From theory, action.

spacebaw:

interruptions:

a-petro-manifesto:

philosophy-of-praxis:

But yeah, legal definitions are absolute because Petro is an asshat and demands it of the world.

How do you function in the real world if you don’t recognize legitimate, legal definitions of words?

Why complain about already established language?

Oh that’s right! Evil whitey. 

I’ve already registered my thoughts on the semantic issue that backgrounds this conversation, but I just want to point out a few things that seem to have been lost in this exchange.

First, dictionary definitions are not legal definitions. They’re assembled by private actors, not the Courts, the Legislature, or other organs of the State.

Second, they’re not prescriptive. They don’t tell you how you ought to use a word. They’re descriptive accounts of patterns of word usage. Seriously, take out your dictionary and read the preface material - usually it includes information about words that have been added, deleted or changed in significant ways since the last edition. They aren’t instruction manuals for the language, but reflections of it. Most make this point explicitly in the first few pages.

And as far as “sexism” and “racism” and their “legal definitions” go - in the United States, there isn’t really a legal definition of “racism” or “sexism”. Instead there are terms of art like “equal protection of the laws”, “racial animus” and “discrimination on the basis of membership in a protected class”. It’s different in other places (I think the some European jurisdictions, for instance, have laws relating to hate speech that explicitly define racism), but in the US “racism” and “sexism” aren’t words that show up in statutes. And courts certainly don’t resolve disputes about ambiguous word meaning by referring to dictionaries (certain limited cases where originalist jurists use historical dictionaries as a one among several guides to original public understanding of words).

Basically I’m just saying keep the Law out of your bullshit, because it’s not even slightly relevant to your attempt to show that employees of Merriam-Webster, Inc., are the final arbiters of meaning in the English language.

this.

so much this.

it’s part of a larger trend of stupid fucking idiots not being able to understand that not everything someone discusses reflects their political beliefs and that ideas are just tools, we don’t always believe entirely in the tools we use.