Virtue

The best way to be virtuous is to simply be so.

Live it.

If someone notices, great!

If someone praises you for it, fine.

The problem with virtue signalling is the act of seeking praise by announcing you're doing virtuous things is, well, the opposite of virtue.

Steve Jackson Games added a full page of explanation about how they changed Eskimo to Yupik and that "slavery is bad, m'kay."

They could have just made those changes without mentioning why and I doubt that anyone would have started a thread demanding that the kidnappers of the rightful king of Fnordia be named, as they were in past editions.

Eskimo isn't even as controversial as they seem to think it is, but I think that change has a lot more to do with David Pulver and Sean Punch being Canadian than a general recognition that Eskimo is a slur.  Especially since it's not even certain where the word originated from!

Aside: Am I the only American who is dead sick and tired of Canadians telling us we're doing our culture wrong and demanding we change how we do things? 

They still use "slave" or "enslavement" 25 times in 4eR; down from 52 times in 4e.  12 of the reductions comes from replacing "slave mentality" with "heteronomy."

Many of the deletions are changing to a term like "subject" and the deletion makes me think they've done more to sanitize it than condemn.

The eliminated mentioning that slaves were low status under the rules for status.  How did that mention glorify slaving?  They left in that being a serf is a low status job.  Being a slave is worse than being a serf, how does mentioning that keep us from figuring out that slavery is wrong?

They had to spend extra time explaining slavery in historical context because of this. 

Taking it out of the minion enhancement for familiars didn't hurt or help.

Still, these changes could have been made silently to the same effect, they just wanted to make sure they got credit from... Whomever keeps score on this.

I do know that page of virtue signalling has cost them more than one sale.  That should matter to them more than it does. 

PS: They even mention cleaning up use of the word "Black" and capitalizing it when referring to a Black person, and the word was never used that way in the original 4e... 

You Can't Save It

As an armchair historian and a degreed psychologist...  (What an odd thing to say).

I keep watching people trying to change the word being used for something to keep someone from being offended.

I've lived through three words to describe black people politely when the previous word had become a slur.

I used to have two editions of a textbook changing the names of specific diagnoses because the name of a diagnosis was now an insult.

I've watched an NCO reply to a Black officer with, "Sir," with little doubt that he meant, "CENSORED."

I wonder how long it will be before saying "n-word" carries the same weight as CENSORED.  Especially since you can tell what word was censored there, but it's OK as long as I only allude to it without actually saying it.

But you cannot avoid people insulting other people or disparaging them.

People throw slurs.

In the long run, it's generally better to let them so you can readily identify them and avoid doing business with their like.

You cannot change the words fast enough to keep someone from  being offended.  It's best to let them get accustomed hearing the slur until it loses its power to offend.

Being offended for someone is the absolute least helpful thing you can do about someone being offensive.  Let the target of the offense get offended, or not, as they wish.  Too often I find that the target dismisses the offense because they're familiar with the source only to have a third party cause a shit storm because they're all offended for the target who doesn't really care any more. 

Near Miss

4eR has a page on their virtuousness.

Of note:

 Learn it, use it?

Perhaps we should take the time to learn suffixes on Greek derived words.

Someone who has a slave mentality is heteronomous.

Someone who has been forced into slavery is being subjected to heteronomy.

Of course they'd get the vapors if you called the parts of your brakes by thier proper names. 

PS: 

Even more amusing is they admit on p.B518 that they're aware that slavery didn't always mean Uncle Tom's Cabin.

It must be really painful to deal with the rats racing around inside their skulls trying to reconcile the world the way they want it to be, the world as it is and the world as it was. 

Much Newer Than I Expected

The term "sound suppressor" refers to a device that reduces the sound intensity of a firearm when it is discharged. The earliest use of the term "suppressor" in this context dates back to a US patent in 1985, while the term "silencer" was originally used by its inventor, Hiram Percy Maxim, in 1902.

It's a quote from Wikipedia generated by the Duck Duck Go AI, so apply the appropriate levels of salt.

If the term silencer is wrong, and was never used and it's always been sound suppressor, what were they called for 83 years?

I am thinking that the youngin's are at it again and forgetting a lot of us old grognards were there when the changes happened.

I watched this happen with "assault weapon".

Assault weapon and assault rifle were terms the gun community itself was using for military look-alike guns at least as early as 1986.

I remember when the gun control people starting using it against us.

I remember when we tried to say it was always referring to a select-fire, intermediate cartridge firing rifle or carbine.

