There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words. – Thomas Reid
In case it has escaped your notice, I use an awful lot of words; I publish over 1000 of them every day in regular columns, and that’s not even counting indexes and other static pages. All in all, that comes to roughly 500,000 words per year, or about 1.5 million since I started. You’ve probably also noticed that I choose them quite carefully; as I wrote in “Nasty Words”,
…words are my tools, and I cherish them and baby them the way a good mechanic cares for the tools of his trade. And just as a good mechanic always uses the right tool for the job rather than trying to make do with whatever happens to be nearby, so I insist on using the right word; if I can’t find it right away I’ll sometimes sit staring at the monitor thinking, or else typing and deleting a number of different ones until I’m satisfied…by the time most of you read any given column, you can be reasonably sure that any word you see is the exact one I wanted to use, even if it’s one that you have to look up (as some of you are fond of teasing me).
Sometimes, there isn’t an extant word or phrase which means exactly what I want it to mean, so I have to invent one; at other times, a word or phrase has a broad range of meanings or variations of meaning, of which I tend to use only one. Inevitably, both of these cause some confusion, especially in newer readers; I therefore think it’s long past time I publish a lexicon of terms I’ve invented, adopted or use in one specific manner. If you notice I’ve missed one, please mention it in the comments so I can add it to the permanent version. Terms on which I’ve published a whole column include a link to that column.
Ad scortum: A logical fallacy in which someone discounts a person’s argument not on its own merits, but rather on the grounds that she is a prostitute.
Archeofeminism: The recognition that men and women are already socially equal by nature, and the only way in which we become socially unequal is by the actions of laws.
Bottleneck effect: The principle that the greater the number of artificial restrictions placed upon any given human behavior, the greater the number and severity of undesirable effects such as violence, corruption, criminality, marginalization, etc.
Clipboard effect: The phenomenon that if an individual behaves as though he belongs in a place (such as by wearing a white coat and carrying a clipboard when in a hospital), everyone will assume that he does belong there.
Courtesan denial: The pretense that some or all kinds of sex workers in pre-modern times (including courtesans and sacred harlots) either did not exist at all or were somehow fundamentally different from modern sex workers, so that the latter cannot be validly compared to the former.
Driskill Mountain syndrome: My term for the inability of those who have been blessed with relatively untraumatic lives to recognize that the difficulties they have experienced are far less serious than those of people who have had relatively troubled lives.
Eglimaphilia: A paraphilia in which the chief excitement of seeing a prostitute is derived from the illegality of the act.
Enlightenment police: Those who believe that their ideas about proper living need to apply to everyone else’s personal preferences. See also universal mores, fallacy of.
Ice cream in the hand: A metaphor for female sexual response: “Imagine how a woman might react if somebody…[unexpectedly] slapped a scoop of ice cream into her hand…It isn’t that she doesn’t like ice cream; it’s just that she doesn’t want a nasty scoop of cheap vanilla ice cream slapped into her previously-clean hand by some random stranger when she wasn’t even in the mood for dessert…”
Lawhead: “One who believes that man-made laws are actually based in objective reality like physical laws; he is unable to comprehend that the majority of laws are completely arbitrary, and therefore views a violation of a ‘vice law’ with the same horror that normal people reserve for rains of toads or spontaneous human combustion.” For example, a lawhead believes that because a 17-year-old is defined as a “child”, he actually is a child in some fashion that meaningfully reflects reality.
Morality: Though many people use this word to mean “sexual mores”, I always use it in the larger sense of “[the set of] rules which nearly every sane, decent person accepts as governing interpersonal relations,” chief among which is that unprovoked violence against others or their possessions is wrong.
Myth: A framework or paradigm used to explain and interpret observable phenomena in the absence of (or contrary to) hard data, usually via the involvement of a supernormal force or entity which is not discernible by ordinary means and therefore must be taken on faith. Mythology is a body of related myths and procedures derived from those myths which act together to provide a faith-based world view.
Myth of the wanton: The irrational belief that the sex drive of women is greater and more uncontrollable than that of men. See also slave-whore fantasy.
Neofeminism: The irrational belief that there are no natural behavioral differences between the sexes and that all gender (other than genital dimorphism) is “socially constructed”. Neofeminists believe that if infant boys were “socialized” in the same way as girls they would act exactly like girls, even into manhood. The female standard of behavior is viewed as the “correct” one, thus normal male behavior is considered pathological.
Profession of faith: Nearly all religions have some basic creed statement which believers state in order to demonstrate their adherence to the religion; that of the “trafficking” cultists is, “A lot of people think trafficking doesn’t happen in [the place about which I’m speaking], but it does.”
