{"id":1843,"date":"2015-01-08T01:41:25","date_gmt":"2015-01-08T06:41:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/?p=1843"},"modified":"2014-12-04T08:53:53","modified_gmt":"2014-12-04T13:53:53","slug":"adjectives-nouns-and-persons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/2015\/01\/adjectives-nouns-and-persons\/","title":{"rendered":"Adjectives, Nouns, and Persons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n<p><strong>When we turn an adjective that describes a person into a noun, well, we make a big mistake.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We describe persons with adjectives:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>tall man<\/li>\n<li>short woman<\/li>\n<li>active boy<\/li>\n<li>new employee<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Sometimes, we use the adjective-person pair so often that we transform the adjective-person pair into a noun. One silly example is:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;new user&#8221; to &#8220;new-bie&#8221; to &#8220;noob&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Another, sometimes silly, but sometimes discriminatory example:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;gray bearded person&#8221; to &#8220;graybeard&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now we delve into the mistake area:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;bitterly hard use of strength person&#8221; to &#8220;bitterly hard use of strength&#8221; or &#8220;coolie&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In America, &#8220;coolie&#8221; is what whites called imported Chinese laborers in the 19th century. Instead of people who worked hard, they were coolies. Today, &#8220;coolie&#8221; is a bitter racial slur in some parts of the world.<\/p>\n<p>Now we go into deeper mistakes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;a dark-skinned person&#8221; to &#8220;darkie&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I could go on with more examples of how adjectives describing persons became nouns attached to persons. It becomes ugly quickly.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;noob&#8221; example is a recent short-hand method of describing a person. No harm intended and no harm taken. I suppose, but then I have not been called &#8220;noob&#8221; so often that it irritates me. One day, perhaps, &#8220;noob&#8221; will shoot poison arrows at some persons.<\/p>\n<p>It all started innocently without harm intended or taken.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t shorten adjective-person to noun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips When we turn an adjective that describes a person into a noun, well, we make a big mistake. We describe persons with adjectives: tall man short woman active boy new employee Sometimes, we use the adjective-person pair so often that we transform the adjective-person pair into a noun. One silly example is: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,17,10],"tags":[154,139,133],"class_list":["post-1843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication","category-culture","category-people","tag-communication","tag-culture","tag-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1843"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1844,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1843\/revisions\/1844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}