Thread by @asuph

To follow up on a thread I RTed earlier on about "introverts", a common Marathi word thrown at introverts is "manus-ghana" (literally someone "repulsed by human beings"). Even in English, where we have anti-social and asocial, the former is used frequently for introverts.

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These implicit judgements in our language tend to strongly bias us, because, after all, they're just tokens of the social attitudes, passed on generations after generations -- just like caste names being used derogatively, thus making a group feel bad about themselves.

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Of course, I do not want to lessen the severity of the latter by equating it with the former -- it was to illustrate the point of what labels and biased language can do. Growing up in the eighties, spectacle use was rare at a young age, and anyone wearing them was bullied.

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I started using them when I was in 4th standard, and I remember that I had cried on my way home from the ophthalmologists saying I was only going to wear them at home, because I knew I would be bullied or teased.

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Random people would throw words like "dhapnya, battery, dolas, chashmish" casually. But I remember it because I was at the receiving end. I'm sure I used other such words for other groups -- for the body-positive/darker kids, for instance.

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When language normalizes bullying, you don't know you're engaging in it, especially in-group bullying. It takes a friend or self to be bullied to understand the impact. In my mother tongue, there are many such normalized slurs. It takes lot of conscious effort to avoid them.

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And even calling out such usage by others is futile as people accuse you of overreacting, or being "language police", and so on. Words matter. Words hurt. Remember: racist/casteist people are okay with their behaviour, but call them racist/casteist & they explode with anger.

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For all their revulsion to political correctness, call them by the behaviour they actively engage in and they object to the "words", unlike these other slurs that are really ascribing a non-existent group behaviour/property.

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We should stop calling it political correctness (which is itself biased), it's detoxifying our language, so that we can stop automatic/unconscious groupthink/group behaviour.

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