[ShredKazoo]

Interesting, thanks for chiming in. I wonder if the best way to push back against language policing is to simply poll various groups, see which language they prefer, and publish the results. The deltas could be interesting as well, e.g. even if most blind people dislike the term "blind", it would still be interesting if they are more likely to prefer the term "blind" than a member of the general population.

I think public opinion polling might actually solve the problem, because the actual group has greater moral authority than language police activists. I suspect people might not cite this Atlantic article during a discussion of whether their organization should adopt language policing for fear of coming across as a reactionary old fogey. But if you were citing a poll of the group in question, that's a level of moral authority that's hard for a language police activist to argue against.

Basically the hypothesis to test here is that a latinx-type reaction is fairly common, it just doesn't generally reach public consciousness the way it did in the case of latinx.

[parineum]

Groups don't have homogeneous opinions on this stuff. The prime example these days being Latinx.

If people aren't called what they prefer, as long as they weren't called a slur, a simple correction is fine. Or, if you're never going to see them again, just let it go.

[stephen_g]

From what I read about Latinx, a significant majority of that community seem to hate the term that has been applied to them (which doesn’t even make any linguistic sense in Spanish anyway). Seems to be a small minority pushing it.

[Izkata]

I vaguely remember a poll about that, I think the majority didn't even know the term, then the next largest group hated it.

[prepend]

The challenge is when there is no single term that doesn’t offend everyone.

So you can call a group “Latinx” and offend some and call a group “Latinos” and offend some and call a group “Latinos/Latinas” and offend some.

I want to offend the fewest people with my speech. I would like to use opinion polling to both offend fewest as well as signal that I’m working to offend the fewest.

What’s annoying and frustrating to me is when someone tells me “You must use term X because term Y offends.” Then I change it and someone else tells me “You must use term Y because term X offends.” And the worst part is the circular waste of time. I work in an organization that has a communication clearance process for the purpose of scientific accuracy and we spend a decent amount of time on this kind of editorial preference change/revert. Most isn’t even “offensive” words but stuff like Oxford comma, data are plural, etc.

[parineum]

I don't want to be offensive to people either but I also don't want to have to keep up on polling of what the plurality of any particular group is okay being referred to as. There are an infinite set of groups that I'd have to keep track of.

I'll find out if something's offensive when I say it, with no ill intent, and someone respectfully lets me know that they'd prefer to be called something else. My language will change over time in response to the overall language changing over time.

[prepend]

Right, I act similarly. But when people have competing preferences like latinx vs latino, what do you do?