Craftsmanship question on SE devolves into mra circlejerk
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So, there was an
interestingstupid question that I stumbled upon at English Language and Usage.@http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/205282/gender-neutral-alternative-to-craftsmanship said:
Gender-neutral alternative to “craftsmanship”?
It's straightforward to refer to a "craftsperson" instead of a "craftsman" if one doesn't want to imply a gender. But "craftspersonship", "sportspersonship", and the like seem pretty cumbersome. Is there a more elegant alternative?
The accepted answer just suggested using the word "craft".
@http://english.stackexchange.com/a/205347/1622 said:
You could simply drop the dressing and go with "craft". The word is already used this way, parallel to the word "skill". It is generally unambiguous whether one is using "craft" in the sense of a set of skills, or in the sense of the quantity of those skills one has developed.
The answer with the most votes (that garnered lots of upvotes) was where shit kicked off...
@http://english.stackexchange.com/users/300/regdwigнt said:
Yes, there is: realizing that "craftsmanship" is gender-neutral. People who think it is not should take it up with themselves, not the word.
If I see discrimination where there is none, the root of the problem is myself and not the language. It is also a textbook example of an etymological fallacy.
Craftsmanship implies "man" about as much as woman does.
This garnered quite a lot of comments, and other answers to denounce the popular answer, and the discussion even garnered a meta question.
@http://meta.english.stackexchange.com/questions/5305/strong-community-support-for-a-bad-answer-why said:
Strong community support for a bad answer; why?
The accepted answer does a good job of answering the question by providing non gender-specific synonyms, but the most highly voted answer, which received quite an extraordinary number of votes and was posted by a seemingly reputable member of this community, didn't answer the question and didn't provide (sound) reasons for why the premise was false
... snip ...
I interpreted these 3 paragraphs as follows:
The OP is irrational and should seek introspection, as he/she is lashing out at a word.
The question contains a logical fallacy, and the questioner is the root cause of a perceived problem.
The premise of the question is incorrect.<sarcasm>Yes, that's the correct conclusion to draw. The answer was clearly calling the OP irrational rather than just specifying that the word in question was already gender neutral. How silly did I feel for misinterpreting the answer at face value?</sarcasm>
Do these people have nothing better to do than moan about perceived offences caused by perfectly benign words? I suppose that these guys don't like to be referred to as human. Don't get them started about being a member of mankind.
I personally don't like the word artisanal because I don't like poopers.
Filed under: the butthurt is strong with this oneIt drives me nuts when a crap answer gets accepted, and the actual best answer (with loads of upvotes) is sat below it.
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Standard over-sensitive SJW crap.
These people should just fuck off.
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Do these people have nothing better to do than moan about perceived offences caused by perfectly benign words?
Evidently not.
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Do these people have nothing better to do than moan about perceived offences caused by perfectly benign words? I suppose that these guys don't like to be referred to as hu[b]man[/b]. Don't get them started about being a member of [b]man[/b]kind.
I guess they'd also object to writing a [b]man[/b]uscript, or living in [b]Man[/b]chester. And of course, they can't have a [b]man[/b]icure either. And going to a restaurant can't be much fun, as they wouldn't like reading the [b]men[/b]u.Then again, I guess it also means they won't bank with Gold[b]man[/b] & Sachs, which may not be a bad thing…
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In the interest of less prescriptivism and more variety, let's consider a few possible alternative suffixes to -manship that might work (personal favorites in bold):
- itude (craftitude, sportitude, penitude)
- osity (craftosity, sportosity, penosity)
- iness (craftiness, sportiness, peniness)
- ability (craftability, sportability, penability)
- aciousness (craftaciousness, sportaciousness, penaciousness)
- acity (craftacity, sportacity, penacity)
edit: bold words are favourites of the poster from SE, not my favourites.
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they'd also object to ... living in Manchester.
Probably because of the rain more than anything else though.
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Is it wrong that I keep reading that as penises?
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Yes and no ;)
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@loopback0 said:
peniness
Like that will ever catch on ...That's a mountain range in the UK isn't it? ;)
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Probably but you're not the only one.
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I know an Italian one with a sort of similar name:
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There's also the UK 'mountain' range:
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Based on what I just saw in the TIL thread, it seems she wasn't aware of our little mountain range until I posted about it.
So ner
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The most upvoted meta answer sums it up nicely.
The question apparently hit the network-wide superconducting multicollider, which pulls in drive-by voters from all SE sites everywhere. It is therefore possible that most of those votes were not actually from regular members of the active ELU community.
However, all SE sites’ have postings whose votes totals can seem disproportionately high. There are some truly mystifying examples of one-liners garnering votes far beyond what one would imagine. Some of these high-scoring ELU postings “make sense”, but many of them do not.
Everybody has their own reasons for voting as they do. You should not expect this to always “make sense”. Short, simple postings that are easily digested are always going to draw votes quicker than things that require work to read through; it’s just how people are. Consider this question or this answer. Does that seem sensible? Furthermore, joke postings have always been an issue.
