beccaelizabeth | (Reply)

From:

"I tried once reworking insults for a future SF setting, reworking the swear words so they made sense in context. If you take out . . . "

I remember a sci-fi book series ( the Sime/Gen books by Jacqueline Lichtenberg ) where the swear words were based on life-energy transfer. (Granted, the author may have done the whole selyn thing to create an opportunity for a metaphoric [analogous?] exploration of sexual relations.) She even touched on the evolution of given swear words from unspeakable to generally acceptable.

" . . . insane is still the big scary, or the big dismissal, the word you throw at stuff . . . "

Although I agree with this whole thing (I'm not neuro-normative, and I think conditioning people to think dis'ng me is okay is bad), I'm not sure how else we can quickly and easily say certain things. When I think of the Bush administration's response to 9/11 (essentially abandoning an almost-secured victory to attack a country that had barely any ties to the group that attacked us), "insane" is the best word I can come up with. Because sane people don't do that. (Granting that most insane people wouldn't do that either, I still think it was a literally not-sane thing to do.) What other word can we use? "Evil" has a bunch of baggage guaranteed to derail, "misguided" is way too mild . . . I've got nothing.

There something in our makeup that requires short'n'simple labels for what we're talking about. Every time we succeed in getting across "this word is unacceptable here" another word or phrase pops up to replace it, which later turns out to be unacceptable for other reasons. I'm wondering if there's any way to get ahead of this, or if by eventually succeeding in removing variations on "insane" from acceptable usage we're doomed to start dis'ng some other group.

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