People with Blindness Can Read Again After Retinal Implant and Special Glasses

It's annoying when software support ends for anything, phones, Nest Protect, (any Google product!), but I think best to bear it in mind in buying anything that it's a possibility, who are you relying on for what and what's their incentive to keep going.

Blind people in my family rely on proprietary software for dealing with visual impairments. It's painful and offensive how exploitative these tools often are. The thought of installing something by a similar company into one's body is frankly dystopian.

i.e, people with a condition that leads to blindness, full or partial.

A car person would be some kind of car person hybrid if you read it literally. Car person is acting as a short hand for "Car obsessed person." Car is a noun, blind is an adjective, etc...

Do you have the same objection to, say, “visually impaired” if a person is trying to talk about all people with various vision problems, up to being fully blind?

If those are unacceptable, what would you use in that case?

There's somewhat of a debate about it throughout the European eastern block. Policing language is somewhat of a touchy topic around here.

Personally I much more often stop saying certain things than start using some expressions - they typically age badly.

Not sure that specific phrase is an obsession, but I hear a lot of language-police-type people who try to shame others into changing some phrases like this. The one I hear most often where I live is to use "person experiencing homelessness" rather than "homeless person", the idea being to not to consider "homeless" as a part of their identity, but to acknowledge that it's a (hopefully) temporary situation they have found themselves in.

I get what people are trying to do here, but I think it's unnecessary, and just increases people's cognitive load and adds verbosity to expression. And gives disingenuous people more ammunition to derail discussions. And as you say, it seems like most of the people pushing for things like this haven't even talked to a blind/disabled/homeless person to ask what language offends them. I don't know any blind people, but the people I've talked to with various disabilities had no issues with being called "disabled".

> You're "frankly fed up" with something that barely affects you at all. Why?

Not the person you're replying to, but I assume the problem is that other people often shame or "correct" them when they use the "wrong" terminology, which is not only annoying, but can even cause real-world problems (e.g.: use the "wrong" term at work and maybe your career prospects get worse).

First, this is often forced on people from the above. I don't like the idea of language coercion, doubly so for ideological reasons. Imagine that BBC journalists were forced to include Allah or some nationalist tropes in their work in order to increase piousness and patriotism of their readers; to some people, this actually sounds like a good idea! I don't believe you would wave it away easily.

Orwell described this well with his "Ministry of Truth". BBC (from which this article comes) isn't a ministry, but isn't a private subject either.

Second, can you think about the long term consequences? Just look around at the sorry state of Western politics and Western online discourse.

Language is one of the few cultural commons that remains. There is no chance that stuff like "people with blindness" or "LatinX" will universally prevail. Too many people react to it negatively, including in the young generation. We run a real risk of the left and the right developing mutually incomprehensible languages, which would be a disaster - once that happens, the polarization will be cemented in, because swing voters would have to be bilingual.

I've seen the split of Czechoslovakia myself, and Czech and Slovak aren't even mutually incomprehensible. Just far enough to remind the people that they are very different from each other.

Third, this construct is extremely impractical. One of the actual observations of Chomsky is that natural languages are good at chaining things. For example, you can easily talk about poor blind homeless black people. Once you enter this rabbit hole fully, you have people of color with blindness experiencing poverty and unhousedness. This is just not a reasonable way to communicate and this is also my main hope that this abomination dies out. (It reminds me of Old Norse kennings [0], but those were an art form and never considered to be an actual language of communication.)

Again, see Orwell and his newspeak (Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc.) Orwell wrote his dystopias based on experience with the English intellectual far left, and it seems that those ideas live on.

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Summed together, to start all this while the actual blind people DGAF, as you yourself say, is at best an experiment in futility and at worst throwing more ** into the fan that has us already deeply covered in **.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenning

The actual reasoning is putting the people first, not their disability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language