siderea: (0)
Siderea ([personal profile] siderea) wrote in [personal profile] nancylebov 2017-08-06 08:57 pm (UTC)

The last fat democrat that leaps to mind was Tip O'Neil, who died just the other day in, uh, *looks it up* 1994.

OT: Can I give you a hard time about the use of "stigma" as a synonym for "prejudice"? I know that's becoming common, but that seems really unfortunate to me. A stigma is the trait itself against which there is prejudice, not the prejudice; in the original sense, which I think is important, there was no "stigma against" because the stigma is the thing the prejudice is against. From there greek, where it literally means "sign" or "mark". Fat is a stigma in our society; being fat is a stigmatized identity. It seems a shame to me to lose that usage since we don't have any alternative to express the concept "quality that marks a person out for prejudice", and in the slippage from referring to the target to referring to the targetting seems all sorts of opportunity for prejudicial mischief.

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