unless you are using words bad for algorithms.I would much rather have a cw than all of these childish euphemisms for serious things.
It’s so jarring watching something online and noticing the person awkwardly skirting around the most accurate words to describe what they’re talking about.
Just sucks that the chuds just want permission to say the n word and make lazy transphobic jokes.
westoids when china censors racism: this is literally 1984 animal farm totalitarian authoritarian mass genocide
westoids when AlgoCensor by Google (powered by amazon web services) censors words that would make their advertising partners less money: this is true innovation, the market is solving all of society’s problems in the most efficient way possible, take all of my investment money
Some of those that work forces…ARE THE SAME THAT BURN CROSSES
UGH
Unaliving in the name of
You could argue shit like “unalive” and “ahh” is actually prescriptivism since it was indirectly forced onto people because of social media soft censorship, nobody actually wanted to use those words, they just had to come up with something.
is “ahh” code for the same, death?seeing below that it’s code for assEven if you invent an imaginary authority foisting those words down. Once people use them, acknowledging their use as ‘legitimate’ is the definition of descriptivist.
The only way to oppose such words is to be prescriptive, the correct position.
That’s the same way a lot of words were developed though. Like the word “fence” to mean someone who buys stolen goods came about due to thieves’ cant, a bunch of words used by thieves and beggars to confuse medieval cops. I think it’s better to say words can adapt to situations rather than saying it’s being forced. A ton of words that were underground slang are now just normal words.
There’s a museum/memorial for Kurt Cobain where they fucking say that shit. It’s gross. Like baby talk or something but for mod filters and now it’s leaked into the real world
I bet if he saw this he would un-alive himself again.
Yeah that self censorship is so grating to me, i hate the way that the capitalist surveillance state has reached its tendrils all the way into our daily language
I’m the same with people using AHHH instead of ass.
When I was a kid language was getting more swears and fewer slurs, when did ass become a bad word again?
In case you didn’t know, “ahh” originated as an eye dialect form of “ass” representing a debuccalized pronunciation used in some dialects of AAVE, I think Southern dialects specifically — so “ahh” was not originally intended as a word replacement, any more than “ass” was intended as a word replacement of “arse”. Rather “ahh” was just a representation of how the word was pronounced by some people.
The problem is that probably most people online who use “ahh” instead of “ass” nowadays are either tu-vuo-falling Black people, or they find “ahh” inherently comical, or they’re using “ahh” to evade social media censorship bots.
I’ve never seen this “tu-vuo-falling” expression (I know the song), and it’s kind of great.
The reason you’ve never seen someone say “tu-vuo-fall” before is because I literally made it up just for this comment! Heheh, I have memories of being the lone American in my school, hearing my peers loudly play Seppo music in the breaks, using gratuitous English and dressing up like their favorite Yanks, and I’d just retreat out of sight and drown out their noise by putting on that song. So I wanted to sort of channel that feeling, I guess.
Expressing yourself on TikTok often makes you wish you were Ricky from Trailer Park Boys so you could invoke the people’s freedom of voices and choices act so you could express yourself.
I can’t talk without swearing your honor
If I can’t smoke and swear, I’m fucked!
Barely on topic: The idea that “literally” has changed to mean “figuratively” is completely false and is the only instance I know of where people tried so hard to be descriptivists that they failed and did prescription.
The example “I literally died” is referenced the most, but “died” doesn’t even mean “got murdered” here- it means shut down, in an emotional sense.
If someone said “I dropped my pencil in front of everyone, I literally died” someone could say “really though” and the reply would be like “okay yeah not literally, I just got a little flustered over it.”
Literally died means yes, I actually had such strong embarrassment that it mentally incapacitated me, I didn’t just blush.
Actual dictionary writers have misunderstood this and included “figuratively” as an alternate meaning even though nobody has ever used it that way except when they’re talking about descriptivism. It’s actually embarrassing.
Notice that they did not redefine the words seriously, actually, immediately, really, for real, unironically, or honestly. Even though those can all be used in the same situation, “oh my god I seriously died”… Linguists you do not have to edit the dictionary to retroactively prevent people from lying or being imprecise, ok?
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
But the ‘shut down, in an emotional sense’ is the figurative use of the word ‘died’, not the literal kind.
YES. The word “die” is being used figuratively to provide a completely alternate meaning, and the word “literal” is used to affirm that the alternate meaning literally happened. If the word “literally” HAS evolved a new definition, it’s “fr fr” and absolutely not “figuratively”.
The word “literal” gets people too wrapped up in the mechanics, and it makes them want to go all fucking Amelia Bedelia everywhere.
Die means to stop functioning, to become weak, to wither. A motor can die. That’s what it means there. In that sentence, the word “literally” is used to affirm that there was an actual shutdown, that the person was really stunned, that they really had some kind of crisis, and that they aren’t just looking back on it with growing embarrassment after the fact and embellishing.
There is some added confusion because most languages really don’t have many words for feelings, so people have had to just borrow words to describe them. Emotional states aren’t inherently figurative - “that literally hurt my feelings” doesn’t refer to like, damage to nerve endings in the skin- “feeling” is just based off a simpler, older word for touch.
