Unfortunately the change from Oriental to Asian clubbed about 2-3
billion people in one category which says nothing in some contexts as
sometimes we need to identify people from different regions and
countries.
I still miss saying Wisdom of the Orient, often meaning from cultures
east of India?
Thanks.
(PS Personal professional opinion, not necessarily supported by anyone
else or any organization.)
Ravi (01)
(Dr. Ravi Sharma) Senior Enterprise Architect (02)
Vangent, Inc. Technology Excellence Center (TEC) (03)
8618 Westwood Center Drive, Suite 310, Vienna VA 22182
(o) 703-827-0638, (c) 313-204-1740 www.vangent.com (04)
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
paola.dimaio@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, February 18, 2008 2:43 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] What words mean (05)
(summary of this post: correct use of the language should reflect the
evolution of belief sysems and information systems should be able to
capture/represent that, sort of) (06)
John (07)
thanks for reply. (08)
I knew when I wrote 'political correctness' that it might be a
controversial expression (cant win apparently) (09)
I am aware of the trail behind it (which I am not going to dig in, as
I agree that PC can get out of hand) however I think it conveyed the
intended meaning: the point was understood (the word 'man' intended
to point to humanity reflects a male-centric view of the world, and
may show lack of consideration for women who feel they are a separate
gender) (010)
There are plenty such examples and the trend is 'improving', we now
prefer to use people-hours instead of men- hours, etc. There is a lot
in the language that reflects underlying social assumptions, not just
gender discrimination but also social, racial discrimination etc which
are deeply rooted in our beliefs systems and reflected in our
languages. Often people are not aware of the true meaning of the
words they use. When I learned the possible origin of 'nitty gritty'
, I stopped using it quite naturally, it felt like bad taste, given
the doublt.
quote/
Dr Jonathan Lighter, in the Random House Historical Dictionary of
American Slang, records the first example from 1956: "You'll find
nobody comes down to the nitty-gritty when it calls for namin' things
for what they are". As it is here fully formed, and has the now
customary sense of the fundamental issues, the heart of the matter, or
the most important aspects of some situation, it had by then probably
already been in use for some while (I know of two people who claim to
have come across it in the 1920s). But it is inconceivable that it
should have been around since slave-ship days without somebody writing
it down. (011)
http://www.worldwidewords.org/index.htm
/quote (012)
Other choice of words may be cultural (oriental vs asian) (013)
this is fun read
http://www.danwei.org/media_regulation/xinhuas_guidelines_for_politic.ph
p (014)
I think when we design for the future we should try to embed
'correctness', and be able to gauge the correctess values according to
our value system (015)
lots and lots to dig in there... (016)
PDM (017)
On 2/18/08, John F. Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Paola,
>
> I was going over some of the older messages that I had missed,
> and I came across the following item:
>
> PDM> I am not going to say anything about the pain that lack
> > of political correctness throughout history has brought upon
> > humanity, however, I am sure an application can be built to
> > parse all the politically incorrect statements that exist on
> > the web and modify them accordingly to bring them up to current
> > acceptable standards of ethics (else archived them under
> > 'obsolete' label)
>
> That raises an important point that goes beyond words to the
> underlying attitude that leads to those words. The term
> "politically correct" was popular about twenty years ago,
> but many people found it very artificial and stilted.
>
> The people who proposed that term wanted to avoid offending anyone,
> but they created some fixed and frozen rules and lists of good
> words and bad words. Yet any such list is arbitrary. People
> with hatred in their hearts can use the best possible words,
> but anything they say will sound insincere and offensive.
>
> Anybody who has good will and a sense of fairness and friendship
> can say almost anything without offending anyone. A person who is
> unfamiliar with a culture should get a brief summary of the local
> customs, including taboo words. But an occasional lapse will be
> excused. A person who is not friendly can offend just by walking
> into a room without saying anything.
>
> And that raises a very serious question about language understanding.
> Just having a list of good words and bad words isn't sufficient for
> a computer (or a human) to express or understand intentions.
>
> Subtle patterns are very important, and they affect every aspect
> of understanding -- both linguistic and nonlinguistic. People
> (and even cats and dogs) recognize those patterns instinctively,
> but programming a computer to recognize them is not easy.
>
> John
>
>
>
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> (018)
--
Paola Di Maio
School of IT
www.mfu.ac.th
********************************************* (019)
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