I remember when we tried to say we'd never used it for describing a semi-auto clone.

And I remember when a group of very young internet gun bloggers tried to "take it back." 

No You're Wrong

Dear everyone clucking like you know what the fuck you're talking about:

A thing you screw onto the end of your gun's barrel to make it quieter is a SILENCER.

How do I know that?

Because that's what it's called in the 1921 patent by Hiram Percy Maxim.

Got an earlier patent for one that's called a suppressor?

Because if you don't, saying "there's no such thing as a silencer, they're called suppressors," just makes you sound ignurnt.

The person who invents something gets to name it.

Maxim named it a silencer.

He could have called them mufflers, because that's the only earlier patent for something that makes the noise from a tube quieter. 

It's Baked Into The Language

The paper that was posted on the white supremacist site (much to the author's chagrin), and I can't find it posted on a non-racist site, focuses on how most African languages have no concepts we consider bedrock ideas in Western Civilization.

Without these concepts, you cannot be a true member of Western Civ.

The sooner you are exposed to these concepts, the easier it is to learn them.

And the question becomes the old nature vs nurture debate.

I believe that the average African-American can learn these concepts and be successful in American society.

I base my hypothesis on the fact that they used to be successful members of American society before the Democrat party actively hamstrung them.

In fact, it often seems as if every time racism is almost dead and black Americans are poised to become full members, some Democrat comes along and fucks it with a dick dipped in resin and rolled in ground glass.

I believe that race has nothing to do with their circumstances because the same failures are present in Appalachia.  Thomas Sowell has mentioned the similarity more than once.

That similarity has the "fucked by Democrats" in common. 

Processed Chemicals

Just as every bit of matter is a chemical...

If you're not eating it raw, it's been processed.

Cooking is a process.

Harvesting is a process.

Butchering is a process.

Motor oil is organic, by the way.  All hydrocarbons are organic molecules.

All domesticated food sources are genetically modified.  Some by injecting genes and splicing, some by the old fashioned method of selective breeding. 

This has been your linguistic science fact diatribe of the day! 

Worth Your Time

 

Woz Is The Smart One

Steve Wozniak expounds on "you will own nothing and (dis)like it."

It's a growing problem and most people aren't any more aware of it than a fish is aware of water.

FuzzyGeff, first made me aware of the ancestor of this problem back when he asked me to look up Stalin in a paper dictionary.

"Does your dictionary say, "a Soviet politician," or, "a Soviet politician and dictator?"

Other things to check are the definitions of Nazi and Fascism.

I was shocked, all those years ago, that definitions had changed between editions.

Then I was angry, because words mean something.

For example:  Vaccine and inoculate were changed while I watched during COVID.

Amusingly, my Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary from 1959 contains some archaic stuff.

Vaccine: adj 1. Of, pertaining to, or derived from cows, or, especially in technical use, cows afflicted with vaccinia or inoculated with its virus; as, vaccine lymph.  2. Of, or pertaining to vaccinia or vaccination.  n 1. Matter or a preparation containing the virus of cowpox or vaccinia, in a form used for vaccination.  2. In general any substance for preventative inoculation, especially, a suspension of sensitized, attenuated, or killed, bacteria, called preferably bacterial vaccine, injected into the body to induce immunity to the same species of bacteria and their toxins.

Note that second noun definition and "induce immunity".

Here's the current definition from Merriam-Webster's website:

1: a preparation that is administered (as by injection) to stimulate the body's immune response against a specific infectious agent or disease: such as a: an antigenic preparation of a typically inactivated or attenuated (see attenuated sense 2) pathogenic agent (such as a bacterium or virus) or one of its components or products (such as a protein or toxin) b: a preparation of genetic material (such as a strand of synthesized messenger RNA) that is used by the cells of the body to produce an antigenic substance (such as a fragment of virus spike protein)

 

2: a preparation or immunotherapy that is used to stimulate the body's immune response against noninfectious substances, agents, or diseases.

1: a preparation that is administered (as by injection) to stimulate the body's immune response against a specific infectious agent or disease: such as a: an antigenic preparation of a typically inactivated or attenuated (see attenuated sense 2) pathogenic agent (such as a bacterium or virus) or one of its components or products (such as a protein or toxin)

a trivalent influenza vaccine

oral polio vaccine

Many vaccines are made from the virus itself, either weakened or killed, which will induce antibodies to bind and kill a live virus. Measles vaccines are just that, weakened (or attenuated) measles viruses.—Ann Finkbeiner et al.

