Names we call each other

[M1V0]

I think my main intended point got lost in my writing.

I am by no means advocating for the policing of language, or mandating specific terms to use. Group identities are more complex than that. E.g., I use UKB, read it frequently, and possess some self-identification with many of you as other users of the site and that we share common ground on a passion for our pasttime. I am not though, indicating I am a "UKBer" or anything of the like. My identity is far more nuanced.

My point was that our social identities and how we see our membership of particular social groups, which can be defined by medical diagnoses, activities, political views, employment, etc., affects the way that we can treat others. These identities, not the terms, are what shapes our actions towards others, and in particular instances, it is necessary to use language that does not strictly place others in a social group outside ones that we may share common ground.

 

[seankenny]

Nah, it’s not our identity that “shapes our actions towards others” - it’s our relationship with the means of production! Or at least our position in various hierarchies of economic, cultural and physical power.

Over emphasis on identity in a medical context is a handy way of obscuring who has the power in the relationship between healthcare worker and patient (clue: it’s not the patient) whilst pretending to do something about it.

 

[mrjonathanr]

Nah, it’s not our identity that “shapes our actions towards others” - it’s our relationship with the means of production! Or at least our position in various hierarchies of economic, cultural and physical power.

I'd agree with that to the extent that our relationships shape us and so create the sense of who we are in a given context. The world shapes us. Who we think/feel/believe we are does shape our behaviour too, there is a tension between all these forces.

Sorry to read you have not recovered Sean. Thinking positive thoughts for you.

 

[seankenny]

Thanks! Really appreciate the positive thoughts Recovering but not recovered is the order of the day, I think. Small steps and all that.

 

[SA Chris]

Hang in there!

 

[stone]

Sean: may the force be with you versus long covid!

About wording etc, I'm struck that this guidance from Disability Rights UK recommends NOT using the term "people with disabilities" but instead "Disabled people".

Using the term ‘Disabled people’ or ’Disabled person’ is therefore a political description of the shared, disabling experience that people with impairments face in society. It brings together a diverse group of people and helps to identify the causes of our discrimination and oppression, communicate shared experience and knowledge, and create social change.

https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/social-model-disability-language

 

[Oldmanmatt]

Sean: may the force be with you versus long covid!

About wording etc, I'm struck that this guidance from Disability Rights UK recommends NOT using the term "people with disabilities" but instead "Disabled people".

Using the term ‘Disabled people’ or ’Disabled person’ is therefore a political description of the shared, disabling experience that people with impairments face in society. It brings together a diverse group of people and helps to identify the causes of our discrimination and oppression, communicate shared experience and knowledge, and create social change.

https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/social-model-disability-language

I liked the wording on the parking spots in Dubai “People of determination “.

I’m a bit on the fence about this subject. Some “names” are clearly meant to be derogatory, but some are just neutral or customary.
I guess “Widower” grates and I have to tick the box fairly regularly. I describe myself as a widow. I can’t see the point in gendering it and widower makes me feel like I’m in a Jane Austin novel.
I brought that up, because I was shocked at the beginning of my widowhood, how many people think the term is synonymous with “helpless” or “pathetic”. The point being the above, mentioned by others, context, often exists more in peoples heads, than actuality and differs from head to head.
Intent, more than context, would seem the more pertinent factor.
I could make “aren’t you a ray of sunshine” either an expression of utter endearment or a fight starting insult, merely with intonation.
Main problem here is the forum post lacks the critical data, for determining intent, that intonation supplies. I bet the same comment, voiced in conversation, would have passed un-noticed, unless a patronising or dismissive tone was noted by the listener. ‍

 

[slab_happy]

Sean: may the force be with you versus long covid!

About wording etc, I'm struck that this guidance from Disability Rights UK recommends NOT using the term "people with disabilities" but instead "Disabled people".

Using the term ‘Disabled people’ or ’Disabled person’ is therefore a political description of the shared, disabling experience that people with impairments face in society. It brings together a diverse group of people and helps to identify the causes of our discrimination and oppression, communicate shared experience and knowledge, and create social change.

https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/social-model-disability-language

Yes, though that political framework is more favoured in the UK than the US.

And even within that, when it comes to talking about groups of people with specific impairments, different groups can still have very different preferences for "person first" language or not. Some groups may be happy to identify as "disabled people", but then have a strong preference for "people with [specific condition]."