Prohibitionist: One who believes that certain consensual human behaviors can and should be prohibited by laws enforced via violence and intrusive government surveillance.
Pygmalion fallacy: The belief that robot simulations of women could be competition for real ones to anyone outside a narrow segment of the population. Adherents fail to recognize that “any gynoid whose physical form and simulated functions…were indistinguishable from those of a human woman, and whose personality was sufficiently unpredictable and unique to pass as that of a woman in the close interaction of a date, would also be sufficiently human to pass any test a court might devise for granting human rights, and would almost certainly be interested in obtaining such.”
Rhinoceros effect: The tendency for any mass movement, no matter how ugly and destructive, to grow in popularity until many who once opposed it now defend and may even join it.
Secret Squirrel: Any device or procedure designed to ensure secrecy which is so disproportionately rigorous or extreme in comparison to its subject matter as to constitute a parody of such devices or procedures (from the American cartoon character of the 1960s).
Sex rays: The irrational belief that any adult sexual activity is so dangerous to the imagined “innocence” of children (including adolescents), that adults who are known to have been sexual in any way (outside of conventional marriage) must be kept from having any contact with them whatsoever; extreme cases of the belief even demand the quarantine of inanimate objects (including structures) with which sexually-active adults have come into contact.
Slave-whore fantasy: Self-doubting men have a deep and abiding need to believe that sex is not under female control, so they immerse themselves in a lurid, exciting and adolescent fantasy that female sexuality is always controlled by men (pimps and customers), and that all heterosexual women who are not owned by husbands are instead owned by “pimps” and “traffickers”.
Universal criminality: The establishment of so many complex, broad, vague, mutually contradictory and intrusive laws that every single person is in violation of at least some of them at any given time.
Universal mores, fallacy of: The false belief that everyone feels the same (negative and/or conflicted) way about sex as the believer does.
Vulgar: “Honest discussion of sex…is not vulgar. Nor is the use of one-syllable Anglo-Saxon words…when I speak of vulgarity I mean leering, childish, dirty-sounding ‘euphemisms’ for sexual acts and body parts which are actually much more offensive than just using the four-letter words.”
Whorearchy: The tendency for sex workers of any given type to imagine that they are “better” than other types of sex workers; the problem is exacerbated by laws which arbitrarily define some kinds of sex work as “legal” or “illegal”.
What a great resource for my plagiaristic little soul!
Your lexicon has certainly influenced my own in daily life as well. Especially the term “neofeminist”. As was your goal, it is a word that fits like no other, perfectly encapsulating the situation/philosophy/person/etc.
I would like to suggest the addition of another term to your lexicon, although unfortunately there probably isn’t much need for it:
ad iohanninem A logical fallacy in which someone discounts a person’s argument not on its own merits, but rather on the grounds that he is a client of prostitutes or wants to be a client of prostitutes.
There was a guy on twitter who was making passionate tweets in honor of Jasmine, the Swedish sex worker who was killed by her ex-husband. I don’t remember his handle, but it was @ something of silence. He was forced to delete his twitter account and his blog because certain idiotic future-ex-sex-workers (they don’t deserve to be called “sex workers” or “whores”) hounded him with “ad iohanninem” tweets that he couldn’t be a true ally of sex workers if he was a “john”—he had to be the enemy.
And that’s why there unfortunately isn’t much use for this term because too few men are willing to stick their necks out in defense of sex workers for fear of being stigmatized.
On Whorearchy:
I remember discussing with a British sex worker who didn’t understand why I, as an American, felt the need to differentiate between, legal, illegal, and grey area sex work.
To me it’s simple: Sasha Grey and Asia Carerra can go into great detail about their storied careers, and could even while working in them. They’d still get stigmatized, but that was pretty much bound to happen as soon as they had sex on camera.
However sex workers in legally grey areas and in actually illegal areas, can only talk about their careers anonymously, euphemistically or by outright lying in public forums because a non-retired sex worker who is working illegally will be targeted by the police. This is of great help to the authenticity deniers, because they will attack any anonymous sex worker as an agent of the all powerful pimp lobby.
It’s one of the reasons I actually dislike the term sex worker, porn stars are no less sex workers than “full service escorts,” but the escorts can’t even admit what they do. Indeed, I often wonder if a cop, reading an American woman doing escorting calling herself a sex worker would say, “Let’s roll.”
I confess it is pretty weird to read British and Australian non-porn sex workers going into great detail about what they do, and who they do it it with, with seemingly no fear. Refreshing, but my natural inclination is to worry for them before I realize, “Oh, no, she’ll be ok, she’s in Australia, she can say what she likes.”
