Reasonism Versus Areasonism

I’m watching Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0, and after Sam Harris’s talk there was a comment from the audience (at 48:20) that perhaps a good replacement for atheist would be reasonist, because the prefix a- is usually applied by those who are in the position of power within a given paradigm, to identify those who reject that paradigm. So we should turn the tables and call theists areasonists.

The comment somewhat misunderstands the etymology of atheist, which is not actually a derivation of theist, but in fact comes to us more or less intact from the ancient Greek atheos. Anyway that’s quibbling over a minor detail and is beside the point.

I love the idea. It’s really just a reworking of rationalism versus irrationalism, but the a- prefix has the added benefit of drawing a connection to atheism, with the hope (at least for me) that the point would not be lost on the recipient of the areasonist label.

The Murder of Language

I have had enough of political correctness. It sounds like a decent enough proposal: let’s not offend one another. The problem, however, is that people will always find something to be offended by. A word that is agreed upon today can become taboo tomorrow, merely because some group decrees it. Well I say fuck that group; let them invent their own language, or commandeer one that nobody else is using, like Latin, or Esperanto.

It’s not always the fault of the offended group, of course. Sometimes hateful people begin using a previously acceptable word in a pejorative sense, thereby rendering it useless to those of us who never intended it that way. Thanks to this process, perfectly good language is being murdered piecemeal.

Example: homo, as shorthand for homosexual. I happen not to like the word gay in this sense, because the common antonym is straight; this implies that gays are somehow crooked or warped. I much prefer the perfectly accurate and descriptive words homosexual and heterosexual; but those are five and six syllables — they are ungainly to write and to speak. The obvious solution is to use homo and hetero as shorthand. We do this with bisexual: the common alternative is the prefix, bi. If we use the shorthand there, why not everywhere? The -sexual suffix is a no-brainer for describing sexual orientation. Homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual become homo, hetero and bi — what could be simpler and more logical than this? Nothing could be; we have taken literal descriptors and shortened them for everyday use. Done and done; rinse and repeat. Right? Wrong. Somewhere along the way, some homophobic cocksucker (sorry, couldn’t resist…by the way, shouldn’t that be “gayphobic” now, if we’re to remain consistent?) decided to turn “homo” into a taunt, and what could homos do but adopt a new word without the sting and insist that everyone use it?

Well I say that whole process is bullshit. I say it is time for people to deny bigots the power to murder language. If you don’t allow a word to hurt you, it can’t; words have only the power we give to them. It’s time to stop redefining things in order to placate various groups. Whether they decree it for themselves or it is foisted on them, adopting new words to describe people often means the old word has to die. This process doesn’t expand language; at best it maintains a level of usability, at worst it makes discourse less elegant.