DefenceAgainstPostModernism

ThoughtStorms Wiki

Note. This page previously used the infamous n-word.

It was used deliberately, precisely in the context of talking about whether there was a way to use such words, defanged or stripped of their connotations and social resonances. And use of the actual word made the point starkly.

At the time this was written almost 20 years ago, this seemed less of an issue than it does today. Society's sensibilities have evolved since then and we take such things far more seriously. In recognition of that, and as I have no desire to either upset people or to assert any right or justification to use the word, I've edited this page to remove it.

But, you know, if you wanna play the "look Phil once used the n-word ... what a bastard!" game with the WaybackMachine, then sure, mea culpa, I did.

OTOH, this is not a story about how Phil used to be a little bit racist and now claims to have changed his opinions. I am happy to say my opinions on race (scientifically junk), racial prejudice (very bad), and the n-word (ugly and derogatory) haven't changed at all. This is purely a story about what is discussed on the rest of the page below. How much control we have over what our words mean, and whether there are ways of changing that. Perhaps with formality.

As to that question, I believe the proposal below is still interesting and would be worth society exploring. I also recognise that social use of words has a huge inertia and that perhaps it's harder for individuals to unilaterally take control than I hoped when writing this.

In some sense it feels like PostModernism robs us of the ability to speak when it subverts our words, claiming to find hidden meanings and prejudices within them. (LanguageIsHolistic)

I propose a bold solution to this problem. We define a new vocabulary of grammatical markup which seeks to formalize our positions with respect to such problems, much as mathematics and logic have tried to formalize certain other concepts.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. We are becoming used to certain groups reclaiming derogatory terms as positives. And this is something that I fully welcome. At the same time, there are many ambiguities about this. Who is allowed to reclaim a word such as the n-word or queer or geek as a positive rather than negative? Does being a member of a group traditionally abused with the term give one a unique right?

Although I am not particularly interested in such derogatory terms, I am interested in them as a test-case for what I'm proposing here. So, let us take some arbitrary markup convention, for example {-geek} and say that this stands for the word stripped of it's derogatory problems.

Please understand that I don't intend such markup to either :

deny the history of derogatory use, or the reality of the prejudices behind it
claim that I am someone who personally has the moral ethos or authority to reclaim the word.

Instead, the markup signals that I desire to use the word in such a way that strips all derogatory connotations from it. Furthermore it armours this particular usage of the word against future interpretations / deconstructions of its meaning. In a sense the semantics of the markup reference future discoveries. It specifies "whatever problems are uncovered in the future, this usage is explicitly designed to remove them".

Of course, something like the n-word, stripped of its derogatory content is so empty it's hardly worth using. But some words will have more usefulness.