Bad words are changing

imgresEven some of our most storied and longest-lasting profanities have proven susceptible to a gradual weakening in the face of changing social norms and technology-aided taboo-sapping overuse.

Today’s Slate.com explains, in the excerpt below: “Damnhellshit, and fuck are not what an anthropologist observing us would classify as ‘taboo,’ ” says linguist John McWhorter, author of What Language Is: And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be, among other books. “We all say them all the time. Those words are not profane in what our modern culture is—they are, rather, salty. That’s all. Anyone who objects would be surprised to go back 50 years and try to use those words as casually as we do now and ever be asked again to parties.”

“As McWhorter notes, even fuck—the super-badass, cannot-be-effed-with, undisputed heavyweight champion of all curse words—has not escaped the passage of time with the full force of its offensiveness intact. Sheidlower, who is also editor of The F-Word—a comprehensive volume that delineates the impressive history of the word fuck, as well as its many uses and variations that have cropped up throughout the English-speaking world—is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on this topic. He has studied the progression of the word with precision and scholarly zeal. There are, he says, “a number of things going on with fuck.” Continue reading “Bad words are changing”

Jailbreak the Binary

Tired of that nasty M/F gender thing? How about all binary thinking?

imgres-1

A new Google Chrome app will replace any gender-specific pronoun with a neutral one and will deal with a lot of other words as well.

We installed “Jailbreak the Binary” and tested in out by searching the words “woman” and “man,” coming up with the following hits: “Person (Wikipedia),” “People.com,” “Top 99 People of 2013,” “People’s Issues, Advice and Personal Stories,”, “People’s Basketball”…  Okay, so you get the idea. Then we tried the words like “maid,” “father,” and, once again, no gender whatsoever. And when we went to look up one of our favorite newsgroups, “Feminist Philosophers,”  the search yielded the correct link, but translated it as “Androgynous Philosophers.”

We think it’s great someone came up with this. The only problem is that you need to remember to turn the thing off when you need to return to the gendered world. The description from Google reads:

View the world without gender.

Based off of “Jailbreak the Patriarchy” by Danielle Sucher, but with gender neutral pronouns and as many gender neutral other words as well.   Takes all instances of ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘he’, ‘she’, and as many other gendered words and swaps them for gender neutral versions.   When ‘OFF’ is displayed on the icon then the extension is off.

Find it at: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jailbreak-the-binary/mmdlclbfhplmbjfefngjbicmelpbbdnh