I'll start: "Shoving x down our throats"

the amount of people who have told me i'm one of the good ones because "at least you don't shove gayness down our throats," or "i'm fine with it if they dont shove it down our throats" has made me cringe whenever i hear that phrase used in any context, even harmlessly. how about you guys?

  • blakeus12 [they/them, he/him]
    ·
    10 months ago

    i don't lose anything by not saying that, and i avoid potentially being offensive to someone. not really excessive in my eyes.

    • JohnBrownNote [comrade/them, des/pair]
      ·
      10 months ago

      i disagree. it's quite some effort to police yourself for uncommon words that aren't slurs in your own dialect compared to the odds of perpetuating harm.

      or maybe i have an undiagnosed language processing difficulty.

      • blakeus12 [they/them, he/him]
        ·
        10 months ago

        fair enough. i don't use that word anyway. i wouldn't expect anyone else to do that, but personally i am just going to, not do that

    • FumpyAer [any, comrade/them]
      ·
      10 months ago

      I looked it up, it's a slur for an aboriginal group in Pacific Canada. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chugach

      So for anyone in North America they are not very far away.

      Edit: They also had a settlement in modern Alaska that was destroyed by a hurricane in 1964, and US Chugach National Forest and Alaska's Chugach State Park are named after them.

      • JohnBrownNote [comrade/them, des/pair]
        ·
        10 months ago

        i submit that alaska/pacific canada is very far away from most of north america. anything north of vancouver might as well be the moon.

        "chug" is an onomatopoeia for the noise a mechanical engine makes, which is what chugging a drink from a bottle often sounds like. it has nothing etymologically to do with the Chugach people. "nip [that] in the bud" contains an anti-asian slur... except it doesn't because that's not how words work. Those potatoes are removed potatoes for perfectly appropriate reasons even if the too-longstanding football team name still makes my eye twitch occasionally.

        that's not carte blanche to be a 13 year old who found a certain synonym for greedy in a thesaurus, but neither is that what Roger Miller sang about, or what the single-serving milk brand was doing, or what anyone outside of a tiny geographic area means.