My fellow autistic people are notorious troublemakers in this respect, because many of us (me included) actively prefer being referred to as an "autistic person" and not a "person with autism".

Which is partly because of the long and negative history of treating autism as a disease a person has, which they could potentially be cured from to reveal the normal person supposedly trapped inside. Whereas most of us experience it more as an integral part of who we are.

N.B. I'm not going to be offended if someone calls me a person with autism, and in fact I probably won't even notice.

But I do have a preference, and I will get very annoyed by neurotypical people insisting that "person with autism" is the only "correct" language -- not least because it tells me that they're prioritizing using what they think are the "right words" over listening to the group of people they're talking about.

There's no one-size-fits-all correct answer, beyond trying to listen to the people involved and seeing what they prefer.

 

[slab_happy]

I guess my concern is that excessive language policing can give the appearance of treating people humanely without any of the substance.

Fervent agreement, from someone who is generally on the "language matters" side.

It's cheap and easy to have a little seminar to teach your staff whatever the current version of "correct" language is considered to be. It's often expensive and really hard work to provide your patients (or clients, or service users, or whatever you call them) with good-quality care.

And unfortunately, sometimes the former is used as a substitute for the latter. And you can swap the language around but still be treating people in a shoddy and paternalistic way.

 

[Oldmanmatt]

People,

I know some guys with great empathy and very limited vocabulary. It is ridiculous to require that they should use words with subtle difference in meaning depending on your feelings. As long as a label not used exclusively in a derogatory way (gipsy, spic, etc...) it is fine to use.

I don’t find Gipsy derogatory.

I’m proud of my Roma heritage. Gran Glover (my Great Grandmother) was very much the Matriarch of the Glover clan until her death in the early ‘80s. She was a Pearson, though branded Didicai (as I would be) by her family when she married my Great Grandfather. She remained fiercely proud of her roots.
My late wife, being ethnic Romanian, was troubled marrying someone who was part Cigani (Wallachian Roma, in her and her family’s eyes), given the tensions between those two groups. :kiss2:

So Cigani became less derogatory in her (and her parents) view.

(My dark/olive skin tone earned me the lovely nick name Gandhi or variously Spic, Wop or Dago at school (Cornwall was incredibly WHITE in those days, I wouldn’t get a second glance now).
A few years ago I was doing a CPD course at Plymouth Uni and after the obligatory “introduce yourself to the group” thing, when we broke for coffee, a young fella from Southampton, complimented me on my English, told me I was very well spoken and asked if I’d been educated in England… :slap

Anyway, it’s intent, not the words themselves. Call me Gipsy in the wrong tone and that sense of pride will manifest itself in a very different way. :boxing:

Again, the written format does not make that intent obvious and the reader often applies their own biases, their own imagined intonation. I love the way my kids have adopted emoji’s to colour in that missing detail of online communication.

Which is my usual rambling way of saying what Slabs, MJR, JWI and Nail said far more concisely.

 

[mrjonathanr]

Cheers Matt. Maybe you’ll like this lady’s take (auto translated subtitles if you jiggle the settings).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHWqNu0fb9E

 

[Oldmanmatt]

Cheers Matt. Maybe you’ll like this lady’s take (auto translated subtitles if you jiggle the settings).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHWqNu0fb9E

Exactly.
Full disclosure though, my Great Grandmothers were Romani, Dutch, Danish and Maltese/Italian (all the males were English). Obviously, none of my Grandfathers were genetically related, but they must have shared a certain, uh, wanderlust and were all military men. I kinda think I’ve inherited that,
Quite proud of my mongrel status, you pure English types are genetically impoverished. :tease:

Truthfully, hardly anyone is “pure” anything. I think we’re just a bit odd in being aware of our ancestry (My mother’s older sister has the family bible, that documents her father’s line ( the Stacy family, originally Ustacius (now the Ustaces and the Stacy’s) back to 1066 and a Genoese mercenary who came over with William. Her family kept marrying back into the Italian line, with the Stacy Matriarch being the Italian/Maltese Great Grandmother. Daughter of an Italian communist who fled to Malta when fascism rose in the 30’s).
It’s a bit weird knowing this level of detail, but the Christmas period was fucking complicated for me as a kid, with the various branches holding massive gatherings, or the frequent piling into the car for another wedding/funeral etc and having all the stories repeated at me and my cousins, over and over. Shit, when I joined the Navy, my Maltese G.Grandmother came over especially to give me her blessing.

