Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th January 2025 - awful.systems
https://awful.systems/post/3278715
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from blakestacey@awful.systems
Paul Graham is on his bullshit again.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from blakestacey@awful.systems
As many writers (perhaps most eloquently George Orwell) have observed, women seem more attracted than men to the idea of being moral enforcers.
Ah, thanks Paul far validating my disdain for Orwell at least.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
George was writing his stories in the 40s, so at least has “product of his time” as an excuse.
Paul’s just a flat out piece of shit to be writing this nearly 100 years later.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from mosiacmango@lemm.ee
Fair, though in Orwell’s case the misogyny is not accidental either, but an essential aspect of the mostly conservative ideology he adopted for 1984 (contempt for the working class, linguistic purism, just really being a little too enamoured with his perfect crystal of unending oppression etc).
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
linguistic purism
That must have been really subtle, all I remember is a concern specifically about how a sufficiently totalitarian regime may try to weaponize language as a further means of subjugation, not that language evolving is bad in principle.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Architeuthis@awful.systems
I think the premise of total control through language is in itself silly, though that can be excused by the book being satire. But Orwell, for good or ill, was undeniably a linguistic purist, as one can gather from a close reading of “Politics and the English Language”.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
Huh.
I guess it stands to reason that the guy who made such a deal out of abusing language as a means to nefarious ends would himself have ideas about how it could be abused ethically.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Architeuthis@awful.systems
text/geminiThis content has been proxied by September (3851b).