And again, it’s exactly the same as the words really, actually, seriously, honestly, unironically, none of which are getting supposedly redefined. I can use the word honestly as part of a lie. I can use the word unironically ironically. I can use the word literally as part of a figurative sentence. The actual individual words don’t need to change at all. You don’t need to “fix” the definition of words people are saying so that you can imagine they are speaking more plainly than they are.
Nobody who says “I literally died” is including the word “literally” because they want to ensure the person that the death w as figurative, that they didn’t have some brief cardiac arrest. Even if they say “BRUH I literally went 6 feet under the ground and fucking ROTTED” they are basically just joking. The word literally itself doesn’t need to change here.
Why not change the word “rotted”?? Oh I guess “rotted” now means “continued living in good health” because otherwise they’d be lying.
And most of all, FUCK. Literally is often an important clarifying word. If people actually start using “left turn” to mean “right turn” you should stop them! That will cause actual problems. Not because it sounds funny to you. Sounding funny is the thing that bothers prescriptivists. If people believe the “literally” propaganda and teach it to enough kids, a very valuable word becomes absolutely unusable and goes to the fucking graveyard like “bi-weekly”
I can’t stand it, but my darling 💚 uses it in her vegan advocacy social media posts just to avoid bans. She would flat out say “killed” if she could.
Does a green heart menas death? Is it because something in specific?
I’m just asking because this would be the second time I see it. Fist one in Lorca’s “Romancero Gitano”.
Me and her 💚 use green hearts all the time. She specifically uses them because of the association of the color green with veganism.
Oh, then I’ve misunderstood. Yeah green heart for veganism make a lot of sense.
I dunno, how “prescriptivist” is it really to notice something about how people talk, and know where it comes from, but still strongly dislike it on a personal level? Like you aren’t arguing that “unalive” is somehow a misusage of the word, or that it’s ungrammatical — you’re just saying that you find the word “unalive” grating, right? And the reason why you find the word grating is presumably because of the context around where it’s used and how it proliferated. I think we all know deep down that if we weren’t in the context of worldwide average screen time being six hours and forty minutes per day, with capitalists creating these Skinner boxes with robots carefully curating content, thereby forcing people to invent all sorts of bizarre euphemisms… That “unalive” would be exactly as grating as “red rum” or “kick the bucket” or “curtains” or any of the other less serious sounding euphemisms for death or murder already out there.
Honestly, it’s like how I go to the grocery store and I notice it says “peanutbutter” and “hotdogs” instead of “peanøttsmør” and “pølser”. Like I’m not going to act like American English having a profound impact on the grammar and vocabulary of Norwegian is strictly “incorrect”, because, like, my own Norwegian is noticeably Americanized, I literally grew up speaking American English at home and I know that it’s generally bad for one’s mental health to act like one’s natural way of speaking is incorrect and needs to be fixed… But I still dislike “peanutbutter” and “hotdogs”. And more specifically I dislike the context and implication of it. In other words, whenever I speak Americanized Norwegian, it’s self-expression, it’s a cohesive and beautiful lect shaped by unique circumstances; but whenever others speak Americanized Norwegian, it’s the Great Satan imposing its culture and language on the rest of the world in the name of capitalist exploitation and yadda yadda… And I honestly just think it’s OK to be opposed to that without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, you know?
So yeah, all in all, like, being a “descriptivist” shouldn’t have to mean emotionally dulling yourself, you know? It shouldn’t have to count as “prescriptivism” to notice how the world around us shapes the way we talk and, in disliking the current state of the world around us, being disturbed by how it manifests in our speech. The important thing to understand is that the language is a symptom, and so it is the cause that should be treated.
descriptivism is linguistic tailism, humans have the ability and responsibility to shape their shared language for the benefit of all instead of letting anything and everything happen with no consequence as if entropy and random chance and any kind of capitalist or fascist modifications of language are holy and beyond reproach. as a niche leftist community there is not much we can do for the moment but analyze, however a strong centrally organized revolutionary communist party of some kind should absolutely ‘prescribe’ how language is used to shape society for the better.
I don’t think descriptivist is really operating on a normative level. It is not taking the position people/society ought not try to shape the language. It is simply recognizing the reality that the meaning of a word in language is (*insert specific branch here - but often it is something like “common usage”).
Does this mean that prescriptivism is ultraleftism?
The weird thing to me is why people don’t just use existing euphemisms like “punched their own ticket” or “catch the bus” for suicide, or even just a different phrase that doesn’t even count as a euphemism like “took their own life”. Mangling words like this just feels unnatural.
not everyone knows these really
They can google “euphemisms for suicide” and their audience can google “what does x phrase mean”
Because unalive is one word rather than a full phrase that would take the whole of the screen for your tiktok.
Then use a synonym. Depending on the context, slay, destroy, exterminate, extirpate, snuff, etc. etc.
Imo the point is prescriptivism requires power or organization, otherwise I’m just an old manby yelling at clouds. That’s why “unalived” and things like it are becoming commonplace, they (supposedly) have evolutionary advantage due to censorship from an entity with the power to censor.
And when it comes down to it the symbols people use to represent concepts aren’t as important to me as the concepts themselves, so idrc if language evolves. Energy better spent elsewhere usually.
