What I don't get, JM, is why you waste your time on something so utterly insignificant? There are manifold examples in people's everyday, ordinary life when language is used in obscurantist ways to harm people. Consider, for example, my never ending quest for a job. Recently, I decided to give up trying to stay near my dad and just going ahead and abandon my kid to gales of creative destruction like my mother had to do with me, an event which left me homeless for nearly a year. Oh yes: Free labor! As such, I glanced at Federal job openings and noticed a supposed shortage in information security, a field in which I worked for several years. Then I decided to look for more work with the Department of the Navy, then expanding outward to the entire Fedzyztem.
And lo! I found, of course, ridiculous language that meant nothing to me, acronyms and initialisms galore. In short, all many of ways in which language was used to keep people OUT. That is, to weed down the talent pool or make the process so frustrating, so insider, that I can see how people would just give up from feeling excluded.
That really happens. It really happens that tax forms are so complicated, people who are low-income do not apply for the Earned Income Tax credit. That even the EZ form is so complicated, that poor people needlessly have to spend money on someone like my dad to fill it out for them.
Those are real fucking problems. And to be fair to the people who write this stuff, at least with IRS material, what is amazingly clear to me, experienced with this stuff, is that you can *tell* someone was working hard trying to make it intelligible. But it doesn't work out that way.
Again, these are REAL fucking problems, that affect people's lives every fucking godamned day. The government is probably filled to the brim with incompetence because of their supposedly "meritorious" hiring system which ends up turning the application process into a nightmare of obscurantist lingo, a grand insider's game that gives those with a built-in advantage a leg up over those with none -- and thus reproducing the system.
But no, the focus is on the least significant issue to people, given that the work of the pomos affects less than 1 percent of the fucking population. And this would be because .... it's easier to rant about this shit, which means nothing, than to actually address the other shit which might make a difference if changed. At the very least, it would matter to people that lefties actually, you know, gave a shit about the crap they contend with every day.
And I should poit out, of course, that having lots of exposure to young men (testosterone central) always on the hunt for better jobs, it does not end with the Feds but extends to corporations and their looney application process which, again, weeds people out who find the whole thing mindbogglingly obscurantist, difficult, etc. etc. One kid was over here two weeks ago, recently fired, I had to stop every five minutes to help him wade through online applications to places like Home Despot (not a typo!).
"You know how it is, come for the animal porn, stay for the cultural analysis." -- Michael Berube
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