luciferofastora
@luciferofastora@feddit.org
- Comment on Ok, boomer 15 hours ago:
So it’s not hard to see how this new definition came about but it is, still, sort of just plucking the word and modifying it to a very different context
I think the difficulty here is the assertion that this “unc” stems from black slang rather than a parallel evolution. After “bro” and “cuz” made it into wider adoption, the pattern of taking the first syllable or so off a term for a relative is familiar.
Unrelatedly, the image of the weird uncle spouting bullshit is a cultural meme in at least those parts of the (presumably mostly white) Internet I’ve been exposed to. The subjectively most common forms I see are holiday season complaints about uncles being racist or conspiracy nuts.
That is a very different image of uncles. Combining it with the aforementioned pattern of taking the first syllable to refer to people of a vaguely similar persuasion will lead to a derogatory meaning of “unc” that may well have developed entirely independently of the more respectful sense you mention.
Hence, I’m inclined to believe it’s more of an unfortunate coincidence than a corruption of an originally benevolent term. Either way, it’s unfortunate to have an otherwise positive term associated with something negative, whether by accident or by ignorant misuse.
more community-destructing than community-building
In some sense, that destruction of community may precede the term. If my reasoning above is correct, the term refers to a type of person one would rather not share a community with.
Also, thanks for asking, rather than downvoting; it’s (obviously) not everything but there’s a non-negligible segment of Lemmy that just seems to have an emotional tantrum every time race comes up.
There’s an odd discussion space around the topic, where even the way you treat it becomes a discussion of its own that I don’t wanna get into right now.
However, one part of it may be that people afford the meaning of words different weights. You comment on how slang becomes trivialised, turning into buzzwords rather than proper language. I’d counter that this seems to be a feature of mainstream communication in general: Words (with some exceptions) are treated more lightly, and as we trust the other to catch the intent of our statement, we also throw them with less care.
That doesn’t mean a word I throw lightly also becomes weightless to others, and I suspect that’s where part of the conflict stems from: When you say “this was taken from black culture”, that feels like an accusation of appropriation and racism. If I adopt a word without any intent of disrespect and then get (or feel) accused of saying something racist, I get defensive because that wasn’t my intent. But the way I said it might still have hurt others, and the fact that I said it carelessly is no help.
I think I first saw that disconnect in the discussion around the N-word: To many white people (including myself), it doesn’t have much weight anymore. We don’t hold the contempt that it used to be an expression of. However, to many black people voicing their thoughts online, it seems to still have the sting of centuries of oppression and disparagement. They don’t – can’t? – separate the intent from the vessel that carried it.
The switch of perspectives isn’t intuitive. But it’s worth learning.
I’m curious to learn and to hear the experiences of others. Whatever thoughts I may have are coloured by my own biases, my upbringing, the social environment I live in. I’d rather ask, converse and risk offending out of ignorance than to assume I know the answer and probably end up offending out of negligence.
Avoiding conflict also avoids the lessons we can learn from it. If we take care to avoid lasting harm, we can “play” conflict and learn to avoid actual conflict in the future.
- Comment on Ok, boomer 1 day ago:
How so?
- Comment on Ok, boomer 1 day ago:
I feel like there is always some level of condescension when talking about other generations of slang and I wonder why. There’s a smack of snark to the redundant duplicated repetition of “hot hip fan-didly-tastic” and “sleek Gen-Z packaging”, and “cringe” is obviously derogatory. Can’t we casually accept that “the new slang is” what it is, and set an example for the younger ones in turn?
Couldn’t contemporary colloquialisms coexist comfortably?
- Comment on I am always prepared to move into this version of life 2 days ago:
No, they don’t.
Microsoft wars on the other hand…
That is also a joke. Don’t base your identity on brands, technologies or corporations; not even on hating them. Base it on values and moral convictions, then judge the rest by them.
- Comment on Manic Stew 1 week ago:
I was trying to make a joke of my own, juxtaposing my own use of “being autistic” with the prior assertion that “autistic” isn’t a symptom. I suppose it didn’t land. Sorry about that.
- Comment on Got 'em 1 week ago:
Some ancient Greek nerd calculating the earth’s circumference by measuring shadows: Am I a joke to you?
- Comment on Manic Stew 1 week ago:
Delusion + whatever you ate
- Comment on Manic Stew 1 week ago:
That’s a neurological condition, not a symptom, or am I being needlessly autistic about exact semantics?
- Comment on If websites are slow for you, this is why, AWS is breaking everything 1 week ago:
I’d argue you cna never fully escape the problem of enshittification, unless you produce and maintain everything you use by yourself. Given how much of what we need today requires specialist labour and how impossible it is to be a specialist in everything, chances are you’d be trading enshittification for plain shit.
But using Debian at least shuts down one source of enshittification. Just because perfection can’t ever fully be attained is no reason not to try and get as close as you can.
- Comment on i hunger 1 week ago:
For anyone not familiar, they’re referring to !ich_iel@feddit.de, which originally (and literally translated) is the German version of me_irl, but I have no idea what me_irl is like these days, so no clue if it’s still a good equivalence.
- Comment on Bats taxonomy 1 week ago:
Nah, see, they’re native to southern Siberia. That’s why people don’t find them: you’d never know to look for wombats in Siberia.