… a tetanus toxoid-containing vaccine might be recommended for wound management in a pregnant woman if [greater than or equal to] 5 years have elapsed … .—Mark Sawyer et al.

In addition the subunit used in a vaccine must be carefully chosen, because not all components of a pathogen represent beneficial immunological targets.—Thomas J. Matthews and Dani P. Bolognesi

b: a preparation of genetic material (such as a strand of synthesized messenger RNA) that is used by the cells of the body to produce an antigenic substance (such as a fragment of virus spike protein) 

The Pfizer [COVID-19] vaccine—unlike the seasonal flu shot—does not contain the virus or viral material. Rather, it is an mRNA or messenger RNA vaccine, which creates a piece of genetic code that instructs the cells to create proteins which trigger an immune response.—Jerry Nowicki

Viral vector vaccines, another recent type of vaccine, are similar to DNA and RNA vaccines, but the virus's genetic information is housed in an attenuated virus (unrelated to the disease-causing virus) that helps to promote host cell fusion and entry.—Priya Kaur

Note: Vaccines may contain adjuvants (such as aluminum hydroxide) designed to enhance the strength and duration of the body's immune response.

2: a preparation or immunotherapy that is used to stimulate the body's immune response against noninfectious substances, agents, or diseases

The U.S. Army is also testing a ricin vaccine and has reported success in mice.—Sue Goetinck Ambrose

… many of the most promising new cancer vaccines use dendritic cells to train the immune system to recognize tumor cells.—Patrick Barry

Those are not the same.  Are they?

I also love how they include some extra stuff as examples that is really just justification for no longer using the word as it once was used.  Definitions aside, people use vaccinated to mean immunity because vaccines for hundreds of deadly diseases means you don't catch them.  It does not mean that you have an easier time dealing with your smallpox, it means that you don't break out in blisters at all!

How does this relate to Woz and not owning anything?

Because in 2018 the Merriam-Webster definition of vaccine was:

1: matter or a preparation containing the virus of cowpox used to vaccinate a person against smallpox

2: a preparation of killed microorganisms, living attenuated organisms, or living fully virulent organisms that is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease

chicken pox vaccine; also :a mixture of several such vaccines 

measles-mumps-rubella vaccine

My paper dictionary didn't change when the CDC and WHO redefined vaccine to explain why you weren't getting any immunity to COVID despite being vaccinated against it.

The online dictionary changed and if you didn't have a paper version, or think to check the Wayback Engine, you would never know they changed it.
 

Speaking Of Exonyms

Nazi is an appellation to members of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei  or National Socialist German Worker's Party.

It was intended to be derogatory.

So, if you set out to strip all offensive exonyms you need to stop using the word Nazi.

Or you need to start defending why it's OK to offend some people and not others.

If you manage to do that, you will find that you didn't need to strip exonyms from your writings.

Some people do live up to the stereotype.  Even if you go out of your way to not offend them. 

Shiny Let's Be Bad Guys

The descent into woke at Steve Jackson Games continues apace.

"Sensitivity reading" is the process of editing a manuscript to replace privileged wording – phrasing favored by majorities, the powerful, or the elite, whether in the region of publication or globally – that is offensive to, reinforces negative stereotypes of, or erases the less privileged. Examples include calling a physically disabled person a "cripple," calling a mentally ill individual "nuts," referring to a minority group using a disrespectful exonym, dismissing the contributions of a group, or implying or outright stating that everyone in a certain group is a criminal or less intelligent. The goal of the procedure is to remove negative overtones that target ability, ethnicity, gender, geographical origin, religion, sexual orientation, wealth, etc., rendering the writing more inclusive and equitable without loss of meaning or clarity.

Kromm, GURPS Line Editor

Considering that the people making those sensitivity changes are the epitome of powerful and elite...

But it's an effort doomed to fail.

You cannot make something completely non-offensive to everyone.  The fact that the attempt is offending so many people in the hobby is a sure clue to that truth.

A lot of noise is being made about "exonyms" and how they offend the people so labeled.

Gypsy and Eskimo come up most often.

Sioux and Commanche...  Those are not the words those tribes called themselves.  Those are the, deliberately, offensive labels their neighbors applied to them.

But if I say Oceti Sakowin, or Numunuu, will you know whom I speak of?

