Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.
A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities
The one that horrified me today was the phrase “cost of living”. It’s right in front of our faces that it literally costs money to remain alive.
Yeah that one gets me all the time too. Liberals are all the time about "Human life don't have a price" and then they not only slap pricetag on everything human needs to remain alive, but they even price, by the hour, week, month, the worker's time, their life itself.
And then they freak out at the term "wage slavery".
I sometimes think about euphemisms for things that operate to negate their true nature and make them palatable for populaces that need their consentanufactured.
"Defense" used to describe all military expenditures and structures, particularly for the United States, which has spent nearly all of its "defense" efforts on aggression and territorial domination thousands of miles from its borders. It is conspicuous in how diligently it is used by certain groups, particularly large corporate media orgs, think tanks, and bourgeois politicians. There is, at minimum, an unconscious recognition that (the "good guys'") war must always be framed in the language of defense. For them to describe, for example, the wars on Iraq or Afghanistan as wars of aggresson, which they absolutely were even by liberal definitions, is almost unthinkable. No, the "bunker busters" used exclusively on foreign countries must be "defense".
"Heritage" to describe a white supremacist pining for chattel slavery in the South. Goes hand in hand with, "the peculiar institution" and "states' rights".
The (very deep, usually unconscious nowadays) allusions to vast "natural" spaces that were actually occupied by indigenous people for millennia. Indigenous people that faced a genocide by the same institutions that designate the spaces as official wilderness for its own members. Spinning a deep fiction around the meaning and history of these spaces.
A lot of language is like this. Whitewashed to avoid the horror of what they really mean.
Department of War being renamed the Department of Defense is a perfect example
“Illegals, illegal immigrant, border hopper, etc.” About as dehumanizing and awful as you can get regarding living breathing human beings who are trying to escape hellholes that the intelligence services and armies that your country created.
“Labour Market”, people can be bought and sold like cattle then disposed of when their use is up. Completely disregarding the devastating effects this has on human life.
“Less then lethal weapons” regarding chemical weapons that are banned in international warfare, acoustic weapons that can permanently deafen or kill, tasers that will still kill a person, blinding pepper spray, and batons that can beat a person to within an inch of their life.
"Defensive" architecture. Like people are military combatants fighting you over the sidewalk. If you rely on miniature spikes to deter homeless people, you aren't "defending" the pavement, you are just being hostile.
Defensive architecture sounds like someone is building a castle or a fort
"Human Resources" need I say anything more
The company I work for must be aware of the connotation of that phrase because they call that department "People Experience" instead.
I guess Poland got slightly lucky, most of workplaces still call the department "cadres".
I don't see how that's better. It just doesn't make sense
It's supposed to sound like "User Experience".