[zetsurin]

I wonder about this -- as I've been gently encouraged to not use "lame" (I was using it to mean poorly made, crappy, shitty). The argument at the time iirc was "it used to mean disabled so we shouldn't use it to mean poor". I said sure, because pushing back would be wasteful of both our times, and it's an easy thing to do.

I often feel like these kinds of vocabulary updates don't really bring about "respect and inclusion", though, because everyone knows given context that I wasn't saying or implying that disabled people are lesser: the word has changed meaning. Similarly in this case I'd only ever known dork to mean nerd, and never that it was penis specific, or that it was somehow male exclusive.

I guess i think there's a case to be made for not making words "curse words", and instead understanding that usage changes, and it's needless to to encourage people (maybe enlighten people is still cool). I guess i feel like, why cage ourselves in restrictions when intent is what matters.

In this case, I do think it's a terrible name for this feature, where "search operators" is much more descriptive.

[mlyle]

On the one hand, you're not trying to make people lesser...

On the other hand, it's interesting we do this over and over again (pejoration). Innocent words associated with disadvantaged groups start to become derogatory, are mostly abandoned from polite use to describe people in that group, but then become okay to cast around casually in other contexts.

[techdragon]

The euphemism treadmill strikes again.

It’s a linguistic process that has been academically studied and is surprisingly straightforward once you have it laid out in front of you it’s basically “once we acknowledge word as bad, people use new_word so they can be bad without other people knowing it yet”

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill

[mlyle]

Good mention of the euphemism treadmill. But even without euphemisms....

"Lame," "retarded," etc.-- they were direct (non-euphemistic) words describing attributes. But because they're associated with marginalized groups, they quickly become derogatory (and euphemisms to the extent that they could express negative judgment on other things: "Fortnite is lame").

In the end, language expresses who we are: even the negative aspects of us.