No, accepting the downsides of evolving languages is definitely not like advocating the preservation of physical architectural barriers. I’ll assume that you have used an hyperbole for humorous reasons.
I want to clarify that I care for old people like you who are becoming even more senile and decrepit; we eighteen years olds can be empathetic as well and respectful of the unavoidable consequences of cell degeneration.
I don’t want to dismiss the entire point “elders not easily adapting to language/social change” despite its striking resemblance to the classic “Think of the children” rhetoric, so I’ll just say that pointing out these difficulties supports at most the argument that every change has also downsides. It tells nothing about how allegedly bad the change is from a global perspective.
And I agree with the final goal of building a more welcoming environment, but people who feel more easily offended or that adhere to “political correct” behaviors are also advocating for a more welcoming world… the real conundrum is to whom the burden of adapting should fall.
Some people think that a more welcoming society may arise by limiting the public usage of some words, regardless of the context/intent, while others believe that we may achieve it by developing some form of detachment/acceptance for terms and behaviors, no matter how those words have been charged with hate.
And no extreme is “right”: it’s very probable that a balance between the two currents of thought will work better than hoping for the death of either of them.
Shifting from one extreme to another in increasing frequency and amplitude=bad
@LowLevel, we basically agree. The difference between me and you is that you are u̶t̶o̶p̶i̶s̶t̶i̶c̶ optimistic, while I’m r̶e̶a̶l̶i̶s̶t̶i̶c̶ pessimistic.
I’m sorry if it came across like that, it’s not the case. In my wider social surroundings, there are 3 people I know or know of who altered their gender, so I have a pretty good idea what hardship someone suffers when their appearance doesn’t match with their own image of themselves. I totally respect that.
To me it feels like gender identity and ethnic identity are two sides of the same coin. In both cases, people assume an identity that does not match their physical traits (or they alter their physical traits to match that identity). So if someone is tolerant towards one of those, shouldn’t they be more likely to be tolerant towards the other, too?
I would not go that far, but those actions do come across as very misguided and/or narrow-minded. Perhaps I’m not a big proponent of fighting fire with fire.
That’s interesting. So the kind of discrimination alleged in rejecting your ad was referring to ethnicity instead of the level of English proficiency of the teacher?
Edit: to clarify, there are laws (not new) that prohibit the usage of some expressions in classifieds or job ads. I don’t know which jurisdiction applies, in this specific case, I’m just curious to understand if the rejection is the result of applying the law or the result of applying a stricter policy adopted by the publisher.
The ad was proposed in a Facebook group, and was rejected by discretion of its administrator. My wife did the whole thing, and she didn’t bother to take screenshots. Anyway, as far as I could understand, the reply was by a human who just stated that asking for a “native” speaker was discriminatory.
She didn’t bother to ask for explanations, too, and simply removed that word and the ad was hence approved.
I actually gave for granted that the issue was that asking for a “native” would have been discriminatory towards a wide range of people who was not born in a english-speaking family, so to be precise it’s a sort of (supposed) cultural discrimination more then an ethnic or geographic one.
Anyway, I have never thought and I still don’t think the administrator found our request dicriminatory towards people who have a low english proficiency.
My nudge to the degree for a surgeon was just a paradoxical and humouristic parallel.
Anyway, I’m well aware of the existence of laws to prevent discrimination in jobs. My surprise was due to the rejection of our ad because of what I considered a technical qualification, and not a racial/ethnical/cultural requirement.
I was also just a little bit humiliated to have been implicitly liken to somebody who tries to hire a “non-muslim colf”, or “non-homosexual tenant” (both examples taken from true news read on the newspaper, btw).
I’m sure that there wasn’t any intention of putting you in the same basket where intentionally (and extreme) discriminating requests are put. It may have been simply a misunderstanding about how technical the expression “native speaker” is.
It’s quite common for us to correlate non-technical characteristics to technical ones, especially if the correlation can be used as a shortcut to take decisions. Here’s a stronger example: in my industry there is a widely shared impression (at least in some countries) that female social media marketers are more inclined/talented than male marketers.
Putting aside for a moment the question of how well this shared opinion actually describes reality, it’s a preference/bias that exists and that leads some people to use gender as a proxy for skillfulness.
Of course, laws prohibit any kind of exclusion based on gender and recruiters don’t really consider male marketers less qualified to the point of excluding them in job ads. As a result, any belief in gender-specific talents acts only during the evaluation process.
Worse even: they should not have their hair “styled” in certain ways. It isn’t even about the musical qualities.
I would agree, if they’d be wearing dreadlock wigs … well, they’d look stupid.
But what is there not to like about (elements) from “your” culture being embraced by others- freed from all the negative and human suffering that historically led to it?
