[Ansteorra] Stolen from the Ealdomerian Lexicon

Marc Carlson marccarlson20 at hotmail.com
Sun Sep 24 14:09:03 PDT 2006


>L T ldeerslayer at yahoo.com Because the first two terms that people think 
>of in regard to people who
>like and try to do period stuff are  "period police" and "period nazi"...

I would be the last person to say that those terms don’t come up, and that 
there are some folks who can think of no other way to describe a concept 
that may have only been expressed negatively.  I am also aware that there is 
an irritating (to me) tendency in the Society to find a term to call 
something, and then use that term ceaselessly for that *and anything else 
even similar* from then on, without ever giving any thought to what that 
means (Hence things like Autocrat, Feastocrat, and whatever the heck-ocrat 
is out there this week)..

I guess my point is that it doesn’t matter what the term that is being used 
IS as much as that there is a term at all.   What we have is a spectrum of 
people with different feelings about a particular topic.  I may not agree 
with this person or that person, but I’m not sure I need a label that 
denigrates their humanity to express their position on that spectrum.  
Certainly there are people who are very obnoxious about how they feel, and 
how they act to those with a different position in that spectrum – I have a 
whole slew of humanity denigrating labels for THEM, but they appear all over 
that same spectrum.  The fact they are acting like flatulent twits has 
nothing to do with their position on the spectrum of authenticity/accuracy.

Yes, some people who are interested in accuracy and authenticity do label 
themselves as “Authenticity Police”, or “Authenticity mavens”, or what have 
you (although I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen anyone who called themselves 
an authenticity nazi).  While in general I don’t, I have come up with some 
attempts at humorously using Authenticity Police as a way of trying to cope 
with the insult.  For the most part though, I’m not sure that most people 
who fall into the category of flatulent twits who prefer authenticity 
(assuming that they actually really exist in the numbers suggested) actually 
realize that they are acting in any way that might seem Police like, or Nazi 
like.

I appreciate that you are wanting to make things easier for people, and try 
to remove the sting of insult.  But really, lets say that we decide to call 
all people who prefer authenticity “Blahblahs”, how long will it be before 
people start using “Blahblah” as a negative term to refer to those flatulent 
twits?

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a person, he’s a person over there, she’s a 
person, them over there, we just have different interests and approaches.  
By labeling me a “blahblah”, you will soon stop thinking of me as a person 
first, but as a thing first.  Here let me demonstrate – replace “blahblah” 
in the previous sentence with “self-important, condescending, tight-assed 
bozo” and see how tempting it is? :)

Marc/Diarmaid





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