More or less true here in NSW but not the case in all Australian states.
Ah, the Australians I’m following are working someplace where it is legal, then.
It’s not plagarism if you ask permission and give credit. Is it alright if I use your Lexicon Maggie, with the understanding that I give you credit?
Please do!
Oops, forgot the drill.
Pretty please with sugar on top, Maggie, may I use some of your original and hard hitting neologisms without necessarily crediting you every time I do so?
(Dammit, I just used ‘neofeminist’ on the IJFAB website without asking – though it will probably be a day or two before my most recent comment appears so there’s still time to get permission).
You betcha. 😉
neofeminist arguing that prostitution is not empowering says that no exchange for money is truly empowering,we are all more or less prostituting our talents.while there may be truth to this, the logic of it seems like sophistry to me.what do you think, Maggie?
Here’s your answer, Laida.
Or did you mean a different Maggie? 😉
It’s specifically Marxist sophistry, one of the worst kinds.
Spoken like the Iron Lady herself 😉 .
You know Maggie, one of the things about these pseudo- Marxist neofeminists that pisses me off the most is I swear they Have never even read Marx other than an uncomprehending look at Marx and Engel’s “Communist Manifesto,” and maybe a quick glance at an abridged version of vol. 1 of Das Kapital. Marx was actually one of the few male philosophers of the mid-19th Century who argued for female equality in any form.
Marx had many faults, but his observations about what happens if you let a few plutocrats dominate a Capitalist system is still spot on.
And as for Marx’s ‘Crisis of Capital’ – we’re living it right now.
Marx was uncannily prophetic with most of his questions.
Shame about his answers.
Yeah, but you’ve got to understand, he was trying to find a utopian answer that would allow everyone time to pursue an avocation…something creative that might change the world. He had no precedents to go by, and Freud with his initial understanding of human psychology did not come about until after Marx died.
No the secret was what FDR tried, but was never able to finish: create a very large middle class with a good education, that would dominate political discourse; a mix of individualism and collectivism that actually watched out for one another as a community. He outline this in his message to Congress on January 11, 1944.
LBJ came along with his “great society,” which had some fine ideas, but was very poorly executed. Then Lewis Powell wrote his memo to the Director of Education for the Chamber of Commerce, which basically outlined how to undermine the whole of FDR’s and LBJ’s programs, by selling us the idea that ALL government is bad.
Sometimes, government is the only thing that, to paraphrase Jay Gould, keeps the rich from hiring half of the working class from killing the other half.
In a non-hierarchical, freely associating society there would be no rich (individuals or organisations) to screw over the rest of us.
To quote the corporate libertarian’s favourite economist (whom virtually none of them have actually read):
Yes, but I fear that is every bit as Utopian an ideal as Marx’s classless, moneyless, wageless society.
Nah, where Marx was utopian was in imagining that an all-powerful Party at the centre of a totalitarian State would ever voluntarily surrender enough power to enable a classless, moneyless, wageless society.
In fact the Mahknovists established such a society in the Ukraine in the 1920s until Trotsky betrayed them under a truce flag and wiped them out. Then the Spanish anarchists established one in Catalonia in the 1930s until the Marxists took a break from fighting the fascists to turn on them and crush them.
And of course my people had such a society for 60,000 years in Australia until Europeans rolled up with guns, bibles and smallpox to explain to us how utopian we had been.
It will happen again. If we don’t wipe ourselves out first.
As the kibbutzim in Israel have discovered, Communism does work marvelously well for groups of 200 people or so. After that it tends to fall apart. The clans/villages of the Native Americans–including the Iroquois Confederation discovered a similar situation. It’s not that I’m against your idea, I am simply practical and pragmatic.My experience with groups I have been involved with is that somewhere around 200 people, they break into two or more subgroups, or disintegrate completely.
Hence syndicalism (or the Iroquois Federation for that matter).
There are ways of associating/networking/upscaling that don’t involve hierarchies.
Perhaps, but the largest of which I am aware is the Mondragon Group in Spain, which I believe is less than 30,000 people, in many diverse operations, not all working together at the same time.
Dr. Brooke Magnanti, writing as Belle de Jour in her book, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, states:
“Many of my friends will tell you how temping for a year or ending up in sales is equivalent to prostitution. It’s not. I know this because I’ve been a temp, and I’ve fucked for money, and they are in no way similar. Not even the same planet. Different solar system altogether.”
BTW, Maggie, I was wondering if you had a term to go with the following definition.
“Those who use the rhetoric of contemporary feminism to justify the age-old practice of policing the sexuality of others”.
There’s already a term for that: “opportunist”.
