Little Person Is Way Worse Than Midget
Stating The Obvious
“Little Person” essentializes mainstream society’s experience of the midget’s height as nomenclature in a way that doesn’t just lock in his status as object-perceived instead of subject-knower but overtly foregrounds lack—and meanwhile by modifying “person” implies that he’s a qualitatively different kind of being akin to a Hobbit or something.
But “Midget” is totally its own thing. It’s funny and snappy; people love to say midget. Also the midget fights, and the midget fucks—and everyone knows that, hence him being the star of his own eponymous genres of wrestling and porn.
Like just answer in your gut:
Would it be easier to fight Peter Dinklage or Wee-Man?
See what I mean? Midget owns the frame.
Identifying as a Little Person is like calling yourself an incel.
Still don’t believe me?
“Black” is a horrid name for a race.
Not because of anything wrong with the pigment itself, but because blackness will always code to European-derived peoples as evil, chthonic, chaotic. When white people hear “black” we all think at least briefly and precognitively of night, danger, ambiguity—and impenetrable forests, long winters, and diverse cultural gangbangers, and just given how blacks talk about code switching some of them pretty obviously experience all this as something they need to work around constantly.
“Negro” is a much more dignified word—and yes, also just the latinate variant, but that itself already does half the work just by synergizing perfectly with their quasi-roman naming conventions e.g. Marcus. Thus hearing “Negro” one thinks of men in suits holding beanpies and rifles staring out a window… and also just the culture in America that blacks built here as its own ontologically sovereign thing and not tied to Africa or global blackness under a resolution that’s never quite clear and involves a lot of shapeshifting from the global diaspora that often works against the Negro’s benefit
Negro is objectively just a much more civilized and respectable frame to fall into however you slice it. Calling yourself black is like calling yourself an Orc—it just foregrounds the chthonic flesh pit aesthetic and makes you register at first glance as an oppositional creature of squalor and ressentiment embarrassingly overindexed on one component of phenotype in a world where even genetically proximate Nigerians and Jamaicans are eager to distance themselves from you in wypipo eyes by talking shit when you’re not around despite getting basically everything they have from the Negro’s cultural and athletic achievements.
“Asian” also sucks. The continent is far and away too huge for that low a resolution, and the term meanwhile originates from a time where all of those countries were still at their relative minimum as poorpeepo developing zones, which still permeates the word semiotically and makes one think of all the mean uncharitable treatment these guys got in the 2010s with low status bad driver ching chong tiny dick jokes.
“Oriental” is better. Separates East Asia out, evokes Yellow Peril memories in the white man’s heart and induces a sense of guilt over e.g. the Opium Wars without the Communist shit wiping all that clean. Hints also at ancient Millennia-old civilization wypipo respec intuitively hence ancient chinese secret.
The word “Gay” is incredibly gay in the middle school sense.
First off most gays are relatively moody creatures and not all that happy ime so it’s kind of a mistake to semiotically lock yourself into a modality of acting flamboyantly sassy mostly for women’s approval if we’re honest in a way many dudes will see as performative not getting your own cognition is a bit between his and hers so you can ackshully code switch. But even just a default of being flighty / ironic kind of makes your problems read as frivolous on some level even to women deep down, whereas equilibrating toward a lack of gravity in general is pretty inevitable once you start calling yourself Gay. And obviously there’s nothing wrong with irony or theatricality but it feels hugely unserious and decadent to actually root your nomenclature in that as opposed to making the thing the thing.
And so “Homosexual”—now that’s a word I respect! You’re owning up to the fact you have S-E-X in some unconventional way from the get-go—making them imagine your johnson unclogging someone’s hairy asshole in a bathhouse. Controlling the frame. Unlike “Gay” which makes even men fucking each other kind of tediously all about female social politics in practice, “Homosexual” is a word that straight guys will respect as it creates a world chicks want nothing to do with and can define its own norms and epistemic standards, which the cognitively feminine ofc tend to abhor out of principle.
If I learned I was obviously retarded and people had been calling me “Special’ then I would NOT be glad you all spared my feelings; I’d be horrified no one told me earlier. Also note that most things that are “special” are bad and it means that the rules are being suspended or relaxed or tweaked in some way to do mean things to you—think e.g. special prosecutor special jurisdiction, special warrant—and that’s of course exactly how abortion works for Down Syndrome which I totally support don’t get me wrong but let’s also not pretend one second it isn’t perfumed dehumanization.
“Retarded,” meanwhile, is inherently just a fun and funny word to say due to the staccato rubbery mouthfeel, so we precognitively associate it with happy feelings—and consider we also all call ourselves retarded all the time, whereas no one ever calls a tard a tard at all let alone hatefully. Hell, I feel like a lot of down syndrome guys might even get dece pussy in a meme novelty way if the culture were more favorable to them openly calling themselves retarded and cooning—which btw we all love to do, altho in practice you only get to coon in accordance with how high status your archetype is.
Softer and gentler language almost never dignifies a group at the end of the day.
What it does is emasculate them—via imbuing them with an effeminate victim coding of Helpless Small Protected Baby, or by deploying more intellectualized / deliberate jargon as opposed to common vernacular (which having developed in the wild would be more consonant with felt embodied dignity than something theorycrafted in an ivory tower a la latinx) functionally reduces them to seen-object instead of subject-knower.
Simple as.
don’t even have to read this. this is the correct take.
I always appreciate a good etymology lesson