More weird is that Merican Wokeness is replacing *ness in other countries. Finnish has only one personal pronoun for all sexes, but Woke Finns add American Pronouns to their twitter pages.
The way “American values” have come to dominate America is upsetting. It used to be a diverse country with very different social geography in different regions. Now it’s mostly strip malls, chain stores and freeways, and most of it looks the same.
> why wouldn't they parrot things like woke pronouns
Because different languages have different pronouns. You don't adopt function words into your language the same way you can adopt content words (unless you're, for example, code switching, but even then you don't switch for a single function word).
It happens, as does grammaticalization, but it takes a looooooong time. And the existence of a large extant written corpus and an educated population (as it is the case today, but wasn't quite the case back then) makes it all the harder. As long as you don't have written language, you can have very disparate regional dialects and language quickly evolving. But the need to communicate across time and space seems to stabilize languages in some respects (just witness the case of English spelling, for example).
(Also, Old Norse was quite a bit closer to Old English than presumably modern English is to some of those languages in question - Finnish, especially.)
Here, If you are aware of new wokeness trends in the US is question of about 3 months until the spanish left and media start parroting the new word, idea or whatever.
The consumed culture is overwhelmingly US based. Netflix, social media... The local shows that happen to succeed, mostly are created due to legal obligations imposed by the goverment. If it were not for that...
An obervation, though, is that the academic underpinnings of the “wokeness trends” you’re describing were very explicitly leveraging modern French philosophers. Don’t pretend Continental thinking did not have a string influence on the situation :). That’s to your first paragraph, I quite share your thoughts on your second one.
Yeah, but french philosophers layed the grounds several decades ago. They're not the ones running the propaganda machine nor pumping out "papers" about this issues nor the ones financing activism over this issues. It's almost 100% american.
I live in the Netherlands and so much of what’s on TV, in cinemas is the games we play are American. It’s really inescapable. I’d easily call America the dominant culture in the west from my experience.
I've been to dozen or so foreign countries, and everywhere I see establishments named in English (or even named "Hold the Door" or "Central Perk" - based on American popculture). Another example - quite suddenly, people in Poland started eating steaks and drinking whiskey - something that just wasn't done even 15 years ago.
Oh and the leading newspapers basically parrot a lot of what they themselves read in New York Times, incl. doing interviews with American book writers or even discussing American racial issues (hard to find an international issue less relevant than that to people on the ground in Poland) etc. That's also partly because most of them don't know say German, French or Italian, so they can't really be influenced by those cultures quite as strongly.
I have a friend in Europe who informed me matter-of-fact that American corporate explicitly asked them to sport pronouns in their social media profiles. Or else I suppose.
Yes. The fact this craziness is actually encouraged by Finnish state media as something normal nowadays is seriously starting to destroy my will to live in this country. Idiots are copying everything that's wrong with America here.
Foot bidding is actually a practice from 14th century China in which men would place bids to see a woman’s foot. The winner would receive a hand painted portrait of the foot.
First, yes, I made a typo and meant to say "foot binding".
The reason I mentioned this is because foot binding originally began as a cultural practice among a small group of people in the 10th century. By the time of the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), most social classes were practicing foot binding.
Thus, what I'm trying to say is that the Finns are adopting a cultural practice (pronouns in their twitter bio) as a result of being exposed to another group of people doing it.
The reasons for why they chose to adopt it, though....
How does adding pronouns really affect your life at all? Seems quite a small thing to get annoyed about, especially if it ends up helping someone else.
Speaking as someone who has my pronouns on my Twitter page, the main purpose is to keep those who get bothered by it away, especially because it should be such a little thing that those that manage to get worked up over it are not people I'm interested in spending time on.
I have no problem being on friendly terms with people who think it's a bit silly of me to have them there. But people who are so offended they don't want to follow me? Good riddance.
I tend to see it the opposite way: If it adds fuel, then that is evidence it's not pointless.
If people just disagree and find it silly (and I did myself at one point), then that's their business.
But using someones preferred pronoun is no different from trying to get their name right. It's basic respect and courtesy. That so many people take offence at being asked to show basic respect for others is the reason why so many people who have no personal use for putting our pronouns anywhere increasingly do so, to help normalise it.
People don't need to like that.
But if that's enough to fuel a fire, then let it burn.