Although we can really never know why this one has skyrocketed, I would not be surprised if the votes came from people strongly agreeing with the sentiments expressed by the poster. You will notice that it has as many downvotes as the OP-selected answer has.
However, I do think that you are coming down too hard on that answer. It is not a bad answer, and it is not derisive that I can see.
It’s perfectly germane to point out that a word’s origins are irrelevant to its currently understood meaning, and that it is a fallacy to believe they do matter. They don’t.
As far as I can see, the answer is correct, because craftsmanship really is no more a gendered term than manikin is, whatever their origins. We don’t need a new word for manikins in store windows sporting women’s lingerie, either, and it is a fallacy to think that we somehow ought to do that. A manikin is just manikin; it is not a man any longer, not even a wee one.
That’s the sort of thing that leads to nonsense like forbidding the use of alternate or between for more than two choices, or avoiding inculcate or connotation because they might appear to contain a somewhat rude word-element (well, if French) inside them, or being afraid to use seminal for ideas unrelated to procreation.
Nobody expects unmanned drones to be carrying women in them, either. A “gay-rights” campaign against the Canadian practice of buying homo milk would be similarly misguided, just as one driven by a bunch of troglodytes to rename the genus of Homo sapiens to something more all-inclusive of women like Pan sapiens would be.
Those all sound silly. Or at least, I sure hope they do.
All this over-sensitivity about non-existent issues smacks of political correctness gone mad, like people are just looking for something to complain about. It’s just like how insisting on the ungainly monster-construct “he/she” instead of the more natural they is bound to annoy people. Quite a lot of people are fed up with all that bother, you see, and for a very simple reason: because being told how you can or cannot talk really rubs people the wrong way!
This is especially galling when it’s making stuff out of thin air as appears to be the case here, but even if it weren’t, it would still vex.
Eventually, there’s going to be push-back in response to these teapot tempests about in-words and out-words. It rankles. Perhaps that’s why so many voted that answer up, because they are tired of being rankled by such silly-in-their-eyes hassles, and they see that posting as speaking to that matter.
Maybe.
In the final analysis, we cannot know why that answer got the votes it got, but it does not matter that we cannot know why. These things always happen, and there is no reason to get upset over them. All SE sites have similar issues — or non-issues, as the case may be.
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tl;dr version:
They're words. Just fucking use them.
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The most upvoted meta answer sums it up nicely.
Yeah, I upvoted that answer.
They're words. Just fucking use them.
Filed under: words to live by
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The complainer is confusing two things:
- Which answer the asker liked.
- Which answer lots of people liked.
The asker is the authority on what works for him. He can decide whom to reward. That doesn't mean everyone else needs to agree. And this isn't a cut and dried question / answer like an arithmetic problem.
I think it's also similar to people who say democracy is dead because people who disagree with them get a say in the process. The
BITCHCOMPLAINer is probably guilty of that, too.
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penis
If one doesn't want to imply gender, is there a more elegant alternative?
Do you mean something like "The Annihilator"?
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this isn't a cut and dried question / answer like an arithmetic problem.
That's a very good point.
I've heard many people expressing the view that on Stack Overflow that the top voted answer should be automatically marked as accepted when it outscores the accepted answer by a certain margin. This could work well for questions where the answer is black and white, but not in situations like this.
I get frustrated on Stack Overflow where the accepted answer is bad advice, i.e. an answer that the OP liked because it was the lazy solution, but ultimately wouldn't do the job properly, or would add a wtf to the codebase.
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I've heard many people expressing the view that on Stack Overflow that the top voted answer should be automatically marked as accepted when it outscores the accepted answer by a certain margin.
Both are valid. It depends on what solution you're looking for. The wisdom of the crowd may pick a better generic answer. The guy asking the question obviously isn't the authority on the subject (or he'd be answering instead of asking...ignoring cases where he solves his own problem here).
But OTOH, the people voting aren't the authority on the asker's situation. I think the current system of rewarding both things is a pretty reasonable system. Can you imagine what @blakeyrat would say when some infelicitous answer to his question got upvoted beyond the answer he liked the best? I can. The current system (if anyone knew anything about the questions he asks, of course) at least allows him to acknowledge the answer that works best for him.
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germane
That word shows traces of mysophilia, germanophilia and trichophilia!!!We don’t need a new word for manikins in store windows sporting women’s lingerie
We need it in Terraria:
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the UK 'mountain' range
They're wee little mountains for a little island, but they are mountains. And they're not the only ones we have, there's Snowdonia and the Grampians and whatever it is in the Lake District, just for starters.
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I know; I was just indulging int he great British pastime of self-deprication ;)
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It'd never happen, because I've never had a question answered on StackOverflow. Because I only ask actually difficult questions, and people only answer easy ones to get forumpointzzz.
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I only ask actually difficult questions, and people only answer easy ones
This. I end up researching the problem and then answering my own question a lot of the time. Funnily enough, that still earned me a few forumpointzzz™.
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penis
If one doesn't want to imply gender, is there a more elegant alternative?
How about "The white knuckle ride"?
