You say here that all words carry emotional context in meaning. This is untrue, and you yourself demonstrate this by claiming that terms like slave-owner have lost their emotional potency and need to be replaced. These two arguments are direct contradictions, but again, words are not inherently emotional, even in context. They can be and they just as often are not.
You claim you don’t see that this is an attempt to piggyback an ethos onto a word, immediately after how you describe changing a term to evoke an ethos. When you say that a word needs to reflect that your opinion that race based slavery is wrong, is right, and your hypothetical racist’s opinion is wrong, you’re trying to insist that language agree with you. Think about what you type here;
By accurate, there, you mean, “agrees with me.” I don’t think the meanings of words should work that way. I don’t want my words to blindly promote one side of a conflict, even if it’s the side I agree with. That’s an attempt to bypass reason and just force an idea on people without rational support.
This is the point I wasn’t able to get across. Words already do work that way.
If what you propose is true then enslaver does not add any more emotion and condemnation than slave owner does.
You are not suggesting that slave owners cannot be called enslavers, You are only suggesting that calling them as such would make them look bad. I’ve merely suggested that that’s the point.
I don’t challenge the idea that people should make good arguments, but good arguments, like bad ones are made up of words.
No. I don’t. It means accurate in the sense that it puts across the idea a person is trying to convey or it doesn’t. Feel free to disagree with the concepts those words put across.
You can disagree with me, but you need to understand what I’m saying first.
Edit:
I actually meant it the other way around, words carry emotional meaning in context.
I agree. It’s definitely worthwhile to think critically about how we describe slavery and the Confederacy, but some of these suggestions are misguided. By ignoring the undoubted legality of owning other human beings before the Civil War, and the hugely important economic role of plantations, we could ignore the vast scale of pre-war slavery—and how much the United States as a whole was built on the shameful foundation of slavery. Not talking about the legal concept of states’ rights means passing over how Southern states perpetuated the institution of slavery for so long, and the fact that they began a rebellion against a democratically elected government.
Not really important, but Union Army is correct since it refers to the US Army plus the state militias. But anyway, I likewise agree most with the authors on defaulting to United States rather than Union.
No, what I proposed was that certain words can have more emotional meaning in certain contexts, and that it is a bad idea to try to force such emotional contexts such that they’re considered neutral and inevitable.
Right, so suddenly any time I try to talk about the Civil War, or slavery, or plantations, I am intrinsically forced to make an anti-slavery argument. I don’t want to do that. I personally think slavery was vile, but I don’t always mean to be talking about that subject. Sometimes I’m just talking about slavery in a general context. I don’t want to stop using the term slave-owner because I don’t want to stop being able to talk about slavery objectively. I don’t want to be unable to have a conversation about it without turning it into a sounding board for other personal beliefs of mine. I don’t want to edit my language so that every word coming out of my mouth is an implicit condemnation of ideas, beliefs and behaviors I disapprove of.
No. you’re not.
If however you are in need to make such a statement, you can.
A hypothetical situation:
You find yourself speaking with somebody about slavery and you refer to slave owners as such, however, your interlocutor, a black man, refers to them as “f*ing slave owners”, would you correct him so that your neutral understanding of slave owner is preserved or would you understand that to him, they are without a doubt deserving of contempt?
Are you arguing for objectivity in content or communication?
I get it, you don’t want somebody else to dictate the terms of the discussion since those terms can provide the frame of understanding. I believe this is where you’re coming from, if not your particular point.
If you are not inclined to talk about the evils of slavery you’ll have no trouble using slave owner and still be understood, if you find a sea change and people can only speak about it with horror and repudiation then you’ve still got the prerogative to argue against slavery as horrible.
I warn you though, you actually believe that talking about slavery can be neutral in today’s world. There’s a whole frame of reference to support your view, and arguing for it requires you to understand ,not that you are arguing for neutrality, but that you are arguing for the status Quo, which may seem so natural to you as to believe that it is atemporal and neutral, but it isn’t, its just another frame of reference.
You’ll need to escape ideology before you can argue “neutral” positions.
To be fair, is neutral even possible, especially with something like this. Where is the neutrality in the argument about slavery and the civil war? You could even argue that attempting to neutralize the conversation is itself ideological.
You’re making my point for me. If this person refers to them as “f*ing slave owners” then he has used an extra word to express his, personal, emotional viewpoint. He hasn’t tried to insist that everyone change the core noun to agree with said viewpoint.
You half get it. Each person should be able to dictate via language their position. Changing slave owner to enslaver is, by the very claim both the people in the article and you make, trying to change the word to favor one of those positions. As a result, via the new word, everyone is now favoring one position, whether they want to or not. Don’t load your words at their core. If you, personally, want to express your personal emotional stance, then do like your hypothetical black man, include another modifying word already prepped for the job.
Most soldiers were drummed up in the same manner as any other. Find poor disaffected youth, give them a double whammy of patriotic jingoism & the promise of a future and bam, you got your cannon fodder.
That’s not to say they weren’t evil or stupid, it’s easy for powers to make stupid people that do evil things out of uneducated poor people, they just might not know it is all.
I’d respond to those apologists with “Most people fighting for the Confederacy were lied to by their peers if they didn’t think they were fighting to preserve the institution of slavery. You are aware that there were no WMD’s? Yeah, just like that.”
But the apologists I’ve encountered argue strictly from the emotional, believing that anything that suggests the tint of their rose coloured glasses might actually be generations of innocent blood & unfathomable cruelty is a personal attack, despite the fact that they had nothing to do with any of it.
Worse. If you talk about slave owners or plantations using the words “slave owner” and “plantation”, you will be seen as making a pro-slavery argument.
On the other hand, if you talk about a labor camp elsewhere in the world will think of a beautiful antebellum plantation complete with fancy dresses and a visitors’ center with a nice diorama of some Civil War battle.
