@Ereshkigalangcleg
Mumsnet is Karen training college
2/10 wouldn't watch again
Alan Jacobs wrote a thought-provoking piece a while ago on
exhausted languages . Jacob's challenge:
Anyway, when you do this kind of work you develop — or you damn well ought to develop — an awareness that many of our vocabularies are evanescent because of their highly limited explanatory power. You see, in a given discipline or topic area, one vocabulary coming on as another fades away, and you don’t expect the new one to last any longer than the previous one did. I think this makes it easier for you to consider the possibility that a whole explanatory language is basically useless. But while those languages last people get profoundly attached to them and are simply unwilling to question them — they become axioms for their users — which means that conversations cease to be conversations but rather turn into endlessly iterated restatements of quasi-religious conviction. “Intersecting monologues,” as Rebecca West said.
Often when I’m grading essays, or talking to my students about their essays, I notice that a certain set of terms are functioning axiomatically for them in ways that impede actual thought. When that happens I will sometimes ask, “How would you describe your position if you couldn’t use that word?” And I try to force the same discipline on myself on those occasions (too rare of course) when I realize that I am allowing a certain set of terms to become an intellectual crutch.
blog.ayjay.org/excerpts-from-my-sent-folder-on-exhausted-languages/
What would these self-styled elites do if they had to had to talk about those of us that they disdain without recourse to the exhausted and meaningless languages of Karen Nazis Bigots and Transphobes ?
Would they actually have to read through MN to determine how to describe us? Would they agree with Sarah Pedersen that we are subaltern counterpublics and to be celebrated? Would they begin to realise the many ways in which they're demonstrating their cultural purblindness?