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this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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I never realized how frequently I called things “lame” until I said it in front of a coworker paralyzed from a motorcycle accident. Hopefully he understood, but it just took that one glance telling me he heard it for me to stop. To try to stop.
But being lame sucks. That's the point. Someone who is paralysed isn't going to say it doesn't.
Being gay doesn't suck so it should not be used to describe something that does.
Just gonna stop in to say that 'sucks' in your usage is gay/misogynist slur meaning 'sucks dick.'
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2017/03/suck.html
I looked myself and the term sucks goes back a bit farther than that, though, at least in England. "Sucks to your Auntie!", is an Old English insult meaning "your Auntie be damned!". It was said by a character in Lord of the Flies in 1954. Sinister Street was written by Compton MacKenzie in 1913 and has a sentence that reads, "This kid's in our army, so sucks!".
The term gained popularity in the US in the 1960s, and it isn't really clear whether it reached America from England, or whether Americans reinvented the term from scratch with its own connotations. That being said, I'm sure many if not most people in the US used the term with the intent to imply negativity with regards to homosexuality back when the phrase was new.
Nowadays, I think the the term has been largely separated from its' negative correlation to fellatio. Personally, I never even realized the correlation until I was very far into my adulthood, and most people my age never used the word with that meaning in mind at all.
This is kind of my point - the majority population never has any reason to think about the origin or evolution of our synonyms for bad, we just pick them up from usage - usage by older people who may have racist or xenophobic intent, or may have picked the terms up by osmosis themselves. That's how the slurs get engrained in language. But I'm willing to bet, even if you don't actively think of 'sucks' as connected to fellatio, that you've used 'sucks dick' or 'sucks balls' as an emphatic. (If your emphatic is 'sucks eggs,' then you're even older than I imagine, and please forgive my ageism ;) )
Oh then I misunderstood what you meant by your original comment. Thanks for making me think about it, I never really thought about some of the origins of our seemingly mundane slang.
Come on. Is that really a problem now? I get not calling people gay as an insult. But lame? I don't even think of handicapped people at all when I hear that word.
When people talk about 'privilege,' this is what they mean. When you really stop to think about it, a huge amount of our casual insults/denigrations come down to slurs on anthropomorphized objects. If you believe that propagating such language is hurtful to the people the slur represents, you can make yourself crazy thinking about all the synonyms for 'bad.'
Is it really awful? Who knows...probably depends on the degree, but one can imagine that someone actually living with whatever deviation, someone who spends their life with awareness that their 'lameness' means they will never be the Adonis- or Venus-like advertising model, might become hypersensitive to those words. I'm not saying that we need to shun people who use 'sucks [dick]' or 'lame' instead of 'bad,' but I appreciate the people who make that effort.
It's kind of the bring-your-own-bag approach to inclusivity. Using your own bag at the grocery store isn't going to influence climate change; stopping slur-based judgements isn't going to end discrimination; but they're things an individual can do to feel a little better.
I get that, I really do. Thing is, life is hard and arduous a lot of the time and I have way too many things on my mind to even link a word like 'lame' to a meaning like that.
And a lot of people DO shun other people for using this language, which I get when words like 'gay' are used as an insult.
I'd definitely not call myself privileged because I use the word 'lame' though.
@RobertOwnageJunior @tburkhol It is privilege to not have to worry or even consider how lazy language impacts people who are different from you.
If you can understand why using "gay" with a negative connotation perpetuates harm to LGBTQ+ folks, you can figure out why the same applies to applying negative connotations to language around disablity.
If you don't have to worry about how these negative associations cause harm, that is a privilege.
@RobertOwnageJunior @tburkhol an easy example of unexamined privilege is being able to say "I don’t even think of handicapped people at all when I hear that word."
So can I use dumb? Because some people are relatively unintelligent due to their disability. Will they feel attacked when I say 'this is dumb'? Does that make me privileged?
Like, how specific do we get? Wouldn't it be easier to differentiate between people using these words as insults or otherwise?
I have my problems as well, for example I am unusually tall, which makes for some problems in my day to day life, for example finding the right shoes/clothing. Is someone using the phrase 'huge problem'' privileged? Is there a line we draw, or can we only ever use perfectly neutral phrases.
I am living my life trying to be nice and sensible to everyone, can't that be enough?
Because people are way too easily offended nowadays.
See, often times this exact sentence is also just used by people as an excuse to be an asshole. Which I think is equally as big a problem.
I am not sensitive at all, but if some random dude comes up to me and calls be a big, ugly dumbass? Ima be honest, that dude's getting punched probably.
Perhaps. This is a targeted attack on you though. So you're naturally expected to be angry and attack someone. It's not the same thing. False equivalency.
What's happening here is censorship of others because you don't like it. Censoring others is not the right way to do things. You can't just go around telling people to change just because someone might be offended.
Maybe not the violence but, but this is basically how people are supposed to handle being upset: you take responsibility and action.
Instead people do nothing to solve the problem directly, and instead go around telling the whole world that it needs to change to accommodate them.
Don't tell someone they are being short with you when they are mad because thats an attack on height challenged individuals
That's a good point, but do those handicapped people actually identify as 'lame'? I feel like you guys are really trying to find a reason to not use certain words because there might be one person in your country that's maybe offended by it. Imo, most people (handicapped or not) aren't really offended by most words, except straight up derogatory terms (N-Word being the obvious one).
I don't think any of the admittedly few people in wheelchairs I know would be offended by my usage of the word 'lame'.
I still use "lame" to this day. What should I be saying instead?
The issue isn't "lame", afaik there's nothing wrong with the word. The issue is that OP used it so often that he said it everywhere.
Your motocycle accident? Lame.
Other (made up) examples:
Your grandma died? Lame.
You got a promotion? Lame
The biggest issue with a lot of the insults/slurs around mental or physical handicaps is the euphemism treadmill:
Case in point, retard and lame used to be official, non-insult words used by doctors. I don't know a solution, but as a person with a mental handicap, I feel like there's more important battles to fight. The intent behind the word, for example.
100% with you. If I say 'It's lame you're getting less money' or 'The prices for housing are getting to a retarded level' it definitely hasn't the same vibe as if I say 'Die, you lame fucking retard.'
I'm just gonna go back to calling everything gay and retarded now because my substitute word "lame" is now unacceptable.
Some of us never stopped! Join us. Soon the cycle will complete and those words will once again be acceptable, just like what happened with idiot and moron and savant.