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"

This

If you take out "lived," the sentence is exactly the same. "Lived" adds nothing and makes the sentence sound overblown.

How else would you have experience of being a prisoner apart from living the experience?

If I had been a prisoner, I would say "My experience of being a prisoner was..." I wouldn't say "My lived experience of being a prisoner was..."

Seeing/hearing it used repeatedly in a lay context, I suppose.

@ThisFluentBiscuit
The OED is published by Oxford University Press who publish a many dictionaries under various titles to serve different audiences

Lived experience appears in at least one of these.

Which OED dictionary does it appear in? Do they publish a social work dictionary? Wouldn't surprise me if it was in a specialist dictionary since the gruesome phrase seems to have got its feet thoroughly under the table in social work. Or do you mean that the phrase is in a textbook or glossary published by Oxford University Press?

I am talking about a lay context and the OED is THE world's authority on the English language. And it's not in there.

Even if you are autistic you never have 'lived experience' as a teacher. Parents of autistic kids will tell you that. You will always have no experience.

I think it's fashionable in the context of social work, where I wish it would stay. I accept that it's used in that field, even though such overblown and grammatically incorrect language doesn't make the field look respectable.

It just needs to stay out of the lay vernacular.

Goes both ways. You have been told over and over why it's wrong, what category of bad grammar it belongs to, and had examples provided of other errors in the same category, yet you rigidly stick to your false belief.

And since no one has yet been able to explain how I can get experience without living it, I win!

I sat on my sofa and I travelled around the world. I did it via Google maps and now my lived experience is that I travelled the world.

Quoted in error.

You’ve twice referred to midwives nursing babies (when naming points about their professional v personal experience). We don’t nurse babies because we’re not nurses.

Maybe saying getting frothy on Twitter is unfair. I actually do share your reviews around virtual signalling on rainbow lanyards. But that is very little to do with my work and I have almost no interest in minor issues such as that.
What I do have is a real drive for services to be created using the voices I've not just one type of person be that a council worker or HCP or a service user but that services are created with the voices of people who will be delivering and using that service. How is that at all anything to do with being "activist led" (I don't even know what that means).
I am more than willing to listen to other voices in our service in fact that is why we encourage people to come and talk to us about their experiences and what they would like to see done. I can tell you that doesn't mean people come and tell me what I want to hear but I have to listen very hard to some home truths about how shit the work we have done is. Rather than just try and keep changing it to what we think as workers will make things better.

So I guess you're going to say that you don't nurse birthing mothers, either. How is midwifery defined, then, if not a specialist type of nursing?

@ThisFluentBiscuit

Which OED dictionary does it appear in?
Oxford Learners Dictionary

@ThisFluentBiscuit
Also Oxford Reference

@ThisFluentBiscuit
And it's not new. It's been around since the 1800s

Oh, that's the dictionary for non-native speakers. Yeah, no wonder they need that phrase explained to them. I'm a native speaker and it doesn't make sense to me either. The fact that it's not included in the Oxford English Dictionary should tell you what you need to know about its accuracy. It's in the Learners dictionary because some pretentious prat is bound to say it to them, and not in a social-work context.

But wouldn't 'I have no experience of being a prisoner' mean exactly the same? The 'lived' seems redundant.

The word "cunt" has existed since around since the year 1230, which doesn't mean that it was in common usage.

Lived experience is a new fad in terms of common usage.

Nope, definitely don’t nurse birthing mothers. Midwifery is not a branch of nursing, it is a separate profession in its own right with separate scope of practice and legislative framework. The reason we don’t nurse women is because midwifery is focused on normal birth - nurses care for people who are unwell. If you are interested look on the NMC website.

But...women need nursing care during and after birth, no? They might not be ill but they are often injured and they are in a medically altered state, and in pain. Sounds like they need nursing to me! Maybe the nurse/midwife split is a distinction without a difference.

People who break limbs don't have an illness, but doctors don't palm them off onto non-doctors. Who cares for birthing mothers' episiotomies, for example?

Yes I thought it was probably normal lay usage that has 'triggered' you OP. Are your friends or colleagues using it for very normal everyday things?

No, I keep coming across it when reading things that have nothing remotely to do with social work. I read it on here somewhere yesterday.

You could have experience of working to support alcoholics op... or you could have lived experience of having been an alcoholic and you are now working to support others.

That's the difference.

But if you take out "lived" from those sentences, the meaning loses nothing. By definition, you can't have experience of those things without living that experience. That's why it's so annoying.

I'll try to shut up now.