Broadly, my objection is that these linguistic changes have had no positive impact on anything meaningful, and instead act as a corporate smoke screen for real issues.
Nothing they write is actionable, so I'm not sure how changing the language would affect anything. Imho it amounts to little else besides fear mongering, if there isn't actionable advice.
This is common nonsense.
Those people who have stake in new language push
and disparage and those that have stake in the old
contrast. It's the old 'not broken' argument but your
emphasis are particularly egregious in association and
I don't believe you have done any real work other than
posting.
I don't see anything in your list of complaints that is about the actual language, not meekly about the culture surrounding it. The established perceptions of "best practices" are much more in need of a shakeup than the language itself. Maybe replacing the language is the only way to achieve that change, but then it would be more like a necessary sacrifice than a goal on its own.
It hurts the language. People who could help improve and advocate for the language think twice before getting involved.
People want to feel good about their language of choice, see this use something else.
I believe another aspect of point 1 is that, they believe that whatever injustices are out there in the world, will be fixed if they just change the language to be of such a format that such injustice can no longer be described.
I completely agree with you, with the qualifier that the article is very much part of the problem. These sort of issues always start small and then the media picks them up and splashes them on the front page purely as outrage bait.
I have absolutely no reason to care about this issue. I'll bet 99% of the people reading the article have absolutely no reason to care. I don't care if I see Latin(o|a|x) on a form, if I was creating a form and someone asked me to include Latinx I'd say 'sure, why not'. This is an artificial culture war created by a click happy media.
I was responding to this: "Changing the language doesn't bring anything." and this: "You cannot reduce risk, you can only replace it with another", not to the Wikipedia entry. The Wikipedia entry is very reasonable, and does not make the same outrageous claims.
Definitely. It's an even weirder thing to grumble about here, in that the language change is the means to an end: saving lives.
If somebody were getting all riled up about tomayto versus tomahto), I'd say that a complaint about policing language was reasonable; that really is purely a language thing. But generally when I hear it somebody is actually opposed to a substantive change but won't come right out and say it.
That always seems weird to me. You'd think somebody so excited about being able to say what they want would, y'know, say what they want.
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