- Comment on some days i cant even 1 week ago:
My grandpa apparently went to war with the municipal council over his unmown meadow. Had a decent piece of land with wild flowers and grasses and all that. The story was told to me second-hand about 15 years ago and is at least 30-40 years old, but if I got it right, he mowed that land once per year in fall.
The council wasn’t happy with that, because he was supposed to mowed it twice per year, once in spring. Grandpa refused to cut down the flowers in their bloom, both because of all the things living in and off that and because pretty. Stern letter, discussions in person, deadline was set and went by. All the while, the “unkempt” non-lawn grew.
Eventually council imposed a fine. Obviously, a fine is supposed to compel a change in behaviour, but they couldn’t set deadlines tight enough or the initial fine high enough to actually hurt him, so he just paid his “fuck your lawns” fee year by year.
I believe they gave up at some point, but I’m not sure whether that’s just wishful thinking. In any case, that meadow was still growing wild and free when I was old enough to assist in the yearly mowing, long after his death.
Obviously, we can’t all afford to stick it to the local bean counters that stubbornly, but it’s nice to dream sometimes.
- Comment on i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too 2 weeks ago:
Samsung’s pre-installed photo apps do that by default, I believe, unless you spot it and go digging where to turn it off (which seems do differ between some models, if I recall correctly)
- Comment on Senate report says AI will take 97M US jobs in the next 10 years, but those numbers come from ChatGPT 2 weeks ago:
LLMs are the embodiment of “close enough”. They’re suitable if you want something resembling a certain mode of speech, formal tone or whatever without having to write it yourself.
When using it to train other LLMs, you’re basically training them to get “close enough” to “close enough”, with each generation getting a little further from “actually good” until, at some point, it’s just not longer close enough.
- Comment on The Discord Breach Might Be Worse Than We Thought, As The Hacker Is Said To Have Two Million Age Verification Photos 2 weeks ago:
Me when I get a request for PII pertaining to a suspected corruption case: Have one of our corporate lawyers give me a written and explicit statement of what data I’m supposed to send to whom or get bent. I’m not touching that with a ten foot pole and gloves unless I have a legally solid affirmation that what I’m doing won’t come back to bite me, and that our workers’ council knows about it and will back me up.
I’m reluctant to even confirm that I can get that information in the first place. I mean, I’m the one with full access to the audit tool, so I probably do, but I’d have to access that data in the first place to check. I don’t think that anyone would notice or care so long as I don’t share that information, but as you said: dangerously radioactive; don’t touch if I can help it.
- Comment on Texas National Guard arriving in Chicago 2 weeks ago:
Well, there’s a free bonus in the fact that unhealthy people also require more healthcare. Probably not intended, but you’d have hard time convincing me that it’s an unwelcome side effect.
- Comment on Texas National Guard arriving in Chicago 2 weeks ago:
It’s fine, that’s just writing in first person perspective as rhetorical device.
- Comment on Texas National Guard arriving in Chicago 2 weeks ago:
Maybe they did. Once. Long ago. Because the tester was even less fit and the only criterion was if a bunch of 17-year-olds could outrun a 60-something with a 40 years of military-sponsored junk food headstart and was half out of breath just shouting “ready – set – huff Go!”
- Comment on 1919 (correctly) 4 weeks ago:
Does she always hold her breath and listen?
- Comment on New phonetic alphabet just dropped 4 weeks ago:
Þere’s a user around hat always writes like þis, substituting all “th” digraphs with the archaic letter Þ/þ (þhorn) or Ð/ð (eð). Þey were adapted and used interchangeably in Old English in place of “th”, before eventually being replaced by þe digraph again.
Þe user in question found it entertaining to use þem once more. Some people find it extremely annoying and tedious to read.
If you need it in modern English characters, tap here
There’s a user around that always writes like this, substituting all “th” digraphs with the archaic letter Þ/þ (thorn) or Ð/ð (eth). They were adapted and used interchangeably in Old English in place of “th”, before eventually being replaced by þe digraph again. The user in question found it entertaining to use them once more. Some people find it extremely annoying and tedious to read.
- Comment on New phonetic alphabet just dropped 4 weeks ago:
Xenomorph
- Comment on Know Thy Enemy! 4 weeks ago:
Strategy vs. Operations
He was good at the latter, as far as I understand, but a General needs to coordinate multiple operations to support and build off of each other.
- Comment on Hmm this "unisex" bathroom seems biased... 1 month ago:
Then you open it after flushing to check and potentially clean skidmarks?
- Comment on 'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed' 1 month ago:
Once that big thing happens, they can no longer milk the anticipation
- Comment on 'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop' 1 month ago:
That’s what I was getting at, yes.
I genuinely believe it might not fix everything, but will go one hell of a long way to making a lot of things easier to fix.
- Comment on 'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop' 1 month ago:
There should be a mechanism to reward artists for their work and enable them to keep creating, but without also allowing a system of vampires to control that mechanism and enslave them in a twisted web of dependency and power.
- Comment on Tell me the truth. 2 months ago:
I really intensely love adverbs though
- Comment on Reddit will warn users who repeatedly upvote banned content 7 months ago:
Technically, I’m not new, just recently moved instance, but maybe mine delights you anyway? Assuming it’s still there, idk how long it lasts.
- Comment on Your boomer parents after giving you the most outdated job-seeking advice of your fucking life [Day 86] 7 months ago:
pound the pavement
Gonna be hard around here. They recently fixed all the cracks.