeks generally live less than 300km from the sea, from any point in the country” how can this be considered “negative” grouping and “labelling of a whole people”?
On one side, the labels are demeaning and they reveal the mentality of people who use them for millenia. On the other side, using fluffy positiveness hasn’t really solved the real issue, from what I see in daily life. This kind of language lingers on the wrong side of “woke” for now.
Changing the label from “charwoman” (1 word) to “cleaning lady” (2 words, mention of “lady”) and later to “the lady who is doing the house-keeping” (7 words, stress on the importance of the task) doesn’t change the income or the social position or the insurance situation.
Changing “shell shock” to “combat fatigue” (shock to fatigue) doesn’t heal a person, but it sounds better on the war time radio.
Changing the label from “we fired the employee” to “we let our former team member explore for opportunities elsewhere” (corporate legal fluff) doesn’t change the fact that the person is now unemployed and probably struggling.
The need to ditch labels could be the result of cultural progress: we feel that we are doing something wrong but we still don’t know what to do about it and we tip-toe around it until we find a solution.
However, in the daily life, this kind of language has become a very handy tool to do the opposite and is mostly used as such.
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