I’m gonna take your question at good faith and assume you’re not just trying to be racist or bigoted, and looking for an excuse.
I also did check out your other post on it and my answer is going to go about along the same lines.
The reason some words are considered bigoted and marginalized groups is because… That’s how people use them.
I’m only speaking about English in this example because that’s the only language I know. But this language is extremely flexible, and super tight definitions don’t really exist. So people use words however they intend to use them, which is probably true universally, but again, I only know about English.
It’s weird to wrap your brain around because it’s kind of inverse of what most people think. It took me a while to understand this, and I needed a English major to tell me exactly how to approach this. But all definitions of words and all ways in which words are used are determined by the community. If racists and bigots are using a term in a racist and bigoted way, then it is a racist and bigoted term.
How come “the gays” would be considered bigoted while “gay people” or “lgbtqia+” are not considered bigoted? That’s just how we decided to use that language over time. Now that we use words that way, it would take a looong time, and some major cultural changes, to change that.
I’m gonna be blunt here, your refusal to use real examples is sus at best
Be real you used a slur didn’t you
What exactly is it that you want to say
For example, using phrases like “turn a blind eye” is seen as ableist.
I mean… didn’t you just answered your own question? Are you trying to understand how phrases like that are coined in the first place?
How is that ableist? It was “coined” by Horatio Nelson who himself was blind in one eye and ignored an order from his superior officer by raising a telescope to mockingly “look” at the signal flags of his superior’s ship while saying that he quote, “had the right to be blind sometimes”.
If you’re in circles where people are preformitively picking apart every single phrase known to man. The answer is ignore it.
This sorts of thing almost 98% happens online. No one is going around real life and getting mad at people saying phrases like that, unless said phrases include slurs or are egregiously racist, sexist, etc.
You need to be more specific, because it sounds like you are looking for excuses to use words you probably shouldn’t be using.
I’m not looking for excuses to use words that I shouldn’t be using lol. Referring to my previous post on a similar topic (https://lemmygrad.ml/post/508144), say the term “Debian” was used metaphorically, such as describing someone or something as “Debian”. That would often come across as bigoted. Now, I’m not denying that it’s bigoted, I’m just wondering why.
Debian is a variant of Linux. What other use have you found, because now I am curious.
I just used a placeholder in this post to avoid using any actual terms that could be construed as offensive.
Well I think people in that thread gave you a plenty good answer, if you need more clarification you’re gonna have to be more specific and just put a cw on whatever slur it was you used that made someone mad.
(the fact that the original answers people gave you have not been satisfactory leads me to believe you are fishing here)
OK, what was really going on is that I was reading a blog post from a comrade about how many phrases that are often colloquially used are actually ableist/sanist. And in that blog post, it mentioned a lot of phrases where there weren’t any slurs per se, but were still considered ableist/sanist, such as the aforementioned “turn a blind eye”.
Probably should have led with that and a link to the post instead of the vagueposting that got people suspicious.
