beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I don't know much about this 'Rally to restore Sanity' bit. Some comedian, many people I read think it's yayful. Message boards saying 'Be Sane'.

I'm not much impressed with political speech around the word Sanity. Usually it divides the world up into 'Sane', which is what you want to listen to, and 'Insane', which you don't want to listen to.

Is it really a good idea to say 'don't listen to mentally ill people'?

But oh, wait, they're not talking about actual mentally ill people anyway, they're doing some metaphor thing where some speech acts are sane and some are insane. Great. That's okay then.

Except really, no. Sanity is not a metaphor or a way of telling off speech you don't want to hear. It's mental health or mental illness, and it's not a simple way of figuring out who to listen to. There are mentally ill people who are any kind of crazy you care to name but not actually ignorant on some topics. Have reasonable well thought out things to say about some things. Like, say, their rights, and how they'd quite like to not be the victims of hate crimes, thanks so very.

But insane is still the big scary, or the big dismissal, the word you throw at stuff to paint it worthless.

I don't see how that helps.


And the rally title don't say what it's actually about. So that isn't helpful either.


Have you noticed the meaning drift in 'mental' too? This one bugs the hell out of me. Mental means of the mind, it's a word present in mentally illness or mental health, except people say health to mean when health goes wrong and the opposites start to blur together. And now I see and hear it over and over, "That's mental!" And they say it to mean crazy, insane, nuts. And sometimes they mean it to mean crazy exciting and sometimes they mean it to mean ridiculous, but they haven't actually said either. The insulting tone just spreads out and makes a nonsense of actual words.


There's words lying around this week I kept on noticing, in sig lines or whatever, somebody quoting something. One quote says 'poofter' and one quote says 'spaz', and people are using them with their avatars and their sigs. And I want to say, is that what you really want to be saying?

Willow saying she's a spaz to call herself a bad word was plausible yet annoying in context. Quoted over and over down the page, do we really need that? The top urban dictionary definition for 'Spaz' is "From spastic, the disability. Means a person that acts insane or mentally retarded." The other definitions elaborate on that theme. The thing where spastic, insane, and retarded are whole different things isn't in the minds of people using the word. The thing where spastic was mostly referring to cerebral palsy isn't the first association. It has been used for so long as a playground put down it's just being read as another bad word. So a character might use the word, but they'd be being rude to people with disability, and thoughtless, and do people using the quote want to be rude and thoughtless some more? Really?

Or 'poofter', which Spike calls Angel when he wants to imply he's being less than macho, tangling sexual orientation and gender presentation in one put down. It's one of the words for gay, and not a polite one. Spike using it as an insult, perfectly plausible, he's evil, he's an arsehole, he'd say it. Quoting it in your sig over and over? Random homophobic insults are really the way you want to present yourself?

But I don't go saying this stuff directly to people. I don't know where the line is between 'needs saying' and 'background irritation'. It's just one word, in one quote, which made sense in context, in an annoying kind of way.


But you add it all together and you get language where the insults are about making bad words out of neuroatypical, disabled or queer.

I could really live without that, you know?



I tried once reworking insults for a future SF setting, reworking the swear words so they made sense in context. If you take out the religion swears as totally irrelevant, and the sex swears because sex isn't a bad thing, and the sexual orientation swears because everyone can do who they want, and the race swears because race is just neutral, and the disability swears because there isn't any disability any more (or there is and nobody puts moral weight on it), you very nearly run out of swears. You're left with words for body parts or body fluids or excrement. And a PG rating for language. And a language only suitable for utopia.

Which, you know, I could live with.