Ratchet warning
One National Review – 4chan laughingstock of the week is a “language awareness campaign” at Western University in London, Ontario. It’s a Facebook campaign, the kind with people posing next to sound bites, which frankly makes the whole idea look sillier than it has to. Not all its points are obviously absurd, but they look solemn and self-important in that format, so it’s no wonder that National Review and 4chan are pointing and laughing.
Some of its points are silly though.
Like this one:
I don’t say “White washed” because it presumes “Whiteness” as tied to a certain set of behaviors.
No, it doesn’t, any more than washing white shirts to get them clean does.
Or this one:
I don’t call people “gingers” because a unique hair colour does not make one inferior.
But “ginger” isn’t always a pejorative. It’s one of those liminal words – it can be used as a taunt but it can also be just a nickname or a colloquialism.
I don’t say “ratchet” because it is racist, classist, and sexist.
And then…come on.
I don’t say “that is so ‘depressing'” because depression is a legitimate mental illness that should not be taken lightly.
Well yes, so you also can’t say “that is so sad,” because sadness is sad; you can’t say “that is infuriating” because fury is a legitimate emotion that should not be taken lightly; you can’t say anything emotive at all, because it’s all so desperately serious – oh wait I take back “desperately” and “serious”…
I can understand not using most of those, even if I do not agree. But ratchet ?
Oh, honestly. That is ridiculous. “Whitewashed” comes from a goddamned PAINTING process for fences and walls you idiots. I suppose these same people also think white women got the vote first yeah-huh.
This is performative and preening. It’s vanity, not compassion.
This one is interesting because while it emphasises heterosexual norms shouldn’t be imposed on LGBT people, it’s apparently fine that men dominate women?
Actually, “ratchet” is the only one that is what they say it is: racist, classist and sexist. It started as a rap term for a gold-digging woman, which expanded into an adjective used to sneer at anything a lower-class black woman might wear or do. Similar to the word “chav” in Britain.
Ratchet is a slang word people use to describe something that’s low-class or slutty, I gather. I’ve often wondered about its etymology and whether it’s related to wretched.
I just commented there: I don’t use “Western” because it privileges a particular culture.
Interesting — I hadn’t heard that usage before*, so I had a quick Google.
http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/04/ratchet-the-rap-insult-that-became-a-compliment.html
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* In Australian slang, “ratshit” is a deprecatory adjective, which made me curious.
Ah, yes. Depression is a black hole, so I won’t use “depressing”. (That’s the example which is closest to me. I know what depression is.)
Hunger is horrible. People are dying of hunger. So I won’t use “I’m hungry”, because hunger should not be taken lightly. Similar enough?
I don’t know what to think of all these language wars. I mean, I really do not know – no pretending. On the one hand, all these arguments of the type “the forms we choose, the linguistic phrases and structures we employ to describe the world are not indifferent to how we see the world” seem somehow plausible. Well… somehow. On the other hand, a cynical loser inhabiting a part of me thinks: “ah, excellent, so imagine that you win the war – that people start saying ‘sad’ instead of ‘depressing’. Then what? Ariel, sweetie, are you really that naive? Do you think they will give a shit about depression after such a change?”
It’s the same with gender. Known lists of genderless languages do not give me any reason for optimism. The way of seeing the world, built into our language? At best, it’s just a tiny element of a huge and complicated puzzle – by itself, not significant enough to make a difference. Almost worthless.
“Sad” instead of “depressive”? Genderless pronouns? Any other linguistic reforms? Are they really anything more than a form of a private protest, to be shared with your friends?
If anyone knows the answer, please tell me. I’m all ears.
I had a situation where someone got onto me because I said something I was doing was about “my OCD”. They told me not to go around saying that, because I shouldn’t make fun of people with OCD. The truth? I am actually diagnosed OCD, and what I was doing was indeed a result of my OCD. So I was chewed out by someone who assumed they know everything about everybody, or maybe just everything about me, without actually knowing much about me at all.
