To HATE the phrase "lived experience"?

[ThisFluentBiscuit]

Pet peeve incoming:

By definition, experience is lived! You can hardly have an experience without living it, fgs! And what's the opposite of lived experience? An experience that you've had, yet haven't lived? It's complete nonsense. It's used to sound falsely clever when an argument is weak, like "In my personal experience." Well, of course your experience is personal! You would hardly say, "In my neighbour's experience, I find Florida too cold in December."

And it's officially wrong, because it's a tautology. Like "top-floor penthouse."

I don't know whether it's the innate stupidity of the phrase or the fact that it's a linguistic fad that annoys me the most.

"stamps off"

So you are saying by using the phrase ‘lived experience’ it suggests more weight should be given to a statement that a direct statement of the experience? If so, that is exactly what people are objecting to.

But the phrase under discussion falls into a specific and official category of bad grammar - that is, a tautology. There's only one word for that. I suppose you could also explain it as repetition, but that's not really what it is. You could call it a redundancy, but that's not right either.

Here's a redundancy:
9 a.m. in the morning.

Either "a.m." or "in the morning" is redundant, which means you have to pick one to lose and it doesn't matter which one.

"A perfect utopia" is a tautology because the idea of perfection is expressed in the concept of utopia.

The fact that I keep saying it's a tautology is because that is the only accurate word for this grammatical error. Nothing to do with a limited vocab or argument. Maybe in faux-academia it's acceptably faux-academic phrase, but to any well-trained brain, it's a tautology, and it's bad grammar.

Oh, that too, believe me! In fact, it's that which caused me to zoom in on it and identifty it as grammatically wrong and faux-academic.

Or a schizophrenic could say ‘I have lived experience of neurodiversity’? (I dislike ‘neurodiversity’ as much as ‘lived experience’)

To me, lived experience means something you went through directly. Experience means something you witnessed.

That's not what it means though. Experience of working with the homeless isn't secondary experience.
Secondary experience could involve reading about being homeless. That's not what is being discussed here

But why can't they say "I have experience of ND"? Or, if they want to emphasise their experience without resorting to bad grammar, they could say:

"I have lived with ND ever since I can remember."
"I have experience of severe ND."
"I experience ND on a permanent basis."
"In my experience, living with ND is really hard."

What's wrong with the word 'tautology'? It's the perfect word for describing 'lived experience', 'burning fire', 'wet water' etc.

You experienced a car crash.
You experienced being a witness to a car crash. (Or, you had the experience of being a witness to a car crash.)

No need for "lived experience."

If you said that you experienced a car crash, the listener would assume that you were in it. They wouldn't think that you only witnessed it because you didn't say that you had a lived experience of it.

I would say schizophrenia is a mental illness rather than a neuro diversity ... Neuro diversity normally means autism or ADHD? Not an expert though!

Not in that context, no. As people keep trying to explain, its use is in a particular context and yes it is annoying when people try to sound clever by using words or constructions in unnatural ways.

Lived experience of going on holiday is up there with "please contact myself" or "please contact my wife and I".

or ‘I am a schizophrenic’

‘neurodiversity’ is meaningless - it is a group description that includes absolutely everyone. ‘Neurodivergent’ is also meaningless as no one is ‘typical’.

'I am sitting on a bus right now' would be far more powerful than saying you have lived experience of it. The first is direct and unambiguous; the second is mealy mouthed and open to misinterpretation.

Also, the reality is hardly anyone with a car chooses to use a bus on a regular basis. One person's experience doesn't change that. It would be interesting to ask that one person to see if there's anything that could be applied more widely, but chances are their situation is different to that of others who have a car and don't use the bus.

It seems that the phrase is useful in social care settings to emphasise the experiences of the vulnerable. It seems that just saying the person has experience of X bad thing isn't enough to get them what they need, which seems awful.

OK, "lived experience" can stay. 😂 But it needs to remain on its own side of the fence! It should not creep and crawl into lay vocabulary! 🤭

And as I keep trying to explain, no setting changes the fact that it's bad English.

Why though? It's loads more words. I have experience of [object] is a completely normal turn of phrase, only in certain circumstances do we need to clarify what type of experience.

By the way OP, have you heard of the term "embodied experience" before? If not, you might need a lie down after googling....

I’d never heard it until now but what a stupid phrase! I shall be sure to add it to my ever-growing list of language-related stuff that annoys the crap out of me…

I have not heard that term. Oh my god. What fresh hell is this.

You misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting you used the term tautology incorrectly, rather that it's unnecessary to keep repeating it. Anyone with even the meanest intellect following the thread will have been aware from your first post you dislike 'lived experience' because it a tautology. You made the point perfectly clearly and don't need to keep repeating yourself. You mentioned earlier that people who used lived experience may come across as 'dim' to 'a date' and that 'that matters'. My point is that you are also guilty of something less than ideal when it comes to self expression and as you believe 'that matters', I thought I'd mention it.

Not true at at all. They are completely different things. So YABU.
Take something like, I dunno, addiction. Having the experience of knowing someone who's an addict and what impact this has had on their life, career, family and friends etc is completely different to actually BEING an addict yourself. That is a LIVED experience: you're able to comment on something from the inside, not just the outside.

Come to think of it, I actually disagree with social work being an academic subject. Social work is a field job. Yes, there should obviously be training on how to deal with people who have x, y, or z issue, but I disagree with the way that social work has been made into an academic subject. It's a vocation. I had the misfortune to edit a master's social-work textbook once. It was for an American course. I've never seen such a load of incomprehensible twaddle.

Social work is - or should be - a vocational role that's mainly people based. Social workers should be out in the community, talking to people in need and getting services for them. For some unknown reason, in the last twenty years it's been made into a faux-academic subject. I'll always remember how awful that textbook was. There was no practical training in it at all.

Only if they actually have a neurodevelopmental disorder/diagnosis to which the terms 'neurodiversity' and 'neurodivergence' apply. Schizophrenia is categorised elsewhere in diagnostic frameworks. Also, many people with diagnoses of schizophrenia or related conditions find the phrase "a schizophrenic" pejorative and prefer person-first language, ie "I'm a person with schizophrenia".

I don't know how else to express that it's a tautology, sorry. I repeat myself because lots of posters don't seem to get that it's grammatically wrong.

That is why I dislike ND so much. It purports to mean those with different ways of thinking but there is no typical way. The biggest reason for differences in thinking is age - a young child thinks differently from an adolescent, a young adult, a mid-life adult or elderly person and this is reflected in our brains. And yes schizophrenics have different (disordered) thinking for life. Even if we just look at specific conditions that affect thinking these include dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, adhd, autism, FASD, genetic conditions such as Down’s, Edward’s, William’s, attachment disorders, learning disability, high IQ, sensory disorders (eg sight and hearing), cerebral palsy, acquired brain injuries, epilepsy, drugs, parasites such as toxoplasmosis…. And yet despite presenting ND as different ways of thinking, and some conditions being more common that adhd or autism, advocates with autism and ADHD take the weight lent by including all these as ND to claim to speak on behalf of all ND whilst advocating just for autism and adhd..