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Screenshot of a tweet by @feralhousepuppy: hey so you’ve been calling me “bro”, “man”, and “dude” a lot and it’s really invalidating to my masculinity cause those are all gender neutral things you call trans women :/
Screenshot of a tweet by @feralhousepuppy: hey so you’ve been calling me “bro”, “man”, and “dude” a lot and it’s really invalidating to my masculinity cause those are all gender neutral things you call trans women :/
It’s odd that the gender “neutral” terms are always the masculine ones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male-as-norm_principle
It’s deliberate, for all the same reasons across all of history.
It’s why I use terms that (I assume) are genuinely like “folks” and “peeps” and “comrade” etc.
Become ungovernable.
Make all words genderless.
Call men “chika”.
Call women “brother”.
Call your girl cat “bubba”
Call your boy cat “pretty kitty”
No gender = no gender conformity = better world
omg this is pretty cool
Don’t forget “cats”
Everybody wants to be a cat 🎶
Oh cool cats, I dig it. That’s cool.
Sorry liberals, there are only two genders: CATS and DOGS
Pussies and bitches!?!?
No fucking way
I’m sorry but I HATE folks. I’m down with virtually all other gender neutral terms, but I psychologically can’t uncouple ‘folks’ from pseudo-homespun charm put on by people who are sleazebags for various reasons. Anything but folks, I beg (general) you
I use folks all the time!
…but i’m also a server at waffle house, so I guess I am using southern culture and folksy charm to sell you waffles and coffee. It’s a soulless existence, I know, but at least I have my cold, hard cash tips to keep me warm at night.
I use the word folks regularly :(
That makes me sad
Don’t let one person’s pet peeves determine your language, even if they’re my pet peeves!
It makes me sad that it made you sad so to correct this I’ll go out of my way to use folks from time to time
Yay
That’s all folks!
Neighbor?
I love “folks”! It makes me think of folklore and looney tunes.
I just hear the word in Davey’s voice from Adventure Time and it has completely taken the term over. I can’t even say folks without impersonating Davey anymore.
It comes from the German “volks” (literally “people”), so I just think of it like that. “What’s up people?” doesn’t sound strange, does it?
Well no, it doesn’t, because it’s a different word. Plenty of words have similar meanings or origins while having very different connotations from each other. See for example the whole [saxon? norman? whatever] vs french root thing in english, where words with identical meanings but different root languages came to have different connotations (worker vs laborer) or even different meanings (cow vs beef).
So what is the distinction? You went on for a while there and kinda forgot that part.
Just that you shouldn’t expect two words that have similar meanings to be treated the same way, because they often have different connotations and usages.
Another example: cavalier vs caballero. Cavalier comes from the French word for knight, and that’s caballero in Spanish, but the meaning is completely different. One is arrogant, one is noble (the good kind, yeah I do get how they are related and where and why the meanings shifted).
Another fine word ruined by the US.
I only use it to refer to my “parents” cuz saying parents otherwise makes me feel like I’m in grade school again or some shit. Otherwise to refer to others as folks feels weird to me.
I think using “deliberate” to refer to something that’s as collective and reactive as societal trends in language usage is misleading. The amount of personal agency involved, except in rare cases of people intentionally trying to cause a cultural shift, is pretty minimal.
Also you got me curious-- “peeps” comes directly from “people” as you might expect, and “folks” and “comrade” actually originally originate as terms referring to (among other usages) military groups. So I would say they are indeed gender-neutral, even in origin, unless you count gendered expectations of the military which I’m not sure carried over to later, more general usages.
I actually spent a few minutes trying to think of a better word than “deliberate” but couldn’t, “not accidental” might have been a better choice.
Ah okay. I do get your point, the trend is clear.
Pretty common in a lot of “gendered” languages actually.
Certainly the case in every language English is related to
It’s weird when we feminise a word like dude (that didn’t have gender and wasn’t about people) by adding a diminutive suffix.
I would say dude wasn’t gendered until dudette was coined, and probably isn’t gendered where dudette doesn’t have currency