Not a rant on politics (and indeed, I’m not stating a position), but a rant on language.<\/p>\n
At one point when I was a young ‘un, there was this high-sugar kids’ cereal commercial (I think it was for Cap’n Crunch) where one of the characters was rattling off a long list of those who couldn’t have any*. All I remember of it was “…and space aliens, and ponies, …”. I asked my dad why they explicitly said space aliens<\/i>, because weren’t all<\/i> aliens from space? He explained that they were probably trying to avoid offensive connotations, because “alien” could also be taken to mean illegal alien<\/i>, a term I had never heard before (and which required some explaining).<\/p>\n
Over the years, this fell out of favor for (along the lines of the well-known George Carlin euphemisms rant<\/a>) illegal immigrants<\/i>, then migrant workers<\/i>. I had to laugh a bit (in a totally non-funny way, the way one laughs in a graveyard) in GJM’s car yesterday when he was listening to a debate on NPR and they kept referring to guest workers<\/i>. GUEST WORKERS.<\/p>\n *Common theme in kids’ cereal commercials, silly rabbit: the assertion that the product is enjoyed exclusively by an elite class. Hardly surprising from an industry that derives much of its methodology used to this day from experiments performed<\/a> in token-economy systems in mental hospitals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Not a rant on politics (and indeed, I’m not stating a position), but a rant on language. At one point when I was a young ‘un, there was this high-sugar kids’ cereal commercial (I think it was for Cap’n Crunch) where one of the characters was rattling off a long list of those who couldn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants-rambles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tim.cexx.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}