Whig theory of language
“Proud” that what? That people are pretending men can get pregnant and push out children and breastfeed them? How is that something to be proud of? How is it “as society progresses”? What’s progress about pretending both sexes make children in their bodies?
How is it moving forward to pretend that men can gestate children?
I note that Sally’s tweet was sent while the debate was in progress in the House of Lords though, with her characteristic dimness, she seemed unaware of that. Anyway the Barkers* went on barking but the caravan has rolled on its way, and not in a direction that will be to Sally’s liking: here’s the report of today’s debate in the House of Lords where there was almost unanimous support for amending the bill to refer to “mothers”.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2021-02-25/debates/DFB70DF3-ABA0-4168-8DBF-DBDA63BA4AEE/MinisterialAndOtherMaternityAllowancesBill
*Baroness Barker is a LibDem peer who was one of only two to speak against the proposed amendments.
Actual facts are old fashioned, and your insistence in their preeminence is very… white colonialist of you, Ophelia.
There is no “moving forwards”… still trying to sell that “arc of history” myth.
Seriously, when King was talking about that arc, he was lying. He knew he was lying… and he knew how important that lie was to tell.
Glad I’m not the only one who sees this…I get people (including my therapist) arguing that we always move toward a more just, better society. Guess none of them have studied Greek or Roman history?
It is my opinion, based on observations and reading and other logical rational stuff (therefore, western colonialist imperialist TERF stuff) that history seems more likely to fly in a circle…or maybe it’s more of an oscillation.
I think it was Twain that said that “history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes”? Seems pretty true…
I especially like pointing to Revolutionary France
1792 1st Republic -> 1793 The Reign of Terror (the first time the left lost its mind) -> 1794 Robespierre executed, Thermidore shit happens -> 1799 Napoleon comes in -> 1815 Waterloo -> Louis the 18th seated again
That was a span of 23 years… Bush Jr. -> Capitol Insurrection was 20. The Third Reich lasted 12 years and defeated the first anti-fascists. That’s one thing the Woke don’t have: an appreciation for history.
To appreciate history you have to know something about it. Since the woke consider history to be an enterprise of white western imperialist colonialist TERF Karens, they refuse to consider it as relevant.
The notion that language change is evolution has always bothered me, and I think I know why now: it doesn’t really fit with either the biological or the popular sense of “evolution”. For the biological sense, I can think of several reasons why it doesn’t fit: for example, language change is more Lamarckian than Darwinian, and most language change is akin to genetic drift rather than adaptation (with the obvious exception being some additions to or changes in vocabulary).
For the popular sense of evolution as improvement or progress, well, no. The Great Vowel shift in English, to give one example, didn’t make English better or worse, just different*. And of course adding or changing vocabulary to fit new or shifting concepts isn’t necessarily progress.
In short, language doesn’t evolve**, it just changes.
*It did mess with our spelling, of course, but spelling isn’t language; it’s a representation of language.
**There is a sense in which language evolved, in that at some point in our evolutionary history we went from having no language to having modern language, and that may have been (likely was, in my opinion) a gradual change, but there’s no way with our current tools to reconstruct that evolution.
Quite; that’s what I meant by “Whig theory” – the cheery belief that progress is inevitable, aka that all change = progress, aka that humanity is on an upward path, aka that the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice.
I really recommend as an antidote to the Whig theory of history, the German historian Reinhart Kosellek’s ‘Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories’. It is very thought-provoking, though the translation at times leaves something to be desired. (The title, for example, would be better translated as ‘Strata of Time’, and the reasons the translators provide for not doing so are very unconvincing.) There is also John Gray’s work.
The ‘evolution’ of language – ‘evolution’ is a bad word in this connexion, but one can certainly, I think, talk in certain limited respects of its ‘improvement’ or ‘development’, as in, for example, the development of clear, discursive language for the purpose of argumentation.