I see this as part of the same phenomenon – the idea that anyone using a word like that is using it as a pejorative or making a joke, or something else, because why would anyone say they were OCD if they were actually diagnosed OCD? That would be non-ironic!
I think some of what’s going on here is that there are usages that are unfamiliar to some of us. (It would be nice in those cases if the person had explained a little more about these usages).
I was unfamiliar with ratchet as an insult. Apparently whitewashed can be used that way too (in the vein of “oreo”, I guess).
See this Urban dictionary link: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=whitewashed
Jesus fucking christ. Take a word with multiple, context dependant uses, where one of those uses has something to do with race / gender / sexuality / any other possible demographic. Pick the demographic-related use to be the ‘important’ one. Throw all of the rest out by declaring that they cheapen it.
And presto! Social media activism.
See the Franz Fanon classic, The Ratchet of the Earth.
I can just see the comp lit masters thesis now–Privilege and fences: Examining Language and Race in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Ha!
For people their age, these are probably the primary usages they are familiar with. If they are part of the vocabulary of rap and other pop culture, then that is certainly true.
That is what they are focused on with these declarations.
Perhaps they should have made it clearer to old white folks like me, but I’m not really their audience and I think I figured it out eventually.
I admit I had a moment of thinking they were crazy, but now I feel like I learned something.
wait, people don’t know what a ratchet is? next they’ll ban the word “screw”…..
and ratchets didn’t just suddenly cease to exist because someone made a slang definition up for the word.
Very witty, Ophelia #12, and Jimmy #13.
Being an ignorant antipodean, I was unsuccessfully trying to work out the relevance either of a useful tool for tightening wire fences, or a misheard NZ and Oz derogatory epithet, or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Yeah, wretched got mangled into ratchet because people don’t have a good understanding of their primary language and now that’s what almost everyone in a certain age bracket thinks the word means.
What troubles me the most is how these folks are taking normal, everyday, non-sinister uses of words and assigning the most negative, hate-filled motivation to the speaker. If I say “That’s depressing”, I am not secretly laughing or belittling those with clinically-diagnosed depression. I am not lashing out against those with depression. I’m simply stating that that thing/event is depressing from an emotional viewpoint. It’s a legitimate use of the word!
Rather than realise or accept that 99% of the time someone uses these “troublesome” words they are not using them to harm others, they focus on the POTENTIAL for these words to harm people in SOME circumstances and decide to blanket ban them! But context matters! Why can’t they realise that?
I suppose I shouldn’t put exclamation points at the end of my sentences – someone might think I’m yelling at them and thus inflicting’ textual violence’. Punctuation-based violence, now that’s an area that hasn’t been explored before. Wonder if I can get in on that somehow, bolster my credentials as someone who is totally-left-wing-to-the-max. Oh, I probably shouldn’t say “to the max” either because max might make someone think of maximum security jail which might make someone somewhere upset for a few seconds.
Man, that’s so ga… wait a minute – is this “it’s OK to use words that are insulting to some if they also have other meanings to others” post a trap? Or is it only *some* words that this works for? Which cu^H^Hassholes have appointed themselves as the ones who get to decide?
Reading progressive blogs, I’d been convinced that using words others could find insulting was massively insensitive (and an expression of my privilege), so I’ve been spending a lot of mental energy trying to police my language of sexist, racist, classist, ableist and mental-health-ist(?) terms to not do that. But now it might not matter so much?
I’m with Ariel, none of this makes any fucking sense any more.
now I feel like I learned something.
That’s great to read. I don’t think the project can be assessed by quoting ginger (which is rare in US dialects, I think) and not fag.
wretched got mangled into ratchet because people don’t have a good understanding of their primary language
Except wretched and rachet don’t mean the same thing, so I’m not sure how you are drawing conclusions on peoples’ understanding. Mangled is a loaded term for the process of etymological development
What a pompous exercise in virtue signalling.
