A Spade is a spade is a spade

It’s a little funny what you could do with political correctness. People are questioning how the male gender has become the “default” sex for most things. The word “woman” itself implies that it’s a modification of the word “man”. Then we speak of “mankind” rather than “womankind” Or we shorten it to “man”. Why do we have “history” rather than “herstory”? Why do the kids take the surname of the father rather than the mother since paternity is always disputed more than maternity?

I think that these things are just conventions, we shouldn’t set too much store by them. Of course you might say "you're a guy, these conventions favour you!" Not always true. If you are Chinese, Korean or Japanese, you always write your name surname first. And when you're with westerners, they can't figure things out so quickly so sometimes you got to write your name backwards for them. I'm perfectly happy with it, even though sometimes it's also a case of preventing your good name from being mangled in their incompetent hands.

And black people, I think it's OK to call them black. It used to be a term or pride, and much better than the derogatory n word, or d!@kie. (Even though negro is just French for black.) Now they call them African-Americans. Which might still be OK except that most of them have never been to Africa before. Why not just admit that the main reason why race has any meaning is that somebody's skin is darker than the other?

When I was doing religious studies, somebody put the dates of Buddha’s life to be around 500 BCE. What’s that? Well it has become politically incorrect to say BC which is “before christ”. And AD “anno domini” is even worse, “in the year of our lord”. So in order for things to become less western centric, you should call it “before common era” / “common era”. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Our year 0 is centred around the life of Jesus Christ, that’s what we think the year of his birth is. That’s the original meaning of “2007” which means JC was born 2007 years ago, so it is what it is. Call a spade a spade. If you change it to “common era” or whatever that crap is, you’re still taking his birth as a point of reference anyway but you’re just obscuring that. Of course it is not very meaningful to say “Qin dynasty was 200 years before the birth of Christ”, because these 2 events have very little impact on each other. But it is a point of reference, and you are using the Gregorian calendar after all, so you might as well use the traditional names.

That’s why I’m also suspicious of how some bosses ask their subordinates to call them by their first names. To be sure there are some of them who truly want things to be more egalitarian but I’m sure that a few of them just want the semblance rather than the actual substance of things being more egalitarian. Like I want to lord over you but I don’t want it to be too obvious that I’m lording over you.

I don’t know, I’ve always been a believer that you shouldn’t invent new names for things that have perfectly good old names.