If you haven't read this, you should -- I think you will enjoy it.

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

I love this bit.
Never saw him live.

I think most of his examples are specious and his fundamental point is grossly shortsighted and insular. When he says 'words don't mean negative things by themselves; context matters,' he's almost right - but the context isn't just the speaker's intent,* it's a million other factors, things that Carlin pointedly ignores.

Still, I know a lot of the Sift audience wants to think that Carlin's point rings true. But does anyone think that it would be more useful, more constructive, and more honest, to call every learning disability 'stupidity'? How would that help us in any way? What could we accomplish with the help of this 'honesty'?


*It's also not 'just' the listener's experience

I think you're taking a very narrow view on the point he eventually arrives to at the end. Shellshocked/PTSD/Battle Fatigue is the perfect example of the exact same thing being watered down into it's least offensive 'sounding' form. It's not two different things (say stupidity vs dyslexic). By using the raw form for something unpleasant, we don't get to mask the ugliness from anyone and we perhaps have a greater chance of dealing with it in some way.

He was certainly ahead of his time; I had a friend's FB post come up requesting 'tone-policing' because he felt the term 'hookers and blow' was disrespectful to sex workers. It makes my brain hurt.

Let's remember he's a comedian, it's pretty facile to overlook the fact that he has to be both entertaining and funny regardless of the message he wants to get across. It is extremely difficult to be funny enough to attract widespread popularity as a comedian and at the same time exhaustively cover a nuanced topic to deliver the most devastatingly convincing points.

I know it's that difficult because no one can do it. Ricky Gervais tries to do it sometimes but he either sacrifices the comedy in lieu of the message or vice versa. Who is to say if he would be as popular as he is now if he didn't do that?

So then is it better to make the perfect point to a smaller number of people, or to make a point to a lot of people and hopefully inspire them to take an interest or discuss it? Well, here we are discussing it, so i think he probably achieved exactly what he wanted to.

Carlin said that if the context is right, any word is fine. But in your "stupid" example, you try to discredit Carlin by describing a context which is clearly not right. So it turns out this is just a strawman argument. He didn't say he wants people called stupid (or retarded) or n-word like the old days, he said that words like retarded and n-word are ok in context. I don't know how you can disagree with that. I also don't know why i censored the n-word because the context was right, but it felt a bit gratuitous when i wrote it.

I know this is what he and a lot of others want to think, but for most of his examples, just like his example of stupidity vs learning disability, there are actual and reasonable grounds for the name changes. PTSD vs shell-shocked, for example, isn't a case of trying to be 'less offensive' - shell shock was an informal term coined by soldiers to describe a range of experiences and symptoms, and combat stress syndrome, PTSD, etc, were developed by professionals who wanted to make an actual diagnosis (to me, shell shock sounds a lot less harmful than PTSD, because I'm not 80 years old). It's a case of people with more expertise and knowledge than Carlin trying to create concepts that are actually useful. You could call it 'murder crazy' if you want to be 'raw' but that doesn't get us anywhere. This is the problem with Carlin's thesis - he brings in terms that he doesn't understand, describing situations that don't affect him directly, and tries to cram it into some 'old white man post-relevance get off my lawn syndrome' (OWMPGOMLS).

I know that a lot of people agree with what they see as his underlying point. I'm just saying that his examples here don't support that point.

Sure, a comedian with a message has to work to be both a comic and convey a message. I think he failed in both cases here; it wasn't funny enough, and his message is a shambles.

I'm not saying he made a good point poorly; I'm saying that he made a really poor point poorly. He's wrong and his examples contradict him. Since part of the comedy of this skit is supposed to be 'It's funny because it's true,' it fails completely for me, since none of it rings true.

Further, I don't know what you think is strawman-ish about my argument - he literally says that 'learning disadvantage' is a PC euphemism for 'stupidity' even though we know that it's not. It's a different word with a different purpose and there was a reason for the development of additional terminology. I would say one or two of his examples are actually changes that were made to conceal unpleasant truths, but many were just made to be more accurate, useful and neutral. Calling it all a PC softening of the truth is just plain wrong.

If you want a strawman argument, on the other hand, I can point out that he sounds alarmingly like the people who fight for their right to call Caitlyn Jenner 'he,' or 'Bruce.' "These people think that just by changing the words they're called, they change their underlying condition. <fart> Doesn't happen!" That would be a strawman argument, since he doesn't actually get into those areas.