Righteous indignation in 3, 2, . . .
Bob Corker called the bailout of AIG a Tar Baby. Those of you who have cracked a book will get the reference. The ignorant will scream THAT’S RACIST. You know, like the time they did over the time someone said niggardly, yard-apes, and mighty white of you.
A pity that you have to choose words because other people are ignorant.
March 3rd, 2009 at 11:44 am
Thank you for pointing out the extremes that political correctness and idiocy has carried us as a nation. This issue frequently makes me want to pull my hair out by the roots. As the saying goes, misery loves company, and it is nice to know that I am not standing in wilderness of reason alone.
March 3rd, 2009 at 1:11 pm
IMHO, the real racists are the people that point their finger and scream the word.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Other words soon to be banned:
trigger, jigger, bigger, digger, snigger, rigger…
“Jamba Juice”
[ just tying it in with recent posts 🙂 ]
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:15 pm
It is a pity, but it’s also the reality. If you want your message heard, you don’t let a colorful turn of phrase get in the way. Are people overly sensitive? Sure. But that’s their privilege. When you’re trying to persuade and convince, throwing out a phrase that may a) be misunderstood, or b) deliberately manipulated by your opponents, is kinda stupid. Especially when the misunderstanding/manipulation can be anticipated. It’s tantamount to deliberately wasting your argument or throwing your opponent a lifeline. Bottom line is, just because you can say it doesn’t mean you should. As St. Paul said “All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient…”
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:16 pm
BTW, sorry if that offended anybody.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:10 pm
The listener does not get to define the meaning of words, the speaker does. Otherwise the listener, not the speaker, controls what comes from the speaker’s mouth. If there is a misunderstanding, it is incumbent upon the listener to accept the meaning applied by the speaker to the words provided by the speaker. That way the intent of the message is clear. With the listener defining meaning, black becomes white, bananas become penises, and being anti-Western-Civilization becomes the prerequisite for a professorship in liberal arts departments at colleges everywhere.
The fallacy that the listener is the final arbiter of speech’s meaning has driven university literature studies into the deepest hole imaginable, enabling the various victimologies (womyn’s studies, black studies, latino studies, sociology in general, even literature studies) to redefine the meaning of the canons of Western Civilization into a non-recognizable Marxist hogwash of bile and meaninglessness.
If you do not yet understand, I suggest you just stuff it up your backside. I can explain that last bit to you if necessary, just bring a large sharp-edged object with you for your free demonstration.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Wasn’t it also St. Augustine who begged God for salvation, just “not quite yet?” Yes, one can try to convince others using words. Letting them twist your words does neither the listeners, the speaker, or the public weal any good at all. Such shenanigans must be opposed, immediately upon their attempt, to keep the playing field of ideas level and free of intentionally installed potholes.
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Please, Brer Fox, don’t throw me into the briar patch!
Some of us didn’t have to have cracked a book to know the reference; our parents read those stories to us, not to mention Song of the South (do you suppose Disney will ever release that movie on DVD?)
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Blahblahblah. Really. It’s not a question as to defining the meaning of words. Words are a medium to convey ideas. Unless you’re purely talking for your own amusement, conveying ideas to others is the point of any communication. It’s lazy and stupid to take the position that you can spew any unartful phrase out of your piehole, and then it’s entirely the listeners responsibility to decipher your meaning.
Beyond that, you’re just wrong. Words don’t have fixed and unyielding meaning. A single word can have multiple meanings, that meaning can be modified by context, and the whole concept can change over time. Words have history and they have an emotional payload beyond their bare meaning. People are not robots and they react to things in a manner beyond simple logic. Sorry if that inconvenient, but it’s the way language and people work. It’s why we’re not speaking Latin, or Elizabethan English. It’s why telling a woman she’s beautiful is more likely to get you laid than telling her that she seems relatively healthy, defect free, and height/weight proportional.
It’s really not that difficult. Telling people that question your meaning to “just stuff it up your backside” may be viscerally satisfying, however it’s ultimately self-defeating if you’re speaking to anyone outside your echo chamber. This country just elected a socialist that will bankrupt the lot of us, not because of any qualifications or accomplishments on his part, but simply because of the inability of his opponent to articulate his position. Debate and persuasion is combat with language. You can bring a rusty knife to a gun fight and complain when people don’t follow your rules, or you can take the situation for what it is and fight to win.
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:40 pm
You will NEVER win any fight when you let the ignorance define the terms of the fight. Witness the past election which had much to do with allowing the (eventual)winner to define the terms of the fight.
And I’m to damn old to really care if somebody is too damn stupid(thanks to what is laughably referred to the education system) to understand what I just said.
March 3rd, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Two discussions going on here: words vs. rhetoric. Words sure don’t have fixed meanings (?) and/but, “Don’t tell me words don’t matter.” Rhetoric makes all the difference; Work Makes Freedom, Property is Theft, Ignorance is Strength, Affirmative Action is not Racial Discrimination, We have always been at War with Oceania – there’s a lot of good examples.
