I’m guessing you’ve never seen the bit where Carlin goes from Shell Shocked -> Battle Fatigued -> Operational Exhaustion -> Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The whole thing about changing these terms is it tends to undermine the seriousness of the issues being discussed. And the marginalized people that are effected.
it categorically does not undermine the seriousness of what’s being discussed. it casts aside stigma and hatred lumped onto groups from the outside and allows people in marginalized groups some degree of agency or choice in how they’re named which usually results in more accurate terminology that’s adaptive and capable of shifting away from terms and meanings applied by unaffected people in media and politics. these changes also create community and organization in marginalized groups
source: being gay and trans
i haven’t seen the bit. but there is literally no evidence that seriousness gets undermined. sure, bigots will use shifts in terminology to mock their targets, but bigots were always going to do bigot shit anyway. again, i’d like to believe that carlin would’ve seen how things progressed into the 2010s and 2020s and painted targets on the powerful instead of the powerless.
