Expand this list of related words

January 19, 2023 • 12:30 pm

All of these words are like the others, and you’ll see why. I invite you to add to the list:

nuanced

stakeholder

weaponize

standpoint

intersectional

harm

violence (referring to language or words)

problematize (or problematic)

I thought of more, but thought I’d throw it into your laps. The words are, of course, red flags for ideology, and when they appear in a science paper, or in a paper in a science journal, be careful.

118 thoughts on “Expand this list of related words”

      2. Maybe a typo, but such a great term. Biolence is what we do when destructing habitats and poach/hunt endangered species.

        1. Biolence is what the wolf does to the deer, or the (Caturday) felid to the tweetie-pie.

  5. I like “biolence.” Is that rough behavior in the world of living organisms? “Nature red in tooth and claw”?

  6. biolence is a Trash/Death Metal band from Portugal. (from Wikipedia, and they know everything–it is a different way of knowing)

  8. Jerry and friends, I still don’t get why “nuanced” has been degraded by woke/social justice ideology? I have always thought that being nuanced, that is, being able to think in shades of grey, was a good, desirable trait. Indeed, the woke have appeared to me to lack nuance and to try to think in terms of black and white, turning every issue into good versus evil.

    1. Having written the above, I think adding names to Jerry’s list is a Herculean task, given that the woke/SJW crowd continually generates a seemingly endless stream of neologisms as well as shape-shifting the meanings of old words.

        1. I always used to laugh when I saw Augean’s equipment on the rig. Their job – hauling rock cuttings and drilling mud from the shale shakers to skips to be shipped to shore for disposal to landfill, instead of being thrown into the sea – was perfectly sensible. But the number of people who actually understood the reference in the name was minuscule.

          https://augean.co.uk/

    2. It is, but it’s been degraded. What it means now is that if you have an argument that is good and the other side has no ready answer (like saying that we should ban assault weapons), then your opponent says that your view isn’t sufficiently “nuanced.”

      2. Or is it just that Alice, convinced that her argument is beyond debate, won’t listen to Bob’s counter-argument? Bob is trying to point out to Alice what she is doing while still trying to hold his temper in order to preserve some grounds for discussion. I mean, to use your example, there are lots of ready answers to the bald assertion that “we” should ban assault weapons. Sure, they aren’t going to change Alice’s mind, nor Alice Bob’s, but Bob could charitably describe Alice’s refusal to listen as being insufficiently nuanced. If Alice said to Bob, “Hmm, maybe you’re right, I’m not listening”, then there could at least be a debate acknowledging nuance. Otherwise Bob might as well just retire with his assault rifle and ignore Alice’s argument.

        When I was reading MLK’s 1965 interview in Playboy (with Alex Haley) the other day, my main thought was, “Boy, this guy totally lacked nuance.” But I had all kinds of ready answers to his assertions.

    3. I think it’s similar to the way the words “family,” “freedom,” and “values” have become a bit suspect due to misuse by the Religious Right.

    4. Agreed. Most of “progressive” discourse (especially the performative type on Twitter) is bad in large part because nuance is completely stripped out. You can only believe JK Rowling is anti-trans if you refuse to have a nuanced understanding of the difference between sex and gender, or if you read her and ignore all the nuance and focus only on stuff that makes it through your dichotomous filter.

    1. I translate “problematic” as “I don’t like it, but I won’t spell out why because that would make me look stupid”.

  11. great idea – I understand the jist here – otherwise ordinary words that have been used to a particular degree. Surely, ages past have seen similar over-use of words?

    Perhaps a subset would be words that blend or outright use scientific or technical terms / jargon. I know I am a pendant on this issue. So some words – to get them out of my system :

    binary
    anti- (.. you know what comes next)…
    intersection (… usually direct from Crenshaw as “intersectional”)
    … [ reads above…]
    OH!… well, how about that!
    … surely there are more…. that will occur to me when I have time…

    1. … as my theory which is mine is that one of The Two Cultures (C. P. Snow) feels left out and decided to use cool sounding terminology.

    4. I’m not sure about this :

      theory

      … previously, it’d be “law gravity”, but that fell out of favor. I suppose “philosophy” might be another – that has a colloquial/non-technical sense, that is also nebulous.

  12. interrogate
    marginalize/marginalized
    erase/erasure
    stigmatize/stigma
    structural
    performative
    site of
    contestation

  13. “Lived experience”.

