I hate the word ‘Consumer’ or I mockingly call it ‘CONSOOMER’. Because that’s to imply everyone in the world is just cattle, but with wallets. We’re no longer customers. We’re consumers now. And a consumer’s purpose is to consume shit, whatever is put out there. Got money? Shut up and consume, it’s what corporate interests and capitalism itself thrive on. Consume and consume.
“Stupid” or “smart” or “IQ”. Take your pick.
Intellectual capacity is a social darwinist fantasy.
That includes insults that go along the lines of, “Trump supporters can’t read.”
[Aside: I dislike Trump supporters, mind you. But if they couldn’t read (especially reading Breitbart, or the Epoch Times, or the text part to Russia-funded propaganda memes) that would actually be an improvement right now. Lower cognition would be an improvement if it were real.]
Anyways my reasons are as follows: I’ve tutored quite a few people, and never found one actually incapable of learning a particular concept.
I have, on the other hand, found a large number who were underconfident about their ability, citing their “low” intelligence specifically. And unlike their intellectual capacity, this belief in IQ was actually limiting. And harmful.
I have also encountered people (outside of my tutoring) who thought their “intelligence” was a source of superiority over the masses.
They were not superior people. Their vocabulary – which people often use as a misguided proxy for intelligence – was offputting because they often used words they had clearly never heard used in context. Indicating these words were added to their lexicon unorganically, pulled from a dictionary or thesaurus rather than an adventure novel, highlighting a strange set of priorities that always made these people suspicious to me.
Every time someone calls me smart, I tend to suspect they’re trying to scam me.
Every time someone calls me stupid, I shrug because they clearly haven’t met all of the people who call me smart.
But in all cases, they are invoking the idea that some people are just capable of more, and others are just capable of less. It’s social darwinism, like I said.
And I find it disgusting.
If you want my respect, never appeal to social darwinism in my presence.
Calling customers, “guests”. A customer is someone with a business relationship with someone/something else. They’re exchanging money for goods and services and have a right to expect certain value for their money.
A guest is something else entirely. A guest has no implicit right to expect a certain any particular level or quality of services. They are dependent on the magnamity of the “host”.
Calling a customer a “guest” robs them of status.
This one’s interesting, because it hails from a time when there was more of a cultural underpinning to the term - companies had a cultural obligation to at least keep up a facade of taking care of their customers, and calling customers guests was explicitly meant to convey a sense of safety and comfort.
It has the exact opposite effect now, because the customer’s interests are often in direct opposition to those of the company. The company thinks it owns you, and no longer cares what you think about it.
Refering to women as “females” is always a massive red flag for me, it really gets under my skin.
Socially, female seems to be a distancing term, if someone feels it’s not their position to discuss women. To me female is biological discriptor used when discussing non-humans (e.g. a female antelope) and Ive gotten in the habit of talking about a woman firefighter or a woman conductor to avoid female, I think because it is largely associated now with the alt-right between incels and alpha-males.
To me female is biological discriptor used when discussing non-humans (e.g. a female antelope)
Also, it’s an adjective (e.g. a female antelope), not a noun (ex. look at these females)
I hear the word “freak” in movies and it rubs me the wrong way. Not because it’s bad but it’s because people don’t call each other that IRL. It’s only an insult in movies. It’s weird.
We said it a lot in the 90s
I think it’s very interesting to go back and look at those movies. Many words were used that are not allowed today. :)
Even Seinfeld has jokes that would upset some people today.
I don’t like the casual use of the word “hate”
Maybe it’s just me but hate is quite an extreme emotion. It basically means you want something killed/destroyed. I know people don’t often really hate the thing they claim to hate but I’m far enough on the spectrum to not take words literally.
I think it’s problematic when used in political contexts. Complex societal problems, like racism etc., are reduced to a feeling, thereby ignoring all the wider implications, histories and contexts while also reducing it to a mere individual problem.
