Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

If we were astronomers, you would have a point. This is not a women's studies department, we're not discussing women's studies. We're non-experts, discussing ordinary daily life. The field specific meanings are not appropriate, and telling people who use the general definition they are wrong is not constructive. Please stop accusing people of being a troll for no reason. It is also not constructive.



I'm not calling people trolls for no reason, though I take your point that in some cases (such as perhaps this one) it is not the correct response. So, my apologies.

However, we are still discussing the subject matter that things like Women's Studies and Sociology deal with, so using the terminology makes more sense than not using the terminology, especially when people who are going to actually be able to say anything useful about this will mostly either already know the terminology or quickly learn. Getting exasperated at people who will not use the correct terminology even after it is explained to them seems justified to me, in the same way that if some people kept saying that a "page" obviously only refers to either a piece of paper or a trainee knight or a trainee legislator, "because common English usage and anything else is Orwellian psyops" (quote marks indicating aggregate ranting of the hypothetical other), when we were talking about single page applications in the context of webapps, and they resisted correction, exasperation would be justified, and accusations of trolling would not be remiss.

So, I think that insisting on using the correct terminology from the disciplines that deals with something makes sense where we can, whenever we want to actually talk about something in a useful way, and people who insist that using the correct terminology is somehow a conspiracy or evil or whatever (to be clear, you have not suggested that, but others in this thread have) are totally trolls.


>However, we are still discussing the subject matter that things like Women's Studies and Sociology deal with, so using the terminology makes more sense than not using the terminology

No, it doesn't. The vast majority of people do not recognize the other meaning of the word. So in a discussion among ordinary people, like the one here, using the ordinary word's ordinary meaning is appropriate. The response from SJWs that everyone is wrong for using the word correctly is not reasonable.


Please read what I actually said.

There is a discipline which deals with this stuff. Being initially ignorant of that is fine - no one knows everything - but when people say "Look, there is a discipline that deals with this stuff, and here is how the terminology works and here is why" then replying (as you have done) "No, ignore that and use the colloquial usage when talking about this stuff" without watertight explicit reasoning as to why either that discipline does not apply, or some other discipline is a better fit, or the discipline is somehow flawed in a way that makes this terminology wrong, is stupid and also both morally and practically bad.

Do you understand this now, or do you think that the word 'page' should only be used to mean either 'paper' or 'position analogous to squire, but for either knightly or political office' even when we discuss webapps?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: