[ExI] Political Relativism (was very informative)

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Wed Dec 30 22:55:19 UTC 2020


Sometimes I wonder if other languages are as messed up as English.  I love
etymology and see often that a word has changed meanings so many times over
the years that you would never know the original meaning of it from the
current meaning.  We allow words like 'unthaw', and let 'ravel' and
'unravel' have the same meaning, whereas 'sanction' can mean two things
which are opposites.  What a mess (never mind the archaic spelling, which
makes English so hard to  learn by nonnative speakers).  bill w

On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 4:50 PM Anton Sherwood via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On 2020-12-30 11:01, Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat wrote:
>  > These days it ['liberal'] seems to be back to being a pejorative
>  > again at least in America where it is used by conservatives to
>  > describe progressives, socialists, communists, and other
>  > left-wingers. I think in the rest of the world, it still has its
>  > earlier meaning pertaining to freedom. At least it does when Putin
>  > speaks ill of liberal democracy.
>
> There was an amusing essay in (iirc) The Economist some years ago,
> beginning more or less: "In both Europe and America, there's a lot of
> talk that liberals are ruining everything; but in Europe and America the
> word has opposite meanings."
>
> Let's not forget that "liberal" can also mean generous, i.e. giving
> freely.  I don't know if that has influenced its political meaning, on
> any continent.
>
> --
> *\\*  Anton Sherwood  *\\*  www.bendwavy.org
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