People like pleasant things. And they like to talk about pleasant things, avoiding unpleasant stuff at all costs. One way to achieve that is to create taboo words. Because by making some words a taboo, a strong social inhibition is created, which pretty much makes it impossible to talk about unpleasant stuff without being quickly ostracized from the group.
But sometimes there is no escape and we really do need to discuss unpleasant things as well, whether words that we use to label them are taboo or not. That can prove to be a problem since it is impossible to have such a discussion in common language without causing significant amount of social friction. The way around that is to use uncommon synonyms. The less people know what they actually mean, the better. So instead of using nasty words like fuck, we say intercourse. Instead of shit, we say excrement, and instead of a fart we say flatus. As if saying things in Latin makes the reality any better.
What is also interesting is that if one of those words becomes common knowledge and starts being regularly used, it soon becomes a taboo word as well. The reason for that is the fact that we can no longer hide behind the veil of incomprehensibility, saying nasty stuff in a way most people think most people think most people (repeat ad infinitum) won't understand. Interestingly, it is not enough just for most people to understand it, but it must become common knowledge as well. But that's beside the point. What matters is that we can talk about nasty stuff only when there is still a slightest chance of doubt that someone somewhere won't understand us. If that chance is essentially zero, we must reinvent the terminology if we want to discuss the matter further.
Unpleasant stuff is not just what people do or produce, sometimes it is the people themselves. And when a group of people gets a negative reputation, one way to attempt to improve on that reputation is to start using a different label. It does not really matter whether that reputation is earned or not, as changing the hearts and minds of people is a significantly more difficult task than just obfuscating the reference.
The US, as usual, leads the way in this sort of social engineering, renaming groups of people at ever faster intervals. The best example for this is a group of people, forcefully imported from Africa, which became to be known as niggers. Originally imported from Spanish via French, the word simply meant black, and it pretty much described their most prominent external characteristic. As it slowly became an impolite term, in a somewhat unusual twist, the Latin root was replaced by the more polite version which was "colored person". But that term became derogatory as well, and those same people were once again renamed to blacks. While still not quite as offensive as the former two, the term black has eventually given in to "African American". Which is somewhat clumsy, as many people who move from South Africa to the USA are both white and African Americans at the same time. So the most recent invention is "person of color", which is also somewhat unfortunate as it can be quite easily confused with the offensive "colored person". Interestingly enough, black people don't mind other blacks calling them niggers, in fact they seem to take a sort of pride in that name calling, almost as being members of an elite club. And they should be, because they are what they are, and it would be self destructive to try to obfuscate it by reinventing their nomenclature.
Although the aforementioned group had more renamings than any other that I'm aware of, they're in no way unique in that manner. Take for example gypsies which became the Romani people, or the Arabs and Pakistanis who recnetly became Asians. There is also an inverse process, in which culturally favored groups' names are changed in order to obfuscate their identity, in order to prevent any sort of tribal reverence towards them. Hence whites became Caucasians, not because the term was less elitist, but because nobody really knew what exactly it meant.
One thing we can clearly see from all this is that renamings are just temporary measures. The people are not as stupid as the progressive elite seems to believe, and they catch on to new phraseology pretty fast. If someone hates niggers, that person will hate black people as well. Changing the name of the group won't turn those people into a new race. They'll still be the same people they were before the name change took effect. And everyone else will be quite aware of that as well.
If there is a problem with black or gypsy people, that problem won't go away by changing their names. Most likely there is a problem, otherwise the whole concept of name change would never be utilized. We've called Germans Germans for thousands of years, and no one seems to mind. And if there is a problem, changing the reference by which we label it will do nothing but kick the can down the road for a few more years.
But sometimes there is no escape and we really do need to discuss unpleasant things as well, whether words that we use to label them are taboo or not. That can prove to be a problem since it is impossible to have such a discussion in common language without causing significant amount of social friction. The way around that is to use uncommon synonyms. The less people know what they actually mean, the better. So instead of using nasty words like fuck, we say intercourse. Instead of shit, we say excrement, and instead of a fart we say flatus. As if saying things in Latin makes the reality any better.
What is also interesting is that if one of those words becomes common knowledge and starts being regularly used, it soon becomes a taboo word as well. The reason for that is the fact that we can no longer hide behind the veil of incomprehensibility, saying nasty stuff in a way most people think most people think most people (repeat ad infinitum) won't understand. Interestingly, it is not enough just for most people to understand it, but it must become common knowledge as well. But that's beside the point. What matters is that we can talk about nasty stuff only when there is still a slightest chance of doubt that someone somewhere won't understand us. If that chance is essentially zero, we must reinvent the terminology if we want to discuss the matter further.
Unpleasant stuff is not just what people do or produce, sometimes it is the people themselves. And when a group of people gets a negative reputation, one way to attempt to improve on that reputation is to start using a different label. It does not really matter whether that reputation is earned or not, as changing the hearts and minds of people is a significantly more difficult task than just obfuscating the reference.
The US, as usual, leads the way in this sort of social engineering, renaming groups of people at ever faster intervals. The best example for this is a group of people, forcefully imported from Africa, which became to be known as niggers. Originally imported from Spanish via French, the word simply meant black, and it pretty much described their most prominent external characteristic. As it slowly became an impolite term, in a somewhat unusual twist, the Latin root was replaced by the more polite version which was "colored person". But that term became derogatory as well, and those same people were once again renamed to blacks. While still not quite as offensive as the former two, the term black has eventually given in to "African American". Which is somewhat clumsy, as many people who move from South Africa to the USA are both white and African Americans at the same time. So the most recent invention is "person of color", which is also somewhat unfortunate as it can be quite easily confused with the offensive "colored person". Interestingly enough, black people don't mind other blacks calling them niggers, in fact they seem to take a sort of pride in that name calling, almost as being members of an elite club. And they should be, because they are what they are, and it would be self destructive to try to obfuscate it by reinventing their nomenclature.
Although the aforementioned group had more renamings than any other that I'm aware of, they're in no way unique in that manner. Take for example gypsies which became the Romani people, or the Arabs and Pakistanis who recnetly became Asians. There is also an inverse process, in which culturally favored groups' names are changed in order to obfuscate their identity, in order to prevent any sort of tribal reverence towards them. Hence whites became Caucasians, not because the term was less elitist, but because nobody really knew what exactly it meant.
One thing we can clearly see from all this is that renamings are just temporary measures. The people are not as stupid as the progressive elite seems to believe, and they catch on to new phraseology pretty fast. If someone hates niggers, that person will hate black people as well. Changing the name of the group won't turn those people into a new race. They'll still be the same people they were before the name change took effect. And everyone else will be quite aware of that as well.
If there is a problem with black or gypsy people, that problem won't go away by changing their names. Most likely there is a problem, otherwise the whole concept of name change would never be utilized. We've called Germans Germans for thousands of years, and no one seems to mind. And if there is a problem, changing the reference by which we label it will do nothing but kick the can down the road for a few more years.
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