Newspeak

~ Clarissa

So do you know the new term for layoffs?

Subtractive change.

And if you are against layoffs or eliminating tenure lines, that means you are “guilty of systemic bias against subtractive change.”

This terminology was invented in academia, so it will take a little bit of time to become widespread.

Austerity has found a new disguise.

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Published by Clarissa

17 thoughts on “Newspeak”

    1. –can’t tell what’s funnier there, the term itself, or the fact that they think there’s a need for an article on it, to help the perplexed understand. The whole thing breaks my brain a little. Sound of one hand clapping. Understanding underconsumption. Core.

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  2. I haven’t heard that one yet, but we did have an administrator a couple of years ago who kept going around saying that our university’s biggest problem was that we kept adding programs and never got rid of any. The administrator in question was not entirely wrong about that, but I don’t think agreed with most of their judgements about what needed to be gotten rid of.

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    1. This new term is being pioneered by the LGBTQUAA+ Leadership Program at Stanford in partnership with their Business School. What LGBTQUAA have to do with it I’m still not certain.

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        1. …is it like, “leg-butt-quay-plus”, do we spell out all the letters “ell-gee-bee-tee-cue-you-ay-ay-plus”?

          Where did the I go? I feel like there used to be an I. Did the Is get canceled?

          It keeps getting longer and evolving, and seems to exist to be unwieldy in both conversation and writing, as a complicated and obtuse way of saying “not straight”. We could just shortcut that and start calling them Crooked. But since they wanna be obtuse and pompous, I think it’d be best if we used military radio letters whenever we have to refer to the thing out loud, for maximum ridiculousness: “Lima-Golf-Bravo-Tango-Quebec-Uniform-Alpha-Alpha-Plus”?

          The Lima-Golf-Bravo-Tango-Quebec-Uniform-Alpha-Alpha-Plus Leadership program at Stanford has a certain ring to it…

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            1. Next year it’s gonna have fifty letters, and the corporate and academic worlds will grind to a halt because nobody can escape meetings in under five hours, due to the recitation of the sacred letter sequence. They will then hire ceremonial “Ellgees”– brightly-robed functionaries whose sole job is to intone the sacred letters quietly and perpetually in a low drone, so that everybody else can get on with their lives, having replaced the seqence with a hand gesture, in much the same way as the early church’s six-hour liturgy was shortened by having the priest say some of the longer prayers *at the same time* as everybody was singing.

              Ten years later, the hand gesture will have replaced the “bird” as the universally-understood method of insulting people who cut you off in traffic.

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          2. “Where did the I go? I feel like there used to be an I. Did the Is get canceled?”

            Yeah, I noticed that, too. Somebody’s job at Stanford is in jeopardy because they just cruelly marginalized all the INTERSEX students on their campus. At least they were woke enough not to ruin the program by including any H (for heterosexual) or N (for normal) people in it.

            Dreidel

            (I didn’t put the double underline that appears under the word “woke” [or at least appears on my screen]. WordPress apparently considers it a misspelling of “awake.”)

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              1. You’d think if they were going to drop one, it’d be the B, since it’s now heresy to admit there are only two sexes, but to be “bisexual” is by nature to embrace the idea of a sexual binary. All the cool kids these days are calling themselves “pansexual” which I guess is just a way of saying you’ll f**k anything.

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              2. (it is of course playacting: every one of the “pansexual” kids I know has a dating type so specific it includes not just bio gender, but also height, hair color, skin tone, and BMI)

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  3. Remember the whole discourse about why homeless is an offensive term, which was purged in favor of unhoused? I never got that one.

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    1. “homeless is an offensive term, which was purged in favor of unhoused”

      Are you old enough to remember the terms “hobo” and “bum”?

      Dreidel

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