pyre

joined 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

yeah it depends i guess. saying "gays and lesbians" in passing is usually fine. but still, while you could say something like "this policy is discriminatory against gays" and not get much protest, the preferred use would still be "gay people".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

language conventions are rarely conscious. they just happen. every now and then there's a campaign for our against using certain words or phrases; sometimes they stick and sometimes they don't. but those are conscious i guess. mostly though it just happens organically.

like a perfectly normal word becomes vulgar in time if enough people just say it a certain way. it's not like people suddenly hold a meeting and decide this word is bad now. it just starts to feel like it after a while, so it eventually becomes so.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

wow #notallinvaders. i said kill or help kill. they fall into the second category. they still volunteered for unjust, illegal wars, unless you're talking about WW2 or something... the US had no right to be in any foreign country in the last few decades.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

~~ketchup~~ ~~catsup~~ catsoup

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (2 children)

i just suggested it as a shorthand. the actual distinction is whether the word is generally used as a noun as well as adjective, and when it is, usually it's used as a plural noun.

it makes sense because plural nouns usually are a quick way to refer to a section of a population that share an aspect. but using an adjective as a singular noun has the connotation of reducing someone to that one aspect of them, which is the adjective. and so using an adjective as a noun with an -s pluralization implies there's also a singular form which is usually offensive.

language is fluid and it evolves, so nothing here is a hard rule and there will be exceptions, and things might change with time. this is mostly based on observation and convention.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

yeah that's pretty much what I thought. shame he turned out to be such a chud. and an extremely racist one too. like, he was arguing for segregation and shit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago (6 children)

yeah, you're right but they're two different cases. notice how when it's right you don't pluralize it with an -s because some adjectives have a form of a plural noun, so they don't have a singular form: "a poor" or "a black" is just yikes. you can find words like "rich" as plural nouns apart from the adjective forms in the dictionary. you might find "female" and "black" as a noun for people too, but they should be marked offensive either directly or in usage notes.

so that's the distinction. "black" or "female" don't exist as plural nouns like "the rich" or "the blessed".

interestingly enough there are exceptions. there is no plural noun "the gay" but "gays" usually isn't offensive as a noun, but also "a gay" is weird and offensive. language is complicated.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

eh, he had a technical profession but i didn't think the humor relied on anything too obscure. i might be misremembering; it's definitely possible.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

first of all, i didn't call them psychotic. read it again.

second of all, you literally day they're broken. i don't know what to tell you.

and finally, fuck veterans, like I give a shit how they want to be treated. maybe they shouldn't thought of that before they volunteered to kill or help kill as many brown kids as they can. unless they were drafted or something then they get a pass. sort of.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

you can tell this is heavily US-oriented since there is no word for leftists. there's just "lib-" for liberals, and "trump-" plus 18 others for conservatives.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 11 hours ago

tbf he looks it. if there's anyone who looks exactly like BO would, it's him. with his disgusting color, shape, texture, everything.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 13 hours ago

depends on whether you sink or float

view more: next ›