When IT people go woke, they really good woke. From the IT department of a large university:
Goid faith question: what’s wrong with ‘picnic’? What don’t I know about this word?
What’s wrong with “brown bag”? Is it OK to say “brown shoes”? What if they are really brown?
Curiously, this attempt at being inclusive is extremely exclusive. Nobody whose language isn’t English can understand this or take it seriously. It’s like putting up a sign, “Rich, smug English-speakers only.” Which is, of course, the whole point.
Yes, how does ‘picnic’ mean ‘gathering’? It usually means eating sandwiches in the rain.
LikeLike
Some “scholars” have stated that the word is historically associated with lynchings.
And no, you can’t say “brown shoes.” You should say, “shoes the color of Jersey cows.”
LikeLike
Soooo……. you’re an innate speaker of Russian, while Klara’s built-in language is English…. how very…. insane!
LikeLike
Built-in language… These are dangerous lunatics.
I still don’t get picnic, though. It’s the same in Russian. Пикник. What can possibly be the problem?
LikeLike
“I still don’t get picnic”
History has been re-edited so that it’s become associated with lynching…. the idea being, I guess, that crowds of white supremacists used to gather for picnics during the lynching du jour…
It’s similar to how they tried to re-edit the first Thanksgiving into a celebration following a massacre of Native Americans. The historical record can apparently go fuck itself when the woke start looking at the past…
LikeLike
This is crazier than I thought. So if somebody put on pants and went to lynch a black person, we should stop saying the word “pants.” How do these people not tire of themselves?
LikeLike
Uh oh. “Binary thinking” is on the approved list.
LikeLike
Sadly, that’s from my alma mater. And they wonder why I never send them any money when they come begging for donations from alumni.
LikeLike
WTF brown bag? It’s called that because of literal brown bag that people still buy and use to pack lunch.
A dummy variable isn’t a stupid variable. FFS.
We can’t say black-and-white thinking? Like words black and white are now exclusive racial? You can’t have a fucking checkerboard pattern? Or, you know, use black and white as night and day or otherwise polar opposites?
People are nuts.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Completely crazy. They’ve turned into a parody.
LikeLike
Thought you may love this collection of snow photographs:
https://mi3ch.livejournal.com/5000449.html
My favorite is:
LikeLike
To my understanding, a picnic is something that white people tend to do, while a brown bag has to do with class ie people who took lunch to work/school rather than purchasing lunch.
Also to my understanding, whoever wrote that list is liable to torpedo the woke movement because so many terms strip away opportunity for interpretation. ie this ‘woke’ business in practicality is largely about people insisting that their interpretation of a word is the same as the meaning of that word. Then they scream and scream and scream until they get their way.
LikeLike
Is brown bag maybe verboten because of the paper bag test (a case of black-on-black discrimination)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Paper_Bag_Test
LikeLike
You could be right. It depends on who made the decision, since there seem to be many reasons to remove the terminology. Using this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_bag#Brown_bag
The last point in the above link is what I thought it was, and states: “Symbolism: While in the United States the lunch box or lunch pail has been used as a symbol of the working class, Safire wrote: “In the metaphor of the modern worker, the brown bag has replaced the lunch pail.”
To be honest, I don’t really understand most of the people making these decisions, since in my opinion, they have serious thinking problems and have badly lost perspective on the world. The reason that you brought up is very ugly, and is certainly grounds for them to avoid the term. Then again, the people doing this are classists, which means that the reason I raised would probably do it too. Who knows.
LikeLike