Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Die-Versity kills everything
The Wash state legislature is wasting time and money revising all the state's laws into "gender-free language." It isn't enough that Die-Versity kills people; it must kill logic and language as well.
A few snips from SB 5077:
I suppose I should be thankful that the nastiest aspects of gendperson neutrality have passed. In the early '90s when feminism was at its full menstrual flood tide, oops I mean personsstrual flood tide, oops I mean perdaughtersstrual flood tide, oops I mean perdaughtpersonsstrual flood tide, oops I mean ppdaughtppdaughtstrual flood tide, absolutely nothing was safe. Any set of lettpersons that could possibly represent anything remotely associated with m*les or m*leness had to be dispersontled.
These modern changes are less clumsy, with one exception: OMBUDS. What's the plural? Ombudses? I can't find an example in the document, though the absurd genitive form ombuds's does appear several times.
However, ombudsman doesn't have a proper plural anyway. Ombudsmen doesn't feel correct, and we didn't borrow the Swedish plural ombudsmannen.**
Replacing achievement gap by educational opportunity gap is a vastly more toxic species of Die-Versity. The Newthink-logic is clear: We will not acknowledge that blacks and whites get different scores on tests. Those differences are just accidental random artifacts. Only the opportunity differs, and we must waste an infinite amount of money re-adjusting the opportunities to bring achievement to absolute equality, even though we know it won't happen and we won't recognize its existence in the first place.
= = = = =
**Footnote: I just realized that we often borrow foreign plurals from Latin and Greek, but we never borrow plurals from any other source. Grammar freaks inconsistently insist on using the nominative plural for some Latin and Greek words, regardless of the actual case in English. For instance, they want us to say "from these data" instead of "from this data", because data is a plural form in Latin. [If you're truly serious about Latin, you should use the ablative plural "from these datibus."] But the grammaroids never borrow any inflections from other languages, even our close cousins like Swedish.
¶ 9:26 AM 
I suppose I should be thankful that the nastiest aspects of gendperson neutrality have passed. In the early '90s when feminism was at its full menstrual flood tide, oops I mean personsstrual flood tide, oops I mean perdaughtersstrual flood tide, oops I mean perdaughtpersonsstrual flood tide, oops I mean ppdaughtppdaughtstrual flood tide, absolutely nothing was safe. Any set of lettpersons that could possibly represent anything remotely associated with m*les or m*leness had to be dispersontled.
These modern changes are less clumsy, with one exception: OMBUDS. What's the plural? Ombudses? I can't find an example in the document, though the absurd genitive form ombuds's does appear several times.
However, ombudsman doesn't have a proper plural anyway. Ombudsmen doesn't feel correct, and we didn't borrow the Swedish plural ombudsmannen.**
Replacing achievement gap by educational opportunity gap is a vastly more toxic species of Die-Versity. The Newthink-logic is clear: We will not acknowledge that blacks and whites get different scores on tests. Those differences are just accidental random artifacts. Only the opportunity differs, and we must waste an infinite amount of money re-adjusting the opportunities to bring achievement to absolute equality, even though we know it won't happen and we won't recognize its existence in the first place.
= = = = =
**Footnote: I just realized that we often borrow foreign plurals from Latin and Greek, but we never borrow plurals from any other source. Grammar freaks inconsistently insist on using the nominative plural for some Latin and Greek words, regardless of the actual case in English. For instance, they want us to say "from these data" instead of "from this data", because data is a plural form in Latin. [If you're truly serious about Latin, you should use the ablative plural "from these datibus."] But the grammaroids never borrow any inflections from other languages, even our close cousins like Swedish.
¶ 9:26 AM