    All experience by definition is lived, and we already had “firsthand experience” to describe what they mean. “Lived” here is pure shibboleth.

    “Experiential” is a border case (it has some utility in psych, for instance), but if not red flag, it’s probably yellow flag.

  16. I often say that social justice activists have weaponized the good intentions of well-meaning liberals. I will continue to use the word in that way. I refuse to concede it to the mob!

  17. fraught
    eugenicist (used in the new meaning of racist)
    and of course the obvious ones like: racialized, marginalized, oppressed, privilege, person of color, 2SLBGTI+ etc

  18. Racialized,
    marginalized,
    minoritized
    internalized
    heteronormative,
    cisnormative,
    hegemony
    whiteness
    microagression

    If we’re allowed phrases there are dozens more.

      1. I think it means that it is white people who assign people who don’t look life them into arbitrary racial groups in order to oppress them. So no one is “of” a race. They are only “racialized” as a deliberate action by whites.

        This is nonsense because other races carry out racially motivated behaviour, too: like Black people pushing Asian women onto subway tracks and beating up Jewish-looking people on the street, and Hispanic city councilors expressing contempt for Blacks. Indigenous people resent everyone.

        And also because there are genetic differences that map to phenotypic self-identification with what that person calls his own race. So the categories aren’t in fact arbitrarily socially constructed deliberately by whites or anyone else.

        It’s a mean, ugly word because it says we are doing something oppressive when in fact we are not.

        1. Among pro-woman feminists (IOW, not ‘intersectional anti-oppressionists’) TERF is a badge of honor.

  22. “enslaver”; in the Oxford English Dictionary [late 19th century] and the Merriam-Webster New International, 2nd edition [1920’s], the meaning is precise: someone who turns a free person into a slave. Now the Ultra-woke say it means slave owner. To me, an enslaver is a worse person than a slave owner, and lumping them together is degrading the language. I don’t mind language changing, but making it less precise I don’t like. When I see “enslaver” or “enslaved person”, I know the writer cares more about pleasing the Ultra-woke than being accurate.

    1. > To me, an enslaver is a worse person than a slave owner, . . .

      Certainly, and the enslavers of those slaves who ended up in America, the Caribbean, and Brazil were themselves powerful Africans, who procured slaves from their tribes as a form of tribute and sold them literally down the river to the seaports where the slave ships docked. Calling the (mostly) white plantation owners in America “enslavers” conveniently lets black (not Black) Africans off the hook even though they profited mightily by the trade and were well-respected in their communities.

      And of course there were Indigenous enslavers in North America even before Europeans arrived.

      One question though. If your own community sells you into the tribute slavery of some outsider, is the enslaver the original seller (your own clan who regarded you as expendable) or the original buyer (the outsider who bought you)?

    2. “Enslaver” is now the politically correct version of “slave owner”, and the word “slave” has been replaced in similar contexts by “enslaved person”. Some historians have questioned the supposed basis for these changes. David Blight is among those who have stood up for the previous ways of speaking. You are not running down the personhood of a person by speaking of the person as a slave if indeed the person is a slave. The idea that you fail to respect the person if you don’t switch to “enslaved person” is baseless dogma.

    3. I think that’s an important distinction – who enslaved the people in Africa? I don’t think it was only Europeans. I think some of it was from within Africa – enslavers who then sold those slaves to Europeans who arrived in sea ships.

      1. There has been lots of non-European slave trade from Africa, much of it by Muslims. The Indian Ocean slave trade (check Wikipedia article): “Slave labor in East Africa was drawn from the Zanj, Bantu peoples that lived along the East African coast. The Zanj were for centuries shipped as slaves by Muslim traders to all the countries bordering the Indian Ocean. The Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs recruited many Zanj slaves as soldiers and, as early as 696, there were revolts of Zanj slave soldiers in Iraq.”

  23. Reconning, misgendered, microaggressions (which aren’t real), etc.

    I hate “cis” – I am not a cyst nor a sissy. My gay friends (many, I live in Chelsea) call me “straight”. Many gay men I know are horrified by all this newthink. They’re not aboard the trans train of madness currently pulling into blowback station.

    It is obnoxious and inviting angry backlash for a minority to try to redefine a majority. Tactically it is stupid, it is also morally wrong, but woke narcissistic (there’s a strong, now better researched link) activists only care about their personal agenda.

    Which is often at odds with those they ostensibly want to “save”. Witness the terrible wider effects of the BLM scam.