I wish more people were aware of their genetic diversity. It’s hard to be a racist/xénophobe under those circumstances. ‍

I’m just realising, writing this, that it’s the women in my ancestry that shaped who we all became, far more than the men and I know far less about my G.Grandfathers than I do their wives. Also, Gran Glover, wasn’t genetically a Glover, just as Gran Stacy, wasn’t actually a Stacy.

This might be one of my worst digressions ever. Sorry, as you were.

 

[stone]

I wish more people were aware of their genetic diversity. It’s hard to be a racist/xénophobe under those circumstances. ‍

Suella Braverman has full-on-multicultural heritage/marriage and yet is hardly the greatest champion of multicultural harmony (IMO)!

 

[stone]

I wish more people were aware of their genetic diversity. It’s hard to be a racist/xénophobe under those circumstances. ‍

I found this post interesting https://ewanbirney.com/2019/10/race-genetics-and-pseudoscience-an-explainer.html:

If an alien, arriving on Earth with no knowledge of our social history, wished to categorise human ancestry purely on the basis of genetic data, they would find that any consistent scheme must include many distinct groups within Africa that are just as different from each other as Africans are to non-Africans. And they would find it difficult to identify any natural or obvious subdivision of people into groups which accurately partitions human genetic variation due to the constant migrations of people across the world.

Furthermore, there isn’t really a human ‘tree’. Although we use this arboreal metaphor to describe ancestry and evolutionary relationships, the true structure of human ancestry is far more convoluted. Human populations have continued to diverge, expand and interact throughout the last 100,000 years, resulting in a continuously branching and looping ancestral structure: the real history of Homo sapiens is more like an overgrown thicket than a stately branching tree.

 

[Oldmanmatt]

I wish more people were aware of their genetic diversity. It’s hard to be a racist/xénophobe under those circumstances. ‍

Suella Braverman has full-on-multicultural heritage/marriage and yet is hardly the greatest champion of multicultural harmony (IMO)!

I don’t believe Braverman is aware of the location of her own arse, nor capable of finding it with two hands and a copy of Greys Anatomy.

 

[andy popp]

Interesting thread. As has been noted, behaviours are often or very often far more important and consequential than words. But words do do things - they are rarely only words (see J.L. Austin speech act theory, e.g. "How to do things with words").

One recent act of renaming that I'm interested in, because of my work, is the shift from slave and slaveowner to enslaved and enslaver. The former are passive, they just describe a state - those of being either a slave or a slaveowner. In particular, "slave" reduces the enslaved to that identity alone. It defines them completely. Enslaved and enslaver are active. To say someone is enslaved is not to reduce them one identity alone but is to describe an act that has been done to them. Likewise, enslaver describes an action, one that someone chose to undertake - true even for those who acquired slaves through inheritance: they actively chose to maintain the act of enslaving someone. Renaming these subjects completely reframes how we understand their condition and experience.

 

[seankenny]

It completely reframes one’s understanding… how exactly? The idea that people born into an unjust system have a choice over whether to continue to perpetrate that system or change/abolish it is surely not that new?

 

[andy popp]

OK, maybe "completely" was a little hyperbolic (and apologies for the rash of italics) but I do think the change from passive to active voice is significant. It's not whether or not an idea is new, but how we talk about it. That's the point.

 

[Oldmanmatt]

OK, maybe "completely" was a little hyperbolic (and apologies for the rash of italics) but I do think the change from passive to active voice is significant. It's not whether or not an idea is new, but how we talk about it. That's the point.

This reasoning, though sound for a given value, only applies to those who were and would be thoughtful in such matters.
That’s not as many people as some posters here might hope.
What ever form of name the thoughtful try to apply, the thoughtless will add a sneer as they use it.
In all probability, the more thoughtful the form, the deeper that sneer will be.
Quite a lot of people derive their own self worth from the diminishing of others.

 

[andy popp]

This reasoning, though sound for a given value, only applies to those who were and would be thoughtful in such matters.
That’s not as many people as some posters here might hope.

Trust me, I'm under no illusions.