We already do this with some slurs, right? We can start enforcing these words, too.
Not calling anyone out, I’ve been guilty of it too. And we don’t have to do it all at once. Like, we can start with these:
Ableist words and alternatives.
Stupid, R€tarded, Idiot(ic), Cretin, or Moron(ic): People say this to imply something, or someone isn't intelligent or worth their time, but the words refer to people with intellectual disabilities. Instead, say that a situation or person is frustrating, ignorant, dense, unpleasant, cheesy, or awful.
Dumb: This word refers to a person who doesn't speak verbally, but people often use it to mean that something or someone isn't intelligent or wise. It's listed separately from stupid and its synonyms because it references a physical disability instead of an intellectual one. Try using any of the non-ableist synonyms like irritating or uncool.
Crazy, Nuts, Mad, Psycho, or Insane: "Wow, that's crazy!" may not seem like a harmful statement, but if you think about someone with a mental health condition hearing that statement, it's easy to realize that it is. So instead of using one of those words, try outrageous, bananas, bizarre, amazing, intense, extreme, overwhelming, or wild.
Let me start off with:
Calling a person or even a person's action these things, of course should not be allowed. Calling a situation "crazy" seems fine, though "psycho" should be banned completely and probably also "nuts" and "insane"
Sure? I mean, I don't think that it's used that way at all anymore, but whatever
R-slur is right out, obviously, but I've looked up these words and, for example, idiot was used as a category of low intelligence, but that is not what people mean today and this use isn't even recognizable. It literally goes back to ancient Greece and then Rome, being used to call someone ignorant
The article says not to use "barren" because infertile women are called that, but it's obvious that the use of "barren" to refer to fertility is an analogy rather than the primary reason, as can be evidenced from the very use of the word "fertility" to describe reproductive capacity. "Idiot" is much more isolated than that and much less recognizable.
Moron and Imbecile were actually coined by phrenologists, they have a stronger argument. That said, "moron" especially is in popular use and not recognized as the pseudo-medical term. Imbecile sort of is.
"Cretin" literally comes from "Cretan," i.e. someone from Crete (a suggestion of being uncultured, just like "philistine"). It's absurd to ban it as ableist.
I struggle to even generate an argument for banning "stupid".
Psychopathy is a weird thing, it's definitely a mental abnormality but is it really a disability? In some ways and especially for powerful people, psychopathy is a superability, as it allows them to exploit people more effectively and without the built-in mental anguish that most people are forced to suffer. It can obviously manifest as harm towards the person themselves, but usually due to some kind of other disordered impulse control.
I've struggled to understand the social relation of psychopathy to the rest of society and whether it properly fits into any of the categories of disabilities or not.
Psychopathy is an inability to experience sympathy, essentially. You aren't only able to avoid it, you can't experience it if you want to. Technically it can also be "cured" through therapy at an early age, but that's another conversation.
Psychopaths are overrepresented in addiction, homelessness and prisons.
Its not just the capitalism superpower disorder.
Just because theres the autism superpower savants doesnt make autism not a potential disability.
Yeah it's like it makes social position more extreme in either direction
“Nuts” can’t be banned without ruining some recipes in the food forums.
I can't tell if you're joking but "nuts" as an adjective or adverb can very easily be banned with zero overlap there. As an adjective in cooking, the uncountable form "nut" is used, "nuts" only being used as a noun.
Honest question because I don’t know: is an automated banned word filter able to tell the difference between “Add 50g of nuts to the dough” and “that person is nuts”? My assumption was no, but perhaps these things aren’t as bad as they used to be.
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we could ban "is%20nuts" and "re%20nuts" i guess but that would be nuts
The last ingredient is nuts.
keep those narrative format recipes out of here!
Fine! The most common food allergy is nuts.
As the other user said, we couldn't automate it, but it could still be policy if people wanted it to be.
one possible argument: stigmatizing people with low intelligence is bad and we probably shouldn't do that with any language. An analogy: to discourage body-shaming, we would punish/ban/etc all body-shaming rhetoric, which would wipe out most uses of the word "fat" even though it's not shockingly offensive by itself.
I am an enlightened centrist and will comply with whatever the site rules are. I want to use less of this kind of language personally.
Yeah but then it's a matter of a conceptual framework being banned rather than language, which is outside the scope of the OP and the article.
it's a nonsense liberal article, I think we should address the grain of truth from it if we're gonna talk about it at all
Hence my also mentioning the OP, which does specify "language" and talk about word lists.