    “Anti-trans” is a new invention, trans isn’t. Activists are making things worse for everybody, particularly minorities.
    D.A.
    NYC (FL)

  25. appropriate
    mansplain
    micro-aggression
    equity
    safe space
    trigger
    deconstruct
    narrative
    toxic
    disruptive
    survivor
    journey (most just commute)
    -shaming
    -phobe

    2. This is great!… and by great I mean at causing my eyes slowly shrivel up into raisins as the full explanations form in my mind – god, I don’t know how Lindsay could do it.

      I’ll be able to stop commenting now!

    3. Just in case my humor failed to land (I read the “agender” entry) :

      That site is very well written. Thanks.

  31. supremacy

    … nerds use it differently though – “quantum supremacy” IIUC sounds sorta funny – it’s not Serious.

    1. Menstruators and Womb Carriers are missing from your short list. I think it is clear that trans-activism is profoundly misogynistic.

      Are there still cases of anorexia nervosa? Or have they all turned into SOGDs?
      Women in puberty are often dismayed by their changing bodies, nothing really new there. If middle class, that maybe very difficult to cope with. They are dismayed at their physical changes, and on top of it they are ‘oppressors’. How can, say, a 14 year old cope with that?
      Three decades ago they used self starvation, nowadays it is SOGD. These girls need help in accepting their bodies, not hormone ‘therapy’ or -worse- irreversible ‘sex-changing’ mutilations.
      I’m 100% with Abigail Shrier or J K Rowling there

      1. Pro-woman feminists – by that I mean feminists who actually fight for women’s equality instead of “intersectional oppression’ – have been shouting these very same words for YEARS. Of course, no one listens to us. The media and legacy LGBT orgs know exactly who the women and men are.

        I don’t remember who said this, but a prominent pro-woman feminist said (I’m paraphrasing) that women have progressed from foot-binding, corsets, burka, hijab, and breast ironing to breast binders. How true. And how sad.

        1. No answer from Nicholas yet. I think he means what I know as “rapid onset gender dysphoria”. Abigail Shrier describes it as spreading by social contagion (like other forms of mass hysteria and adolescent dysfunction like cutting, drug use, and disturbed body image), so I’ll bet that his “S” is for “social”.

  34. We ought to invent some words, as if there were a quiz : identify the words that were never used in any written or spoken setting… or something.,.

    Example (on the fly):

    Identity clathration
    Black Chelation
    White Iodination

    Oh by the way :

    identity

  35. organic, when used as other than in chemistry or biology.
    I’m not even referring to labeling foods in that manner.
    It is that now, “organic” is becoming a catch-phrase for things such as movements. Example: “the support for this artist’s songs is organic”, implying that support for other artists’ songs is paid PR.

    1. I noted this above – they ruined “organic”, so it is no idle concern… or perhaps I should get off this small hill…

  43. Oy vey, where do I start?

    If one more person says “view X through the lens of…”

    STOP IT with the various lenses already! I hated this expression from the very first time I heard it.

    Also:

    queer – don’t get me started on this one
    LGBTQIALMNOP…
    decolonize
    triggered
    gendered
    misgendered
    TWAW
    intersectional
    oppression
    anti-anything
    “cis” – don’t get me started on this one
    identify as – If someone “identifies as” X, they are not X. “I identify as an airline pilot.” Well, am I a pilot or not? (No, I’m not, FTR.)
    activist – used to mean something positive
    Indigenous capitalized
    Black capitalized

  44. I find the expressions “rewriting history” or “erasing history” to be particularly galling. It is the job of historians to rewrite history. This is what they do. That is, based on new evidence or the climate of opinion they write, they present new perspectives on the past. This is why there is no “true” history. Books have been written on this topic, although it seems they haven’t succeeded in demonstrating this to the general public. However, historians must present their differing interpretations of the past while remaining faithful to the facts. That is, they cannot present interpretations that distort a fact or omit obvious facts that are necessary to create a persuasive interpretation. For example, a military history of the Civil War would be worthless without a discussion of Ulysses S. Grant. But, based on the known facts (objective truths) of his generalship, interpretations can vary about how good a general he really was. Thus the terms “rewriting history” or “erasing history” should never be used. If a person criticizes an historical interpretation it should be because 1) it distorts or omits known obviously pertinent facts (which could be called “false” history or 2) the criticizer believes there is a more persuasive interpretation of an historical event based on known facts knowing that the criticizer will almost certainly be criticized sometime in the future – so on and so forth. Professional historians earn their keep by taking the second approach.

