The original post by @[email protected] was a woman wearing a shirt that says “Italians do it better”. Someone asked what they do, and drag explained the joke as best as drag understood the intention, though drag disagrees that Luigi killed that CEO. It’s not a call for violence, it’s an explanation of a joke. Other people interpreted the joke the same way.
Less than an hour later, Flying Squid banned drag for that explanation, and for saying Luigi is not guilty. According to Flying Squid, referencing the CEO shooter case and saying Luigi didn’t do it is a call for violence. Expressing support for Luigi Mangione is a bannable offense on LemmyShitpost.
EDIT: The Picard Maneuver responded to drag’s appeal and reversed the ban. Drag will be deleting this post as it is no longer relevant to the current state of affairs on Lemmy Shitpost.
Drag would like to make you think a bit more, if that’s okay. Neopronouns certainly do catch on. For example, singular ‘you’ used to be a neopronoun. It replaced ‘thou’. Likewise, singular ‘they’ was a neopronoun ten years ago. It took less than a decade to catch on and become ubiquitous. And ‘it’, when referring to a person, is currently a neopronoun. One that’s very easy to use from a grammatical standpoint, but gives some people trouble, because it feels disrespectful.
You said that neopronouns impair language development. But drag thinks the precise opposite: neopronouns are absolutely essential to the acquisition of proper language skills. You said yourself that drag made you think about the nature of pronouns. Over the past month drag has met a lot of people who think conjugation is a function of grammatical person rather than a function of the individual pronoun. They’re native speakers who don’t understand how their own language works. Because they’ve never been properly challenged.
English is in dire need of more neopronouns, so that adults who think they’ve mastered the language can still learn something. And so that children can have a broader set of experience to draw from to facilitate learning. Otherwise they’ll pick up false assumptions like the conjugation thing.
Making people think isn’t an act of violence, it’s a civic duty. A person who’s stopped learning is practically dead already. Making people think saves lives from monotony and stagnation. And that isn’t to say drag’s identity isn’t genuine. Drag just wishes there were more interesting queer people in the world committing the seditious act that is existing.
Well, I’ll give a brief response now, and let it all percolate in my brain for a while since I’m riding insomnia at this point.
The first thing I notice is that you’ve got a misconception about how languages as they exist came about. Thou/thee to you was a gradual transition. The words used before that were also a gradual transition into thee/thou and other archaic english pronouns.
Every word in every language currently spoken evolved into what they are now, with possible exceptions in isolated languages I haven’t run across.
A neopronoun, by the only definition I’m aware of, is a coined word, it’s created whole cloth, or intentionally changed from an existing word. Thus, “you” has never been a neopronoun unless you’re stretching the term for colloquial usage. Which is fine, but it still negates the idea that current pronouns in common usage were once new. They weren’t, they just had pronunciations shifted over time as languages do.
Secondly, I said that neopronouns impair language acquisition because they add a layer of complexity that doesn’t (typically) match established grammar and usage. By that, I mean that if a pre-verbal child is picking up language from people around them, which is the normative way, the more complex the structure of pronouns, the longer it takes to have the full vocabulary of them, and to understand how they’re used.
Which is where I have an initial thought. Neopronouns could fit in fine if there’s a limited number, but individualized pronouns would greatly complicate early language acquisition, and even early education, though once you reach the stage of formalized education, I dunno that complexity is a good or bad thing, but it does make it take longer and more difficult for the students.
I still say that individual pronouns is an utter fail because it breaks too many social contracts, and requires constant shifting of language in a confusing and energy wasting way. As an example; if I am talking to my friend Bob about drag, then I have to either use drag both as the nickname and pronoun, or choose to ignore it as a pronoun entirely for the sake of Bob being able to understand the sentences. Now, not everyone using individual pronouns made the choice of using one that’s the diminutive of their name (and you may not have done so offline, but you aren’t going by your legal name here, so it’s irrelevant). So, for them it’s less of a cognitive clusterfuck than what drag runs into on lemmy.
But even when you’ve got someone named bigdog, and uses pup as their individual pronoun, the problem exists that there’s extra steps placed in between the two people talking. You have to take the time every time, to set up the frame of reference. As a thought experiment, that’s great fun.
But it’s an utter fail in practice because it’s not something a consensus of people will be willing to do. It just isn’t. It would require convincing not even just those that actively oppose it, but even allies that are just exhausted with it, and the vast majority that don’t care enough at all. Convincing that many people to rebuild not only their own language usage, but formal education as well, all to the dubious benefit of a minority that can’t even agree on a consistent and reliable way to go about using individual pronouns, it won’t happen.
So it remains a thought experiment. An exercise.
Remember, all the shifts from “thee” , “thou”, and"you" to just “you”, and the ones that led up to that, were shaped by consensus. You had prior words that turned into thee and you. Then, people gradually stopped using thee as first person, thou as 2nd person singular and you as 2nd person plural, and switched to just using “you” for all three. Well, that’s what my memory says each word was; I could have switched up which were singular vs plural, but I think you get the point that it was a lot of people changing words they were already using, not replacing those words with new ones.
But you won’t hear me argue that language can’t change. Any language being spoken actively by people will change. It will even change via writing, though it would be slower since we tend to stick to more formal, codified grammar and vocabulary since the age of print came about. My argument is that any given specific change has to pass muster as useful and acceptable to enough people before it happens, and neuter neither neopronouns, nor individual pronouns have a snowball’s chance of that happening.
There’s also an off topic side issue that it’s not the right time to fight for it, but that’s definitely off topic.
Drag thinks we’re confusing a couple of things in this conversation. You’re talking as though the only possible implementation of neopronouns is that everyone has to use them. But as this conversation proves, that’s not true. Drag is perfectly capable of using drag’s pronouns even if you don’t. If we consider the case of neopronouns only being used by people who care more about respect than convenience, then the only problem with them is that grumpy people will start arguments for arguments’ sake. And that can be solved by simply not doing that. It seems to drag that a lot of people are complaining about being forced to put in extra effort to respect drag, while they casually put in extra effort to complain about drag. Drag certainly thinks it would be an improvement if most people did neither.