I don’t have well-formed thoughts these days about much. Maybe I haven’t been able to formulate thoughts well in a while. In live face to face conversations, I often freeze mid-sentence to find a word. Sometimes the ribbon of idea slips through my fingers and is gone in the wind of qualia. Whatever the cause - if the dork who proclaimed Google Is Make Us Forgetful was right or if Weed Broke My Brain, I’ve arrived at the worst fste for a thought remixer: being slow. Sometimes just processing a sentence someone speaks can take ten seconds. It’s not great.
One thing’s nice, though: I’m no longer angry.
Can’t be angry. Anger be expensive. In these times, where one in seven american residents say they have zero friends, where the times are hard, I can’t afford to be angry, even if I wanted to be.
I gotta be kind, because people are all I have.
Let kindness be our guiding principle, words our healing tincture.
Mr. Lomax thanks you.
But he also says your posts are thoughtful too.
We have a thread called “Um . . . what . . . aka, this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read;” however, I would guess “dumb” is probably as offensive as “moron.” I guess my answer would be sort of the same – the word usage has changed (to one degree or another), and people here are just as unlikely to use it as an insult (though I understand people can be sensitive to a word used in an innocent (so to speak) manner.
I mean, no one (as far as I can tell) has been interpreting that to mean “a person who can’t speak”, or someone mentally disabled (in a known way, or in a way that does not create harm or danger to others).
Context really needs to be a strong determining factor. Dictionary definitions or etymology can help sometimes, but current, present-day usage and the actual target and meaning in the sentence in question has to be important. Otherwise you can end up in situations where you can’t label anything as “bigoted” because actual bigots will get upset at how they don’t actually subscribe to that very specific way of thinking…
A commonly used term these days used to be significantly dangerous to be labeled as such. Now no one thinks about what it used to mean to be called a ‘bastard’. I think many of these words are the same: so far removed from their original meaning as to be context-less at this point.