I never use the term screwdriver because screwdrivers are so phallic. Instead I employ the neologism ‘turnvice’
But then ‘vice’ invokes ‘vice-squad’, teams generally composed of hetero-normative white males with the purpose of e repressing gays, sex workers etc.
So I think I’ll decide on the term thing-a-ma-jig
This is really carrying PC to the limit. Indeed, if we can’t distinguish or express our appreciation for something because it might privilege that which we appreciate, then we can’t make necessary distinctions. David Evans says that he won’t ‘use “Western” because it privileges a particular culture.’ This is, I am afraid, nonsense. Ibn Warraq wrote a book entitled Why the West is Best, and he argues in detail for his preference. What is wrong about that? What is wrong about loyalty to your own culture? You can bet your life that militant Muslims don’t hesitate, and if we can’t hold something to be preferable to the most extreme expressions of Islam (which are arguably legitimate readings of Islam [see Saudi Arabia]), then we have nothing to pose as a defensive shield against this form of Islam. I think Warraq and Hirsi Ali are right to state their preferences explicitly, and I see no reason why political correctness must govern all our speech. Indeed, I can think of lots of reasons why it should not.
My view on this point is that there is a distinction between avoiding something like ‘retard’ and ‘whitewash’. Retard, along with a huge number of words, has a history that ties it explicitly with a demographic of some sort. It may have started out as a purely medical term, but gained additional association with plain old bad decision making, poor problem solving skills and such due to the similarity / overlap between developmental problems and simply being stupid. Thanks to that association, even strictly medical uses gained negative connotations, and came to be taken as an indult even when it was unambiguously medical; and so the term was dropped in favour of another. Several times in fact, because the process (known as euphamism creep) repeats each time a new term is coined, due to that overlap.
Anyway, the point is that that word (along with many other racially / sexually / medically / etc. disparaging words) is directly tied to a demographic, whereas something like ‘whitewash’ doesn’t. The only connection there is that the term happens to reference the colour white, which entirely reasonable given that term comes from using cheap white paint to cover rough exterior surfaces. There is no connection to white people other than being similarly coloured.
I never say ‘trigger warning.’ Because horses are oppressed by saddle-normative cis white men who wear six-guns.
I must confess I had never heard the slang use of ‘ratchet’ prior to this.
I think therefore I shall continue to use it to refer to mechanical devices designed to permit rotation or displacement only in a single direction, and as a verb to describe stepwise progressions that do not tend to revert.
I found this article not terribly well done, but since it’s aimed at the demographic to which “ratchet” is a familiar slang term, some of the comments were interesting. I’m inclined to the view that some uses derive from the expression gone to ratshit, which I’ve encountered many times over the years, and others from Mondegreening wretched. Where the UrbanDic definition mentioned in the article comes from I have zero clue.
Eric Macdonald @23:
Eric, I’m pretty sure David was being facetious and making a joke about the name of the university involved.
AJ Milne @26 – No, No, No, No, NO!
You may not be using the r word in a directly pejorative sense but it is a device that allows motion in only one direction.
Just as the Patriachocracy does with its Gender Norm expectations to people’s sexual orientation choices.
… and by “choices” I’m referring to the choices that people must make that are influenced by their sexual orientation not implying that sexual orientation is a choice.
I can be such a spanner sometimes
Bugger, I’m sure spanner probably has a terribly somethingist derivation .
And Bugger certainly does
And probably “And” since it implies that what follows is of lesser status
I’ll get me coat.
How about challenging ideas instead of the people holding those ideas?
How about not using words as pejoratives against people?
How about thinking about why certain words are ‘bad’ – and when?
How about reading 1984?
#22: “So I think I’ll decide on the term thing-a-ma-jig”
I don’t say “thing”, because it marginalises disembodied hands who work from boxes while serving the spooky and the altogether-ooky.
I had an assistant city editor back in my dead-tree journalism days who could turn darn near any two-word construction into a sexual connotation.
“Dead tree? My tree isn’t dead.”
That sort of thing.