My favorite slang term is “self-licking ice cream cone” …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licking_ice_cream_cone
C’mon, now, get to it! That Ice Cream Cone ain’t gonna lick itself.
Oh wait, Maybe it will!
Many people who seem to believe in sex rays – that if a place is used for a safe-sex conference then it is somehow defiled and unsuitable for shoolkids the day afterwards – would not care to explain the real reason why the feel that way: that they believe in the literal existence of demons. Especially sex demons.
I used to be one.
That does make sense. If one accepts the irrational idea that an act can summon demons, it only makes sense to protect those one believes to be susceptible to possession from their influence. Once one accepts the initial premises – demonic possession and certain activities inadvertently summoning demons – the rest flows naturally.
If you are ever in the mood, go have a look at “This Present Darkness” by Frank E Peretti. Very popular, when it came out. Batshit insane, too, with a premise that would not at all have been out of place in a Dr Strange comic.
One of my favourite personal observations is that charismatic christians honestly believe they have superpowers. Oh, of course they are *invisible* superpowers, but they are imagining that “in the spirit realm” they are shooting rays of light out of the palms of their hands and whatnot. “Calling down the power”, fighting spirit battles.
“This Present Darkness”. Frighteningly nuts.
This coming Tuesday’s column is on exactly that sort of magical thinking.
That’s a nice summary of the concept of neofeminism, but wasn’t there a side bar containing another definition? Is that still around somewhere else? Cause removing it entirely is a little Orwellian ?
Do you also think it’s “Orwellian” when an office rearranges things on its floor, and perhaps eliminates an old piece of furniture that’s been there a while? And the removal of the box explaining the blog’s name that used to top the column, is that Orwellian as well? How about adding the Twitter feed and expanding the links boxes, which is why the others got removed? Can additions be “Orwellian”, or just subtractions? The subject index used to be only one page, now it’s five; is that penta-Orwellian? And when I split it into thirteen as I plan to do in the next few weeks, what do we call that?
My, this assigning dark motives to ordinary housekeeping is complicated!
Oh, maggie that’s so cute. You snarking me because you misunderstood what I was trying to say.
It’s not removing the sidebar that concerns me, it’s if you entirely removed your explanation of neofeminism and acherofeminism.
To you, perhaps the two definitions are the same. However I think that having the early one in the side part is an important part of the context that many of your articles were written in. Yet it’s now gone and as far as I know it no longer exists anywhere.
That’s vintage Maggie McNeill snark you’re whinging about.
This isn’t the the first time Maggie snarked at me. She’s not that great at it, honestly.
Brevity is the soul of wit as they say, but this went on for too long and was repetitive. She also inconsistently put Orwellian in quotation marks for some reason.
Sarcastically asking like “Can additions be “Orwellian”, or just subtractions?” is only funny when the answers is absurd or nonsensically, while here the answer is completely serious. The answer is yes, though it’s generally associated with subtracting people from official records.
Finally, she ends by remarking how complicated it all was, yet she was the one who did most of the work coming up with examples. It’s a pretty rookie mistake.
So, do you actually believe that others need you to explain whether something is amusing to them or not, or were you just afraid they might find it so?
So, you’re not going to produce the original definition of neofeminism. I only wanted it because I wanted to laugh at you, but you still kinda erased something you said that made you look bad, which is a little creepy.
A) What are you babbling about?
B) The definition hasn’t changed one iota.
C) If I wanted to “erase” things that “made me look bad”, there are a lot better candidates than that from the first three months of the blog, and I’m purposefully calling attention to them in my new “Back Issue” columns.
D) You seem to be alone in the belief that it “made me look bad”, because I used to get quite a few positive comments on it; I just didn’t think a box devoted to a single term when I’ve coined so many (as evidenced by this post) was either necessary or a sensible use of limited space in the right-hand column.
E) I actually did look for it this morning among the disused widgets after you asked to see it, but it doesn’t appear to be there; I’m sure I stored it somewhere because I rarely throw anything away, but your asinine attitude hardly inspires me to try to find it.
Thank you for trying to find it.
That’s what I thought happened. Why didn’t you just that?
And just so you know, I already found it. You’re the one who complains about websites deleting content that makes them look bad.
If anyone else wants to see it, here you go:
In case you forgot, you’re on moderation; if I truly wanted to hide the thing all I had to do is not let your comment through. And no, you didn’t “shame” me into it for reasons explained above, but please feel free to think that you did if it makes you feel good to do so.
I guess I don’t know much about snark.
But I know what I like.
Thirteen!?! That’s a coven of Orwells!
As one of my oldest and dearest friends always said about people like “asmallnotch;” they wouldn’t be happy if you hung ’em with a new rope.