It’s very frustrating as someone with even a passing interest in linguistics to watch Discourse over How To Word Things

Because, like… Presenting your statement as a universal, exceptionless law about anything, in a debate over something controversial, is usually a bad idea.

But few of them can compare to the bad-idea caliber of presenting your statement as a universal, exceptionless law about “What it Means when you Word Things A Certain Way, in English.”

English does not follow rules about that.

English is made of bits and pieces of several languages, and “which language’s rules get followed” is decided on a completely case-by-case basis depending on the words being used (not always even relevant to the origin of any of the words, either)

And yet. Pointing out any of this in the conversation is almost always an even worse idea.

Because the conversation is almost never actually about what any linguistic pattern historically meant.

Not even if people are claiming it is about that.

So like. For instance. the conversation might be arguing that feminism has always fought against “using masculine words as the default”

And the linguist in the back of your brain might start clamoring, “but that’s not true! Feminists have demanded the use of lots of masculine words as default! Like ‘actor’ instead of 'actress.’ Until really recently, 'actor’ – and a bunch of those other -tor words– were 100% male-specific, and it’s entirely due to feminism that we now use them as gender-neutral–”

And the side of you that has actual social skills will frantically try to shush her, like, “okay but this is not a conversation about those words, it’s about gender-neutral use of 'man’ and 'he’ and 'dude,’ so shut up”

And the linguist side of the brain will just shout louder, about how “man” and “he” were completely gender-neutral in Old English and there weren’t even any gender-specific words for “person” or the personal pronouns, not until “she” and “woman” came along centuries later, like the medieval equivalent of the most unnecessary sexist “-ess” endings on profession names, and don’t get her started on how “dude” didn’t even mean “male person” until like last century–

and your socially acceptable side is just fighting for her damn life here, trying to convince your linguist side that that’s not what the argument is about – it’s about how the words feel to people in the present day, and it doesn’t fucking matter what they meant a hundred years ago or five hundred years ago, because that’s not how they feel to people today, okay?

And then linguist brain just goes into deep sulk mode, saying that, well, if it’s actually about how the words make people feel, then the argument shouldn’t be acting like there is an objective meaning, or that any of these words really are “objectively gender-neutral” or “objectively masculine,” because they fucking aren’t– word meanings aren’t objectively anything, they are just how people feel about them and use them currently. And if different people feel different ways about a word, the furthest you should ever go is “don’t use that word for her if she doesn’t like how it feels,” and this argument is going way beyond that and telling people they should shut down usages of words that nobody present even cares about, just to discourage potential actually-hurtful uses in the future, and this is all starting to feel like fucking prescriptivism (which the linguistic brain somehow manages to pronounce like “fascist dictatorship” with a subtle inflection of nauseated dry-heave in the background)

And all you can say at this point is, yet again, “this is not a helpful thing to add to the debate”

Whereupon the linguistic brain says several things about human debates, in general, that suggest she would rather live in a universe without any humans or any communication

…which is a fairly concerning thing for the linguistic side of a brain to be saying, but at this point you almost can’t help but agree that’s where she should be living.

And in the meantime you’ve managed to stay completely out of the debate. So probably this was all a win, right?

…I dunno. maybe this is just how it goes for me