If you’re a purist and you prefer the real thing, and it becomes a travesty to you, simply don’t go to see the show. But asking to cancel the whole thing? C’mon…
Probably the people asking for the cancellation weren’t even Rastafari either.
Apparently no such laws exist related to haircuts and musical ability.
Whatever happened to “one love”?
According to some website:
Marley’s message is that division into different factions create conflict among people, and most of the time these factions are imaginary. Only unity can bring about peace among people.
Enjoying other cultures is not appropriation. Appropriation is when you negate other cultures and their values, like when you see the cities of NY and Chicago claim on their Twitter accounts “we’re the world capital of pizza” while, hey, there’s a city in Italy that might have a say in that
OK, so what was the negation of Jamaican culture or values in the case of some white German speaking, dreadlock bearing, reggae playing band that saw its show cancelled because it was deemed to be “cultural appropriation”?
Exactly! The joke would be on them, but that’s it.
To stir things up a bit - this is the “offensive” thread after all -
You mean the city of Pisa?
But they don’t serve Hawaïan style pizza over there! You know, the one with pineapple.
Serious question: what did (proto-)Italians put as base on their pizzas before mid-16th century?
None. I think we all pretty much agree on that.
It’s just one of the various examples of PC-madness listed by who thinks we’re losing focus on the subject.
Uhm, I don’t get the reference about Pisa.
I had never seen a pizza with pineapple until I travelled in the States, in 1996. I didn’t dislike it on the rubberish pizza served by the cafeteria at the university I was guest in. But I didn’t like it so much to want to try it on a real italian pizza when I got home .
Anyway, pineapple pizza is quite a recent innovation in menus in Italy, and still hard to find.
Anyway, I have to say something. MOST of the non-italian people DON’T understand why we italian get so mad about “pinapple pizza”, or about “mac and cheese”, or “spaghetti meatballs” or “fettuccine Alfredo”. They simply think “ok, these italian guys are obsessed with food”.
Maybe this crazy excess of seeing “cultural (mis)appropriation” everywhere might explain somehow what’s our problem.
You mean before tomato came from the Americas?
I don’t know for sure, but various stuff, and not so much. The habit of putting many ingredients on top is quite recent. Anyway if you check out the internet you will see how almost ANY city in italy has its tradition for pizza, and it can be very much different from what we consider “pizza” globally (which is based on the neapolitan pizza, btw).
Oh wow Sushi, you managed to involve some weighty historical deformations in a couple of lines! You are a natural born instigator (You wanted to spice up conversation, right? )
First. There are no proto-Italians, before mid-16th century, just Italians.
This is a common mistake that derives from the separation of the geo-etno-linguistic path of Italy from the political one.
Foundation of Italy substantially happens under Caesar Augustus, the first Roman Emperor. Twelve regions (regiones) were set, that were considered the part of the Roman Empire within Italy, and its population inhabited by people with the roman citizenship. Those borders are basically today’s Italy (with the exception of few territories). This should not surprise us.
The Augustan Italy was not a mere territorial definition. Romans knew geography well, and were expert administrators. There is a deep and tight link between the italian geographical area and those regions: the italian peninsula is very well defined by sea, mounts and other physical limits.
Those regions set presumably at the turn of the first century BC and first century AD, are so true to the geographical, ethnological, linguistic, administrative links of the the people which were in, that they resisted the middle ages and have still meaning to us now. The administrative unity, the common political status of the citizens, and the well developed network of roman roads strengthened even more the geographical unity.
Political history of Italy after the fall of the Western Roman empire becomes very turbulent. But still you can see traces of the undergoing deep unity in some regions that today are not more into this political union. Surnames from Nice are basically italians, as its language was (and dialect still is), as it is for Corsica, regions that were part of the Roman Italy, and were politically Italian (part of smaller Italian states) up to the eighteenth or nineteenth century.
So you can talk about Italians since the fall of the Western Roman empire, and even before, starting from the first century BC, considering them also Roman citizens.
Second: as for pizza… Pizza as we all know it now is from Naples, Italy. There isn’t even contradictory about it, it’s just plain.
But the flat bread with vegetables on it is such an easy preparation that was common in many cultures before (like the greek Pita).
That was the point I tried to make too. I only stated it as a rhetorical question.
Sorry, it was a bad reference to people (or kids) who pronounce both words (almost) the same way. As in “the tower of pizza”
Oh, we get mad too when fries are accounted to the French
Another tradition that feels older than it can historically be as it would have to predate the introduction of potatoes in Europe.
The funny thing is: pizzas existed for a much longer time (and were even called pizza as early as 10th century according to Wikipedia) than what we would associate today with a “traditional” pizza (Napoletana) with tomato sauce.
.
(You wanted to spice up conversation, right? 