Venting thread

[Linguoboy]

I try not to peeve about semantic change, but the overextension of clinical terms to quite ordinary behaviours is getting tiresome.

Yesterday I was teasing a friend by pretending not to know what movie a particular photographic still was from. When he asked, "Are you serious?" I said "No" and continued to make wrong guesses. When I said something that made it clear I'd known the correct film all along, he accused me of "gaslighting" him. Dude, that's not "gaslighting", that's known as "playing dumb" and it's a technique used by humorists probably since the time of Hammurabi.

[MacAnDàil]

Welp... Both my grandmothers died within weeks of each other. This wasn't exactly a surprise: both were over ninety, and had severe health problems. One was such a basket case of medical conditions that doctors were surprised she was even alive. But... it still hurts. Now I have no grandparent left.

My belated condolences.

[alice]

My father died peacefully yesterday after getting steadily worse for a few years.

[Raphael]

My father died peacefully yesterday after getting steadily worse for a few years.

My condolences.

[alice]

My father died peacefully yesterday after getting steadily worse for a few years.

My condolences.

Thankyou.

[WeepingElf]

My condolences, too.

[Travis B.]

Sorry to hear about that.

[Linguoboy]

I try hard not to be prescriptivist but the overuse of psychological terminology like "narcissist" and "gaslighting" is starting to peeve me.

[Travis B.]

I try hard not to be prescriptivist but the overuse of psychological terminology like "narcissist" and "gaslighting" is starting to peeve me.

I am definitely with you there.

[Man in Space]

I just got this car and my mother goes and spills an Arby’s Jamocha Shake down the gearbox.

[Ares Land]

My father died peacefully yesterday after getting steadily worse for a few years.

My condolences.

[Raphael]

Our kitchen's electric kettle just stopped working. We'll try to replace it with one of the older ones that we no longer use, but there were probably reasons why we stopped using those.

[Man in Space]

This $@#% toothache…

[Travis B.]

Too bad hearing about RMS ─ hope he gets better soon!

[Raphael]

I sometimes get a bit annoyed by people who basically use every word describing something bad as a synoym for every other word describing something bad, and then dismiss everyone who objects as a pedantic nitpicker. If all words describing something bad mean the same as all other words describing something bad, then we don't really need all those words - we can simply use the word "bad" for all those things.

(Yes, I'm mainly thinking of people who call everything bad in politics "fascist".)

[malloc]

(Yes, I'm mainly thinking of people who call everything bad in politics "fascist".)

Yeah, there are numerous forms of authoritarian politics and lumping them all into fascism is careless if understandable. It feels good to characterize your opponents in the harshest terms possible, but you run the risk of obscuring important details. Fascism is a specific political ideology and conflating it with everything else just makes it harder to identify and acknowledge the real fascists. It becomes hard to have a serious discussion about whether a particular movement or leader is fascist if the term has lost all meaning.

[alice]

(Yes, I'm mainly thinking of people who call everything bad in politics "fascist".)

Yeah, there are numerous forms of authoritarian politics and lumping them all into fascism is careless if understandable. It feels good to characterize your opponents in the harshest terms possible, but you run the risk of obscuring important details. Fascism is a specific political ideology and conflating it with everything else just makes it harder to identify and acknowledge the real fascists. It becomes hard to have a serious discussion about whether a particular movement or leader is fascist if the term has lost all meaning.

Excellently put!

[Raphael]

My bank's website is so slow that it's basically unusable today. And it will probably stay that way until at least Wednesday. (Tomorrow is a public holiday here.)

[Travis B.]

(Yes, I'm mainly thinking of people who call everything bad in politics "fascist".)

Yeah, there are numerous forms of authoritarian politics and lumping them all into fascism is careless if understandable. It feels good to characterize your opponents in the harshest terms possible, but you run the risk of obscuring important details. Fascism is a specific political ideology and conflating it with everything else just makes it harder to identify and acknowledge the real fascists. It becomes hard to have a serious discussion about whether a particular movement or leader is fascist if the term has lost all meaning.

Excellently put!

As much as I don't agree with malloc I must agree here!

[Man in Space]

I am sick and tired of seeing how xxx gets treated on the board.

As far as I understand, his approach to making his work public is more emic than etic (I say this based on observations of him and his posts here, at the Other Place, and on CONLANG-L), and his conlang is more of an experiment with semantic primes and nonce/ad-hoc qualia than it is a, for lack of a better term, “conventional” conlang (and yet I notice that I’ve not seen any trash-talking of Moose-tache’s Akana puzzle from the last relay, UNLWS, or Sai’s and whoever’s gripping language, for instance). I am well aware of xxx’s unorthodox method of engagement on the board…but shouldn’t he be given the benefit of the doubt, especially with all the neurodiversity endemic to conlanging in general and this board in specific? It’s like he’s the Joseph Merrick of the ZBB and you pillory him with rotten vegetables.

I remember when shanoxilt came here spamming the board and necro’ing decade-old threads. xxx doesn’t do that. He tends to confine himself to a few select threads and contribute that way. Also unlike shanoxilt, he actually appears to be attempting to engage in good faith. I don’t know why he uses the methods he does, but is it really that much of a pisser for some of you that you treat him like a gastrolith when he—by appearances—actually wants to make meaningful contributions in his own fashion?

Yeah, I’m pissed.