Filed under: possible nicknames for my penis
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Perhaps this calls for a "Help me find a new nickname for my penis" thread...
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> the ungainly monster-construct “he/she”
Oh, I hate that one too. It discriminates against those who are without gender!
One should go straight to “s/he/it”…
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This. I end up researching the problem and then answering my own question a lot of the time.
Last time I tried, I wasn't allowed to because I didn't have enough forumpointzzz to add an answer to my own question.
I think they've fixed that now, so maybe it was just a legit bug, but it sure as fuck didn't make a good impression on me.
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Perhaps this calls for a "Help me find a new nickname for my penis" thread...
the ungainly monster
...INB4 jokes about "What does Zecc know about DoctorJones' penis"
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This. I end up researching the problem and then answering my own question a lot of the time. Funnily enough, that still earned me a few forumpointzzz™.
I've only asked one question on SO… and I answered it myself about an hour later.It wasn't a simple question
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Oh, I hate that one too. It discriminates against those who are without gender!One should go straight to “s/he/it”…
That's a good idea because it'd be pronounced "shit".
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Perhaps this calls for a "Help me find a new nickname for my penis" thread...
the ungainly monster
What does Zecc know about DoctorJones' penis
We have a
winnerweiner!
Filed under: I'm seriously tempted to make that thread
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bold words are favourites of the poster
Some of those suggested words (though not the preferred ones) are already in use with meanings vastly different from the words for which they are suggested replacements. Let's use them, so we can add even more ambiguity to our language.
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I was going to point that out, but had some work to get on with so left that as an exercise for the reader.
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It'd never happen, because I've never had a question answered on StackOverflow. Because I only ask actually difficult questions, and people only answer easy ones to get forumpointzzz.
Some of us do seek out tougher questions to answer...
(I just am active in different tags than you, that's why you never bump into me on SO.)
This. I end up researching the problem and then answering my own question a lot of the time. Funnily enough, that still earned me a few forumpointzzz™.
That works too -- a good, well-written self-answer will garner the occasional upvote from a passer-by.
Last time I tried, I wasn't allowed to because I didn't have enough forumpointzzz to add an answer to my own question.
That requires a hilariously low amount of rep (15) -- simply have the mods do this thing called (shock, horror) consolidating your SO accounts, and you should have enough rep to self-answer and do many other things.P.S. the reason for SO not allowing a brand new, 1-rep user to self-answer is four letters long, starts with s, and ends in m. (It's also the name of a canned meat product.)
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Their spam controls seem more like, "fuck you new users!" controls to new users.
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Their spam controls seem more like, "fuck you new users!" controls to new users.
I think that's kinda the point; those who are willing to push through the (pretty low) requirements to do proper stuff are also more likely to contribute something of use. It doesn't work very well, but it's better than allowing every Thomas, Richard, and Harold to run riot.
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That requires a hilariously low amount of rep (15) -- simply have the mods do this thing called (shock, horror) consolidating your SO accounts, and you should have enough rep to self-answer and do many other things.
This happened automatically to me. I guess I used the same email address (and the name was the same) so it was easy to figure them out. I lost my old wasname ID thing they used and started a new account recently to ask a question.
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Jackdaws love my penacious craftacity (of quartz).
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@DoctorJones said:
penis
If one doesn't want to imply gender, is there a more elegant alternative?Penosity?
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>In the final analysis, we cannot know why that answer got the votes it got, but it does not matter that we cannot know why.
I think this should be the conclusion to every social sciences paper ever.
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@DoctorJones said:
penis
If one doesn't want to imply gender, is there a more elegant alternative?
kyriarchy
Yes this is a thing.
Because saying you're against sexism is somethingist, because you're not including people oppressed by race or whatever disadvantage life gave them.
Who here wasn't born in America?
I don't see this sniveling sacks complaining that the word kyriarchy isn't doing enough to help the people oppressed because they were born in France instead of America.
I can see it now.
IQ level is now a protected trait, we are extended affirmative action to ensure that there is IQ diversity in every workplace, and that people of different IQs are equally paid per position. Regardless of how that affects their ability to perform the work in that position.
From article.
I was so oppressed, the idiot said, "Why life, why did you construct my brain in such a way that my IQ is X points deviation below the mean. I won't ever be a geneticist engineer now. They discriminated against me."
and
Please be inform your subordinates that IQual harassment will not be tolerated. No one is allowed to complain about anyone's decisions. No one is allowed to say a decision is not intelligent. No person is
illegalunintelligent.
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>In the interest of less prescriptivism and more variety, let's consider a few possible alternative suffixes to -manship that might work (personal favorites in bold):
- itude (craftitude, sportitude, penitude)
- osity (craftosity, sportosity, penosity)
- iness (craftiness, sportiness, peniness)
- ability (craftability, sportability, penability)
- aciousness (craftaciousness, sportaciousness, penaciousness)
- acity (craftacity, sportacity, penacity)
edit: bold words are favourites of the poster from SE, not my favourites.
lumosity .com may have jumped the gun on that one.
I would have never guessed that lumanship was a thing.