There’s like. No connection between attractiveness and personality and whether you date a lot or get married. Some of the shittiest people I know are married. Some of the kindest most beautiful people I know are perpetually single. Literally never look at your love life as any sign of your worth.
I guess a more general version of the point is that in the last 50-ish years, everyday language has borrowed more and more of both the terminology and structural features of technical language. This happens for a lot of reasons. But I think it’s mostly not a good thing. For one, being abstract and technical is not actually very useful in the messy real world, where concepts are fuzzy and vague and most things of importance are not quantifiable. For another, if natural language borrows too much of the authority of science and the law, it might find that there’s not enough left afterwards for science and the law to do what we need them to do.
Why are you saying ‘minor’ when you mean 'child’?
Why are you saying 'they’re a narcissist’ when you mean 'they’re being mean to me’?
Why are you saying 'hyperfixation’ when you mean 'interest’?
Why are you saying 'gaslighting’ when you mean 'lying’?
Why are you saying 'plagiarism’ when you mean 'rip-off’?
Why are you saying 'war crime’ when you mean 'immoral act’?
Are you so afraid of your own judgement that you need to borrow authority from a more objective domain? Does using a word from a technical language actually make what you’re saying more objective? Or is it just a way of hiding behind the ever-diminishing authority of academia? Why are you too afraid to speak in your own voice?
In the vein of the use of hyper-fixation when you mean interest:
Folks really need to stop pathologising preference.
You’re allowed to just not like something because you don’t like it. It doesn’t have to be rooted in trauma or neurodivergence or whatever else. It doesn’t need some longwinded explanation. You don’t owe someone a dissertation on your preference.
The fact that you can’t raise taxes on billionaires even slightly without them pouring money into fascist political movements is, of itself, evidence that billionaires as a class shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the first place.
I’d just like to point out that every single thing that has happened in the 6 years since I created this post has only reinscribed its absolute moral correctness in my mind.
