Believing There Are Only Two Genders Is ‘Genderism’

Hot Air:  Connecticut officially redefines all language dealing with “gender”

According the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DCF), which published an LGBT glossary of more than 250 terms, the belief that there are only two genders — male and female — should be treated as “genderism.”

The guide, which was published as part of the DCF’s Safe Harbors Project and was last updated July 7, defines “genderism” as: “The system of belief that there are only two genders (men and women) and that gender is inherently tied to one’s sex assigned at birth. It holds cisgender people as superior to transgender people, and punishes or excludes those who don’t conform to society’s expectations of gender.”

“Gender oppression,” according to the heavily-Democratic state, is “The societal, institutional, and individual beliefs and practices that privilege cisgender (gender-typical people) and subordinate and disparage transgender or gender variant people. Also known as ‘genderism.’”

Executive Privilege

The German word Hinrichtung caught my eye the other day. Hinrichtung means "execution" and you can guess why it's in the news. Our word "execution" is Norman and bland; it actually comes from fusing the Latin ex + sequi in the sense of "follows from." In the consequent fusion, one of the sounds "x" or "s" was put to death, making exe-que.  Our related words "chief executive" and "executive branch" could be thought of as the "follow-fromers" of the law. The governmental sense of the word came first while the business sense of the word was apparently a 20th century one. This got me to thinking of who best in American politics has "executive experience."

Back to Hinrichtung. I often look to German for insight into word meanings. The Germans are sometimes brutally honest in their metaphors. In this case, Hinrichtung is best understood as the verb: hinrichten is a melding of hin + richten with hin* meaning "away from" and richten meaning "to judge" (Der Richter means the judge). So putting them together, hinrichten means "to put away by judgement."
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* Old and Middle English were full of germanic directional adverbs like hin. Think hither, thither, whither, whence, thence, and henceforth. Legalese preserves these fossils.

Islamic Scourge

I was not aware that ISIS was in Afghanistan until just now. ISIL (the President's favorite term) will no longer do and nor will ISIS, given their etymologies. I suggest just IS which stands for Islamic Scourge.

link to original

It Depends On What The Meaning Of IS Is

I don't get the fuss about calling those bastards radical Islamists. Or radical Muslims. I just don't get it. Who would be upset with terms like radical Christians, or radical Jews? The term "radical" has long since lost its etymological roots in root.  Words change in meaning: for example "radical" means something very specific in chemistry about which most people are not even aware. So people can't be objecting to the adjective "radical."  It must be "Islam" that's driving them bonkers.

If using the word "Islam" bothers progressives so much, they must be seething with resentment over the first "I" in ISIS.

First Mate Of The Ship Of State

Over at Althouse, somefeller obliquely piqued my interest:

somefeller wrote: Plus, he may become the first First Husband.

This raises a practical question. Should such a man be referred to as "First Husband" given the already extant meaning of "first husband" in the context of divorce? "First Husband" would signal a need to retitle "First Lady" as "First Wife."

"First Gentleman" would better reflect the quaint "First Lady," a title already cemented by tradition. Of course, the GLAAD handers would prefer "First Partner" as battleground preparation and reparation for years of oppression.

Thoughts?

Orwell On Speech

Rabel linked to a piece by Jason Lee Steorts called "Steyn On Speech:"

I admire Mark Steyn’s gallantry in defending freedom of speech and thought, but his weekend column is less than illuminating. It seems to have been 200 percent felt and half thought. Sorting through and categorizing the jumble of quite different examples that provoked Mark’s dudgeon was nonetheless a useful exercise. Here are my undoubtedly boring conclusions. 

When it comes to the legal restriction of speech, or the legal coercion of dissenters, I’ll storm the barricade with Mark. It amazes me that any soi-disant free people tolerate that sort of thing. 

The use of speech to criticize other speech is something else, and the distinction between state coercion and cultural coercion is one that Mark typically doesn’t acknowledge, to the detriment of his arguments. That distinction can get pretty blurry in our present legal arrangements, but in principle the people have every right to make pariahs of whom they will, and to slug it out among themselves, so to speak, when they disagree. 

Still, Mark has a point, and we should ask ourselves what sort of culture we’d like to live in. The readiness to ostracize those who offend our sensibilities is stifling and unhealthy. Except in very extreme cases, we should criticize speech rather than condemn speakers. This is also prudent. Martyrs are popular; better to make an argument. 

On the other hand, I can’t agree with Mark that anything of value is lost when derogatory epithets go out of bounds in polite society. They tend to be bad even for humor, substituting stereotype and cliché for originality. People who used them in different times need not be regarded as monstrous, nor must the canon be censored; we could instead feel good about having awoken to a greater civility and make generous allowances for human fallibility. 

By way of criticizing speech, I’ll say that I found the derogatory language in this column, and especially the slur in its borrowed concluding joke, both puerile in its own right and disappointing coming from a writer of such talent.

I boldfaced the Anglo-Saxon (A-S) nouns and underlined the A-S verbs to emphasize why I think this is a particularly poor piece of writing. Out of the whole piece, only the most vague terms come from Anglo-Saxon: freedom, speech, thought, time, slur, blurry; only two verbs, "slug" and "storm" are Anglo-Saxon, and "storm the barricade" is terribly worn metaphor.

George Orwell wrote in his wellspring of wisdom, Politics And The English Language:

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

"A Brief History of Dude"

"Dude may be the most Mandarin Chinese word in American English. In Mandarin, depending on how I intone the single syllable ma, I could be saying “mother” (mā), or I could be saying something as radically distinct as “horse” (mă)."

Dude has a comparable quality. Just think of the last time you did something awesome in the presence of a friend who affirmed your awesomeness with the exclamation Duuude! Or the last time you said something objectionable to someone who began setting you straight with a firm and sober Dude. There may not be any obvious difference in denotation between these cases, but the difference in connotation is, you’ll appreciate from experience, pretty major."

[A]ccording to Scott F. Kiesling, the author of a seminal 2004 study from the journal American Speech—titled, yes, “Dude”—the term has long implied a particular understanding of fellowship among guys. Its dominant linguistic function, Kiesling argues, has been to enable men, mainly young men, to address one another in a conspicuously straight mode of laid-back camaraderie: “Dude allows men to create a stance … of closeness with other men (satisfying masculine solidarity) that also maintains a casual … distance (thus satisfying heterosexism).”

And yet women now use the word, too—both with men and with other women. Perhaps unsurprisingly, usage patterns vary by gender: Kiesling’s work indicates, for instance, that women show a relative tendency to deploy the term when trying to mitigate conflict with friends or acquaintances. (“Dude, you know I’d never do that.”) But even this usage is a variation on a theme. You can, after all, take the masculinity out of dude, and it still works as a way of establishing solidarity without intimacy."

If that makes you wonder whether you can take the heterosexuality out as well, consider Bret Easton Ellis. Recently, on Out.com, the (gay) novelist lit into the entertainment industry for, among other condescensions, chronically portraying gay men as “bitchy clowns or the queeny best friend.” How did Ellis describe the kind of chill, unself-consciously gay character he’d like to see more of—the “not-famous, slobby, somewhat lazy” guy who “just wants to be himself”? The gay dude. “Why,” Ellis asked, “isn’t the gay dude I have always known and the gay dude I have always wanted to be not front and center?”

Written by a dude named J.J. Gould of The Atlantic via Instapundit