The Blackfoot don't call themselves that.  They call themselves Siksikáí'tsitapi.  You will not find my wife being offended by the name of Blackfoot.  Me?  I'm saying Blackfoot because I will BUTCHER their name in their language.

I know where Gypsy comes from.  The Roma people, living according to their own rules, are not good neighbors.  Having earned that reputation, they really haven't earned a lot of right to complain when the stories grew a bit past the truth.  And by the way, the only Roma I've met who are offended by the term Gypsy are exactly the same kind of race-grifter you'd expect them to be.

Eskimo vs Inuit is the same thing as Sioux vs Oceti Sakowin.  Someone else's name for them.  The Inuit are insulted by how Eskimo was used.  Fine.

Give English some time, though, and your preferred name will be used in exactly the same way.

Remember, English, despite not being a tonal language, can magically change the word "Sir" to mean CENSORED.  I seen't it! 

PS: While working for the Tavrchedl', Mr Punch has engaged in something that's extremely offensive to the people of Florida: Being a fucking Canadian telling us that we're doing everything wrong.

That's How You Say That?

I have long pronounced "epitome" as Epee-Tome.

It's supposed to be e-pit-oh-me.

I am unsure if I never learned to say it, or if I affected the mispronunciation deliberately. 

In Point Of Fact

Did you know that the speech pattern for talking like a pirate was made up by an actor?

Actually talking like a pirate from the first golden age of piracy would have a decidedly Shakespearean tone.

We're not too far off modern American English for the second golden age. 

Spanish Sounds Cooler Sometimes

"¿Dónde están los francotiradores?" is Spanish for "Where are the snipers?"

What I think is interesting is "tiradores" means shooter.

Sniper in Spanish is Frank shooter.

Or is it actually Franco Shooter?

Trying to find a handy etymology site that's in English for a Spanish word is harder than I thought.

The internet says:  The franco part is borrowed from French for 'free' which has something to do with 'free companies' which were civilian units not part of the main armies who mainly harassed the enemy.

Antpingouínos

I learned something fun today that prolly everyone else already knew.

Arctic is because of Arktos, or there's bears here.

Antarctic is the opposite of bears; or no bears here.

Because of the penguins!

We could label the north pole Antpinguínous because it's the opposite of where the penguins are. 

The Spell Checker Is Stupid

It happens every time I try to use the word, 'asterisk'.

I try to spell it asterix.

It's wrong and spellchecker catches it, but suggests, 'aster ix,' 'aster-ix,' 'aster,' and 'testatrix.'

Considering that 'asterix' is the most common misspelling of 'asterisk', you'd think that spellchecker would suggest it, no? 

Who Are You Keeping From Being Offended?

OK, TikTok, why are murderers, sex offenders, and pedos censored with a little asterisk?

It's not so we can't figure out the word.

It's not like those three words are like the dread CENSORED.

Are you worried that murderers, sex offenders and pedos will be offended by being associated with illegal aliens?  If that's so, why aren't gang members, human traffickers, fentanyl dealers and drunk driver's censored with a little '*'? 

Moar Schoolhouse Rock

The differentiation between noun and pronoun is baked into the language.

Whether you like it or not.

The Schoolhouse Rock vid in the post below explains why they exist.

The usual suspects, in their shrill attempts to blur gender pronouns created a position where they wish to use no pronouns.

And I used two pronouns in that sentence to talk about them...  Did it again!

Pronouns are inescapable if you're still speaking English.

I find it very odd that someone whose job is writing doesn't understand English this hard.

But it's possible that as a game designer, they (<--pronoun!) think that all the rules are mutable because they certainly are when you're designing a game.

Two Weeks

Does the media really not know this joke?

It was endemic with every engineering place I ever worked.

"How long until project X is done?"

"Two weeks!"

And it was always two weeks even if we were making prints to send to the shop.  Even if we'd just started a multi-year job.

Two weeks!

But since there's a number in it, that makes it math and something not covered in journalism school.

Language Laws

 The French labeling laws are bullshit.

One of the shop owners is absolutely correct about the manufacturers not making a French version of the box just for them when a much larger market segment in Brazil is being dumped over the costs of making Portuguese language versions of the games.

And Brazil is a proven market of people who actually buy the items in question, not a nebulous "they might buy it if it were only labeled in French."

For paints it makes even less sense.  You're either buying the color because you want the color you see in the jar or you're following the directions which has the English name for that color...

I've seen this personally.  I bought "panzer gelb" not tank yellow.