  45. Two commenters have now said they don’t like to see Black with a capital B. I thought there were good stylistic reasons to do it, much as other ethnic groupings are usually capitalized, like Maori and Rohingya and Whitey. I use it only to refer to American citizens born to descendants of chattel slavery in America, which I think of as distinctive enough to rate a B. After all, Negro was capitalized. Someone born in the United States cannot be an “African American” any more than she can be a Serbian American. Besides, “Africa” is not an ethnic group or even a country. So Black it is. I thought.

    I don’t think it fits to capitalize it for someone who immigrated voluntarily from Somalia or any other country whose skin happens to be black. They can be Somali-Americans as immigrants, but not Black. And ancestors of Canadians with black skin were never slaves here, so they should be black Canadians if for some reason they can’t just be Canadians. And if I want to refer to sub-Saharan Africa I would say “black Africa”.

    Anyway, I certainly don’t use Black to valorize or prioritize anyone by skin colour, and I have to confess that when I see anyone else but me write Black it does set my teeth on edge because I think they are either sucking up or doing a power trip.

    I also note that Thomas Sowell and John McWhorter both write “black” — McWhorter says the NY Times applies their style guide and changes his copy to B. And the USC social workers who tried to ban “field” also refer to stamping out “anti-blackness”.

    Canadian academics have been punished for declining to capitalize “indigenous” so I suppose I should in solidarity not capitalize “black”. Especially if black people don’t either.

    1. “I use it only to refer to American citizens born to descendants of chattel slavery in America, which I think of as distinctive enough to rate a B.”

      I guess that I’m not as sympathetic as you with this argument. Just seems contrived to me. (Didn’t know that ‘Whitey’ is capitalized, and pretty sure that it’s normally used as a slur.)

      1. Well, it’s because you are not so sympathetic to my contrived argument that I am changing my mind.

        I actually don’t know if Whitey is typically capitalized. Yes, it is a slur, but when Canadian newspapers quote indigenous people using it, they usually capitalize the W. The people who actually say “Whitey” may not know about upper-case letters anyway, so there is that.

        1. “…my contrived argument…”

          No offense was meant. I wasn’t calling it ‘yours,’ and have heard variations of it before.

          “…when Canadian newspapers quote indigenous people using it, they usually capitalize the W.”

          It takes a keen ear to discern that capital W.

          1. Oh gosh, I hope I didn’t imply that I took offense at what you said. Not at all. I was putting my rationale out there to see what Americans thought about it. I thank your for your take on it.

    2. Agreed, but one unexpected consequence is the plural : I found myself writing “the Blacks” – that just seems wrong (in the parlance of our times).

      “Whitey”

      [ this is intended to be humorous ]

      In the words of John McEnroe:

      “You cannot be serious!”
      Wimbledon
      Final vs. Bjorn Borg
      21 June 1981 https://youtu.be/ransFQVzf6c

    3. I wonder if McWhorter capitalizes the “w” in “White,” and the style guide compels the Times to change it to lower case.

  47. “narratives”

    Quite surprised this has only been mentioned once before above, as to me this is one of the major ones. Its one of those words used to try to imply that my evidence-free view is just as good as your evidence-based one, as they are both just narratives.

    Yesterday I picked up one of my colleagues on using the word “narratives”, on the basis that we don’t want to buy into the narrative that it is all just narratives. (He agreed with me).

  48. I do not think anyone has noted this term, but this morning in a discussion of infant mortality on Colorado Public Radio, I heard the term “birthing person,” that is, a woman giving birth. They did not seem to mind “maternal” or “maternity,” but I do not think they used the term “woman” or “mother” once.

    1. The gender ideologues have made “woman” an offensive word. They are erasing women from all public conversion. Their misogyny cannot be underestimated.

      1. Striking out ‘woman’ from polite vocabulary seems like a step beyond misogyny, bordering on anti-human.

        1. Absolutely. It is dehumanizing.

          BTW, I meant “cannot be overestimated” not “underestimated.

      2. Yes, thanks! Someone else said something similar. I had not thought of it that way before, but it seems indeed misogynist.

  50. — Interrogate
    — Space, as in “the heteronormative space” (not, “Oh, wow, outer space is cool!”)

  51. Systems [of oppression]
    Unsafe (“This makes me feel unsafe”)
    Narrative (As in “dominant narrative”)
    Male-Identifying or Female-Identifying (a phrase, not a word)

Comments are closed.