Speakeasy wrote:Cainntear wrote: ... The western association of the term "ayatollah" with authoritarian government via a mere two of the many scholars referred to by the term is really rather ignorant of the meaning of the term within Shia society.
You are beating a dead horse ...
and you know it.
Nevertheless, despite the purported ignorance of Western Society vis-à-vis the true significance of the term "Ayatollah",
as you are well aware, in Western Popular Culture, it has become synonymous with an unrelentingly harsh, authoritarian and despotic regime.
So what? It's OK to spread ignorance simply because everyone else is doing it? At some point someone's got to be the better person.
Besides, you still went out of your way to insult me and Serpent, and then proceeded to object to my "woah there" as being "uncalled for" and showing "disrespect".
Then again, perhaps you really would have preferred that my (offensive to you) post read "Fascists of Right Thought." Whatever, my point concerning the inherent danger of "right thought" stands.
That would be a ridiculous comparison. You do know that Mussolini's party was
extraordinarily rigid in their views of correct speech, right? A fundamental pillar of fascism is national unity and uniformity, and the fascists were hugely prescriptivist in their views on language, even going so far as to declare Maltese as a mere "dialect", which is just utterly ridiculous.
Tomás wrote:This thread reminds me of the strong version of moral relativism that took over cultural anthropology several decades ago, with only minor pushback. Have linguists fought this out amongst themselves, or is the relativistic position really that hegemonic?
This has nothing in common with moral relativism.
Language changes all the time, we can see that.
Prescriptivism is an arbitrary choice by a minority of people -- it's authoritarianism and can only be equated to absolute morality if your point is that absolute morality is arbitrary and oppressive.
If you believe in an absolute morality given by a deity, then it is entirely different from language, because we know that the language we speak today is massively different from the language of the garden of Eden, or the language of Elijah, or Jesus, or Mohammed.