As far as winning and losing an argument, it sure helps that “the opponent” was unable to even deliver a position message, as they were blitzed by an onslaught of the professional word-twisters and sleight-of-hand artists in the Media who’s Noisemaker vastly amplified the “Articulate and Noble New Candidate” and dug dirt on the secondary candidate while completely ignoring any potential hazard on the other side – like tax liabilities and lobbyist positions and such…
March 3rd, 2009 at 7:09 pm
One astute commenter wrote, “Folks, you have to stop telling me what I’m thinking from the context of what you’re thinking.”
March 3rd, 2009 at 9:48 pm
You are absolutely right… and it is nowhere near my problem if the person I am speaking too is too stupid/uneducated/narrow-minded to adequately grasp the accurate history and “emotional payload” that the words I am using have.
Now, if the person is interested in correcting their deficiency, I will stumble over myself to try and help them out. But if all they do is pointlessly and ignorantly spout off rhetoric and name-calling in response, more than adequately displaying their own ignorance and idiocy… well, hell, I honestly do not give a shit.
Sorry, but if the ignorant cannot educate themselves, get someone else to help them, or ask help from others in order to keep up, it really is not my problem.
March 4th, 2009 at 12:50 am
junyo, the more Latin and Elizabethan English you learn, the better you are at divining the speaker’s meaning. Try it.
“Playing dumb” works for a certain segment of the national commentariat just now, but there is no future in it. They’ve reached the point at which they have to deny their own history and culture, not just that of others, to maintain intellectual deniability. Nobody’s that stupid. They’re having you on, lad.
March 4th, 2009 at 12:58 am
Please never use the word ‘the’ in my presence.
It highly offends me and means you are an awful person for using it.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:29 am
“You will NEVER win any fight when you let the ignorance define the terms of the fight.”
And when the fight is for another person’s conscience and understanding, how do you redefine the terms of the fight? Beat them until they agree with your definitions and viewpoints, then have a conversation? Sometimes you can chose the battlefield, and sometimes the battlefield is chosen for you. Doesn’t mean you can simply refuse to fight. You’re absolutely right, the educational system is laughable. It also cranks out voters, year after year, that the other side has indoctrinated. If you don’t start counteracting that effect, the battle’s already lost.
“As far as winning and losing an argument, it sure helps that “the opponent” was unable to even deliver a position message, as they were blitzed by an onslaught of the professional word-twisters and sleight-of-hand artists in the Media who’s Noisemaker vastly amplified the “Articulate and Noble New Candidate” and dug dirt on the secondary candidate while completely ignoring any potential hazard on the other side – like tax liabilities and lobbyist positions and such…”
All very true. And irrelevant. The only thing that matters is right now. The tactic of your opponent is to bog you down in minutia, argue about clerical errors, bad turns of phrase, poor choice of words; anything to aviod a substantive discussion. GWB has a degree in history and an MBA from Harvard and we spent most of his administration talking about his speaking style (or lack thereof). And you might think that’s unfair, and it is. It’s also unfair of me to kick you in the balls, but if we’re fighting and you give me an opening, you bet your ass I’m kicking you square in the nuts. Respect your enemy, assume that he’s just as smart, and wants to win just as badly. If you give him an opening, he’ll take it. So why give him an utterly predictable opening. If you know a word or phrase is a potential flashpoint, you have no one to blame but yourself when your opponent exploits it.
“…and it is nowhere near my problem if the person I am speaking too is too stupid/uneducated/narrow-minded to adequately grasp the accurate history and “emotional payload” that the words I am using have.” If you’re actually trying to communicate it is. A comedian bombs and he says “My material is too smart for the room.” Maybe, or maybe you suck. because his job was to deliver humor to that audience, and he couldn’t figure out how to. If your goal is just to rant, use whatever language you want. But if your goal is to convince people that don’t necessarily already agree with you that their perhaps deeply and genuinely held beliefs are wrong, and yours are right (which is how political shifts happen), then it’s your responsibility to remove as many barriers as you can. And it helps to not assume that the listener is “stupid/uneducated/narrow-minded”.
“junyo, the more Latin and Elizabethan English you learn, the better you are at divining the speaker’s meaning. Try it.”
Thanks for making the assumption that I haven’t, lol. As I said in response to emdfl, I don’t believe it’s having me (or anyone else) on. I think it’s the effect of 30 years of culture war battlefield prep, primarily via educational institutions.
“Please never use the word ‘the’ in my presence.”
Had I had a reasonable anticipation that a certain word would have caused you offense, I certainly would have never used it. Understand that my only goal was to open a dialog. Perhaps, as a separate discussion, if you were to explain why that word offends you so, it would help me to understand, and us to better communicate in the future. In any case, our topic at hand is…
You can rage against it and get huffy (which basically equals a blocked shot by your opponent) or you can accept extant reality and work with it.