Me, to my parents: IDK we don't #lifeupdates much anymore
My parents: You don't… what?
Me: Lifeupdates? Life-updates?
My parents: Margaret, that isn't proper English…

Spoken-aloud-hashtags-as-verbs is my aesthetic

There was this one linguist on NPR the other day talking about zombie nouns or some such and how they're bad or killing the language or whatever and dude lighten up

Funny how you picked gender studies words for your bad examples there breh https://icosahedron.website/media/ZTE61jDS2j-zZo6Cufw

Gender studies theorists and social studies authors use passive words to describe social structures because THE ENTIRE POINT is that heteronormativity et al are passive overarching power constructs jfc maybe you should read those books you're dissing

They don't attribute the mechanisms of power to specific agents because ~~an emphasis on agents undermines meaningful critique of the systems in which they operate, systems including but not limited to the aforementioned heteronormativity~~

This is more difficult to learn because *we live in a society where capitalism has trained students to attack specific bad actors instead of the overarching systems which put them into power*, and this feature of our language is *historically contingent and not apolitical*

It's not that "using big words makes you smarter" it's that "the way you frame things affects how you perceive it, and the default framing is one designed to erase the larger forces at play so we have to invent new language to talk about it"

Like do you really think the folks trying to convince everyone not to be racist or sexist or queerphobic or whatever would make their message any more complicated than it absolutely needed to be. Like really. IDK.

*throws hands in air and waves arms around wildly*

The cardinal rule of linguistics IMO is that language changes generally happen for a reason and to fill an existing need. A good linguist might notice the emerging trend of nominalizations and investigate what gaps in the English language they serve to fill, coming to the conclusion that English culture has recently shifted towards a more systems-focused approach which English language as-is is poorly suited to handle.

A good linguist might then realize that given the emerging trend of nominalizations is meeting a social need, any critique of that trend is in fact a critique of the social factors which brought it into play. They might then structure their argument accordingly, or perhaps realize that there is no useful argument to be had. But this article was not written by a linguist, it was written by a Ph.D in Comparative Literature LOL.