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Ember, would you hesitate to use 'muggle' in place of 'mundane'? Because to me they're interchangeable terms, mundane has strong connotations of banal, boring, prosaic, masses, greyfaces, sheeple etc. if somebody called me mundane I'd be pissed off and probably retort, whether or not i was into the occult.
Umm, I would for three reasons, only maybe one of which has any bearing on this argument.
1) It actually takes me a long time to pick up new slang (which may be why it's so hard for me to drop a word once I've acquired it).
2) My primary point of reference for "Muggle" was Harry Potter, and thus my understanding of "Muggle" is from there. Given my understanding of the word, and the context of the story, everybody I know is a Muggle, because nobody I know who has a physical body gets the kind of instant and fantastical results out of magic that the witches and wizards at Hogwarts get.
3) I'm aware of other contexts, but completely unaware of the meaning conveyed in other contexts.
Emberleo, is that you appear to be resisting the possibility that "mundane" (when you use it) could ever be offensive
Er, no, I'm resisting the possibility that because it can be offensive, it must be offensive.
it touches on something Persephone, of this parish, said a while back about racial epithets
The paralell is not lost on me, which is why this bugs me so much. If I didn't care one way or the other, I wouldn't bother discussing it with you.
that the speaker rather than the audience is entitled to decide on the intent and the appropriate reception of the term, which creates a pretty internally consistent approach to usage, but one that I think depends on a view of communication that is not entirely reality-based.
Not entirely. If you folks had declared that I mustn't ever use the term "mundane" here again, I wouldn't argue the point. But the argument here isn't "We don't like it, don't use it here" the argument here, as I percieve it, is "we don't like it, drop it from your vocabulary".
Then, also, I differentiate between "target" and "audience" in this context. There's the speaker, there are those the speaker is attempting to describe, and then there are those who are hearing the speaker talking. They may be three groups (and in this case I would argue they are).
There is a context argument I can use to clarify, but it doesn't paralell this in use: I call American Indians such, instead of "Native Americans", despite being told by audiences over and over and over that it's inappropriate. This is because I've been told by American Indians over and over that they prefer it, and they are the people being described. It doesn't matter that other people think they wouldn't prefer to be called American Indians if they were a member of that group.
However, I'm aware that this is not specifically the context of Mundane - I am also aware, however, that nobody here was being targeted with that label by me, and given the nature of the term, it's kind of hard to go about asking the concept if it minds the label.
I parsed "any more" as meaning "any longer" in its second appearance. That is, it is no more perjorative than "geek" is, with the sense that it is no longer pejorative to call somebody a geek.
That is what I meant, yes. "Geek" was originally an insult, and now pretty much isn't.
This does not exclude the possibility of a non-pejorative usage, but it does suggest that there is a pejorative usage, and that Emberleo, at least, is conscious of the existence of such a usage. In those terms, the next question would be that of whether there was a non-pejorative usage, and if so how it functioned, and how it was clearly non-pejorative.
Yeah, that summarizes what I'm looking at.
also it should be noted that the label mundane/muggle is not self applied, usually that is a big giant indicator of underlying disrespect.
Perhaps this fuels my confusion - the folks I know who are near to geeks, and pride themselves on being normal instead often DO call themselves "Mundane" as a point of pride.
Haus, I'm aware of the resentment aspect, and it's absoloutely true. But I need to chew on this and come back with a more detailed answer for you.
--Ember-- |
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