Thread by @eevee

i cannot verify this, but i've been told that the push to shorten "polyamorous" to "polyam" rather than "poly" (so polynesian people can use the latter) traces back to a single tumblr post essentially arguing that having a single word mean two things would be bad SEO

folks i have bad news about what comes up when you just google "poly" on its own

i, the genius, am attempting to look into this /after/ tweeting about it, and i guess this was the original post? i tracked it down on wayback machine and it's not a snippet, that one paragraph was the entire post (via aidamanduley.com/2015/09/01/sto…)

given the strong tagging culture on tumblr i have to wonder if this was intended to be about tags, because it is kind of odd to ask another community to stop using a word to describe themselves altogether, but the original blog is gone so i have no further context

anyway i'm not sure where the SEO interpretation came from? maybe mutated through a game of telephone. aside from this one post the whole thing seems largely apocryphal; most of what i found is other people asking where it came from or making guesses about it

this is a fascinating linguistic event right here. group A is in the middle of shifting the whole way it describes itself to accommodate group B, who for the most part don't seem to be asking for it